How do get your new neighborhood up and running?

[lazzybum]

As we all know, when you make a brand new neighborhood, there is nothing in it; no houses nor decoration. This can overwhelm some people, like myself, into planning and spending time building, decorating, and playing families so the neighborhood can grow.

In order to make the new neighborhood grow and keep it interesting, how do you play it at the start?

Do you create a few families in the beginning and play them equally?
Or do you just create one family and mingle with the townies?
Or do you create 10+ families at the start?

Do you give the families a diversity in their finances? Like a range from the riches family to the poorest
Or do you keep all the starting families with their 20k and just work up from there?

Do you use cheats to enhance your neighborhood? Realistic cheats like no 20k handout? or All power to you, like insim?

You can share anything else that I havent included about started a neighborhood. :D

[Piyokochanxoxo]

Usually I just make whatever families I want and use all sorts of cheats on them. It wasn't until just this month, that for the first time since Sims 2 came out, I made a neighborhood where I'm not using cheats. Nope, this time, these people have to work for their money. And have kids, and age, and die, and their kids will have kids, and age, and die, and so on... :O This is a big step for me, lawls.

What I'm doing is just starting out with one family, two parents and two kids. When the kids get older they'll marry townies, and then THEY'LL have two kids. And so on and so on. Basically, I started with one family and I'm going to see how many families this family can expand into before I go crazy. :3

[smellincoffee]

I usually create a small number of families, depending on storylines I have in mind. I like my Sims to be characters that I can tell a story with. Generally all of my Sims have to work their way up, although I will stop skilling for some Sims if I want to keep their income at a certain level. When I say "generally", sometimes I will give Sims an extra few thousand § if I want their house to be a particular way from the start.

[mithrril]

I like to make a few families and try to play each of them in order so they grow together. Unfortunately I get pretty bored with that I end up abandoning it.

I also like to just start with one person and go from there, like a legacy, but without the scoring and all. The idea is to populate the whole neighborhood from that one person. I've only ever gotten to 3 generations though. :P I start over a lot.

[Tenielle]

It took me 3 days to get my brand new neighborhood up and running.

I chose a terrain I absolutely loved, and placed a lot of houses I had previously used in another neighborhood. All my houses are downloaded from one builder, but most of them I have rebuilt onto smaller lots, as I find that more realistic. I found the decorating the most difficult, and that took me the longest time.

I wanted to incorporate an in-hood uni into my neighborhood, so I started 10 young adults in my 10-room dorm. 5 girls and 5 guys, and I was hoping they would all pair off without my input (I use ACR). 8 of them did, so once they graduated, then moved into lots together to get engaged etc, but the 2 who didn't have moved into apartments to try and find their true love there.

I usually play on a rotation to keep all the families at the same stage, but don't know if I will do that this time. Although I want to keep my sims at sim ilar stages and to have their children grow up together, I find playing on rotation too restrictive and I tire of it easily.

[ani_]

I can't stand townies, which is why I use the empty templates, unfortunately I couldn't get the empty AL templates to work, so I got AL townies, but the rest are empty.

I usualy start with 3 families, and play them in what ever order I feel like playing. This time I had five families, three of my own, two maxis.

All families start out with what ever money they get when coming out of cas as all of my community lots are sims owned, and without that money they wouldn't be able to start busineses. As I have the no20Khandout hack, sims who move out of their parent's houses, are poor. Which is why the starter 20k the cas families got, is more important than ever. The only community lots not owned by sims are places that don't require a sim to take care of them, like parks and cemeteries and such.

I don't like building, and even the thought of having to first build the hood before playing bores me to tears. So my sims move into an unfinished hood, with just their house sometimes. The hood gets build as I go. What makes the whole building of the hood easyer, is how I devide the hood. I build one type of building for the poor part of the hood, one for the working class, one for middle class. Then package it and populate that part of the hood with the correct type of housing. If a sim ever become rich, they get your own house. Everybody else live in apartments, even thou they are mostly built in row house style.

[Ghost sdoj]

In most of them it was just letting the neighborhood develop houses, community lots and families as I went along, but in the one I'm starting now I'm building the history of it as well.

I have all the neighborhood decorations in now, and have the University filled with plots (Although most of them are currently empty with imaginative names like R1, R2,C1,C2...)

The two kingdoms and the colony each have a family in them now. (Two families in the Elven kingdom, but I have a long way to go with them since they are ruled by a council of 7...) I was playing the families, but then one of them had twins so I stopped playing any of them. I haven't finished putting empty lots in place anywhere else yet because I've been doing more building.

[blackdaisies]

This is a neat poll, i'm also interested in reading everyone else's replies. :D

As for me, my latest neighbourhood which I started in January is the most extensive yet. I started it with three families in an empty hood and put them up in Maxis made houses (I wasn't downloading content back then).

Two of the families I chose not to cheat with, and one I started off with motherlode and liberally used cheats. I played that way for a while until I got Apartment Life and started building apartments. And I just started building and creating characters along the way.

So I didn't do anything special. I just built homes when I wanted to and created characters when I wanted to.

[Fernweather]

I've spent the last couple of weeks just getting my 'hood to the point where it will be playable. I use empty templates and custom 'hoods for everything but the vacation destinations.

First I used SC4 to modify the neighborhood terrains I wanted to use for my 'hoods. Then I created a set of custom townies, downtownies, dormies, and BV tourists and locals. I'm starting with only 6 playable sims, so I need plenty of people for them to interact with. I use the notownieregen and nodormieregen hacks, so over time, the townie population should drop off as they get absorbed into playable households, eaten by cowplants, killed by vampires, etc.

Currently I am finishing up building the minimal set of community and residential lots that I need to give my sims places to live and hang out. This is the first time I've run a game with every lot built from scratch, and it's been a bit more work than I'd expected. It's helping me to really polish up my sorry lot-building skills though.

When I finally start playing, I'll start 4 of my sims in uni and 2 in the main 'hood. The first generation starts with the funds they get in CAS. I use the no20Khandouts hack, so every other generation will need to have at least enough simoleans to rent a trailer at the trailer park if they want to move out.

[lazzybum]

Great ideas guys! I've made two of my own neighborhoods in my game, but the 1st 1 is filled with a few huge families and im afraid incest might happen :x. And the second one got boring too fast and I dont know why, so i made a new neighborhood yesterday.

Im really fond of Tenielle's idea of starting with a group of unrelated sims to start the town and ani_'s idea to have most of the community lots owned by my sims to make it more realistic.

I haven't tried neither of that so Ill try it on my new neighborhood.

I also use no 20k handout and sw's checkbook to make things more realistic :D

[MaryH]

In my new Medieval hood, I've placed all the original Sims 1 families (rendered into Sims 2 form) and have had a ball designing it, and playing it. I started with an empty template and worked up from there.
I've been pretty strict about the CC, as well-everything has to be as close as possible to realistic, with careers, houses and amounts of money as precise as possible. It took me about 2 weeks to find all that I needed for this to work properly.
That means the No 20K handout, TwoJeff's visitor controller (no townies) and careers that would be appropriate. I designed the houses to look as medieval as possible. Heck, there's even a car replacement horse that they use!
However, it doesn't mean I don't take some liberties-but for the most part it's been the most fun hood I've played in quite some time.

[crocobaura]

Well, I start with the basics: community lots. :lol: Can't stand to play simmies for too long in their home lots, so community lots like grocery, clothing shop and restaurant are a must have. As for families, I usually start with a single sim/family, once that gets boring, I start a new family and so on. :)

[SofieAmalieN]

I usually start by re-creating my two fave. sims as kids (or toddlers) with their families, so they can grow up together. I have about 40 houses I built about 18 months ago, sitting neatly in my house-bin. They're just built, with doors, windows, rooms and stairs, but they haven't been painted and there's no landscaping. This makes it easier, when plotting in the first few families into the hood.

I'm really good and moving all the sim-bin sims into the hood, as a kind of townies. Sometimes I decorate their house throughout, while other times, just painting the outside and doing some landscaping. I also give them a makeover and make sure that they have a phone so they can be contacted by my sims. I also usually let them adopt some pets, so my sims don't have to be 'bothered' by the standard first adoption pets.

This usually ensures the first 15ish houses in the hood. Then I go about and build a few community lots. I've usually been building a decorating for a few weeks before I really just play. I play a little in the first few weeks (for instans, my two fave. sims have both aged to Teenagers). I LIKE preparing the hood for actual game play. And not just the main hood, the uni and a sub-hood or two too.

[kayleigh83]

I used to kind of just make a family, plop a lot down, build the house, play, rinse, repeat.

But recently I created a subhood (Shopping District) for my main custom hood Ferndale, and I planned it out pretty carefully before anyone moved in. I built all the houses, and tried to keep like-sized houses near each other, and added in some community lots and lots of neighborhood decorations too, to make it look finished.

It's still not quite done though, although it is somewhat populated - pretty well all of the "starter" homes (most of the cheaper apartment and homes up to 25k) are inhabited. As my Sims age and get richer, and/or their families grow, they will move into the larger homes, and new families will move in to the smaller ones they left behind. Eventually this will mean building bigger homes, or at least more 3+ bedroom ones, which I only have a handful of now. I really enjoyed playing it this way!

[Misty_SC]

I also have started over many times over the years for one reason or another. I did things a bit differently at first when it came to neighborhood creation. First, I would decorate the neighborhood then make the families and get them into their houses, then place one or two default community lots just to get things started, then would move onto building really awesome community lots once everything was up and running.

Now I take a much more relaxed and lazy approach. I start the families then when I want a break from playing I'll work on neighborhood decoration a little bit. I still usually place one community lot from the get-go just so they'll have someplace to go for meeting other Sims. The main difference now is that I build the "city" as it progresses. I won't have a neighborhood with only two families and a dozen community lots. Once there are more Sims, more services move in so ultimately the neighborhood grows in a more natural manner. I find overall this works really well with how I enjoy playing. I want to spend most of my time playing, but when I want to do hood decoration or building instead, I'll work on that for a while, then go back to the families.