The title sucks XD

Anyway, when I play the sims, I want the generations to be on similar track in their life.
I started few new families and some college students. Now the college students have graduated, started a family and their kids are in college. The originals are becoming elders at similar time.
I keep on going like this, I can't play some families now because I need to let the oldest generations all become elders first and have the time order right.
Get me?

I wanted to check if anyone else is like this or if I'm just crazy XD

You mean playing in rotation/keeping them synchronized?

When I send Sims off to college, time essentially stops for their families. I think of university as a "pocket" of time--a detour. When a Sim leaves for college, it's at the time they would have transitioned to Adult.

I completely play in rotation including university. I keep the uni students staggered in terms of semesters to keep them in sync with the ages I believe they are. Best example is with siblings, if I have one go of to uni I make sure they are at least two if not 4 semesters ahead prior to my sending the next one. Depends of course on how far apart they were born in game.

I didn't play this way in my very first hood and it got very confusing when I would have grandparents still having kids. It was much harder to keep up with the family relations that way and I would end up with a bit of inbreeding. The game doesn't seem to recognize relations beyond siblings, first cousins and grandkids so it can quickly get out of hand if you don't keep the sync'd.

I saw someone in another thread mention keeping info on a spreadsheet and that sounded like such a good idea that I started one myself. I've got a brand new hood with only 3 starter families with a total of 8 kids amongst them so easy to start that now and really keep track of things.

I always have a wish to play like this, but there are too many families to keep track of, so I limit myself to two at best. About others I pretend that in a sim world most sims are immortal or extremely long-lived, but there are some cursed with mortality, these are my playable sims.

I do that too. The families I do play, I keep them in sync with each other.

I play such that all of my playable Sims stay in age-sync, too. There's nothing I can do about the townies, although I do age up the ones my playables know along with them, just so that I don't always have the same child/teen townies wandering around. I pretty much limit playable/townie interaction as best I can, though. For me, they are just a pool of possible spouses. (I marry my Sims randomly; it's much more fun than the, to me, boring and repetitive "Search for the Perfect Mate.")

The only 'hood I'm currently playing is my Build-A-City 'hood. It's in its sixth rotation of play, with 92 playables across 24 households. Its four "founding families" are entering their third generation. Since it's large, my most successful BACC to date, it's spreadsheeted to keep track of it, and I'm thinking about dusting off my MS Access skills and databasing it, too, to better track individual Sims. The worksheet of the spreadsheet that tracks the individual families is getting pretty unwieldy! But, for me, it's really fun. I like to make things complex. It wards off boredom.

Anyway, I only just got to open a University, and there are strict financial and academic rules as to who gets to go, such that most teens don't get to go. If they don't go, they age up, marry, and move out (unless they're the oldest son in the family, the heir, who will continue his household of birth) 5 days into teenhood. (Because I hate the teen stage, quite frankly.) But for those who do go to uni, they're sent off there 5 days into teenhood, then I play the Uni once at the end of each rotation. All teens who qualified to go during the rotation are then played all the way through Uni; I dump them all in one dorm so that they're all together, and I only have to play through Uni once. When it's over, they're ready to feed back into the main 'hood as adults, and they aren't out of sync with their friends and relatives because if they hadn't gone to Uni, they would have aged to adult at 5 days into teenhood anyway. If I allowed teens to age normally, as I used to do, I would simply split up uni into two rounds of two semesters each. At the end of the college students' sophomore year, I'd go back and play the rest of the hood, then play Uni for the students' junior and senior years before feeding them back into the main 'hood. This seemed to keep things pretty much in sync, too, although I'd occasionally end up a non-uni Sim who was a few days older than his older uni sibling. But it wasn't a big deal to me.

I play in rotation and include University. I have a list of all my sim households near my computer with little tick marks next to each. The ticks represent what number day I'm on. I play each household for 5 days and then move on to the next. When it comes to university, I send a set of teens to college at the beginning of a cycle, and bring them back at the end of the cycle. Teens go to college in my game almost immediately, if they are a teen at the time of the beginning of the cycle they will just go. And when it comes to merging households, I'll only do it if I know that the two households are at the same amount of days in the cycle - if they aren't, I'd have to go into SimPE and fix someone's days left.

I love playing in rotation because everyone ages when they are supposed to, but I control everyone lives too. No one is ever older than their older sibling or their parent for that matter. People who they went to college with (as long as they were a playable and not just some Greek house playable) grows up with them.

That's possibly me although I know someone else has posted they do the same thing.

Although I don't control my sims with an iron glove (indeed, often leave them to their own devices because I like to see what choices/decisions they naturally make on their own) I like a fairly even spectrum of age ranges as well as genders so there is a wider pool for my sims to choose, for example, the right partner for them. I try to mix them as much as possible. Also like Clashfan I try to send siblings to college in the correct sequential order. Eg I have 4 siblings in one particular family, two of whom are at college and I won't send the 3rd teen until the next one up is at least a semester ahead of them.

What I don't really like is my original legacy family (who kept having kid after kid - yawnnn!) have their youngest son just starting college while his NEPHEWS AND NIECES are actually ahead of him at college. That feels weird. I definitely won't be going for enormous families like that again. It also feels odd having someone you intended to pair off romantically with an older sim actually wanting to hook up with that sim's son/daughter or niece/nephew!

As for the original subject, yes it's a bit of a pain having to keep everyone at the same age level you original intended them to be. I suppose that's partly why Sims 3 was developed, so that everyone would age together.

In many ways Sims 2 lends itself to quite slow game progression if you have lots of sims in your hood. Mine is going at a snail's pace currently, but that's because I go through phases of checking out/downloading lots and sims to expand my game as well as building stuff myself. Also I've got quite engrossed in storytelling and moviemaking at the moment.

I can't imagine playing a multi-generational game any other way. I love that my Sims have history and invite their former dormmates to their weddings and golden anniversaries and greet them with a hug at their businesses. And teens -- who were always so boring to me before -- have huge weekend parties filled with drama that I have to unravel when I play each individual lot.

I play University as 2 terms = 1 day back in the neighborhood, so the teens who go to Uni get fed back into the neighborhood 4 days later. (Because of the way Sim aging works, this includes dropouts as well.)

The townies are a bit of a challenge. Mostly, I try to avoid having my Sims interact with them at all (which means they miss out on the AL social bonuses, drat). Once I feel townies have had too much exposure to a given generation of playables, I age them up (via FT's birthday dialogue). If they're aging from adult to elder, I move them into a retirement home and play out their last days...or they have an accident involving my evil witch's garden of cowplants.

I play this style exclusively, but more loosely than most other posters. (I play dozens of families; in Generation 2 of my last 'hood, there were 253 playables in one generation.) Uni's where my sync gets loose; I don't age people at home to account for the time when uni people are away. I do make sure that sims are divided up so that younger siblings graduate later than older ones (unless the older ones are slackers who fail a semester, of course.) Also, I use TJ's college clock to speed up uni if things start to drag (going through Uni with the first household of students isn't bad, but when you've got 36 houses/dorms of college students to play through on rotation, it gets tedious.

In addition to keeping spreadsheets to time things, I use Excel to keep a record of each sim's primary and secondary aspirations, astro sign, personality, genetics, hobby, LTW (and if fulfilled), lifespan, House [if a sim is magical, since it's a Harry Potter theme 'hood], college major, GPA/honors, career(s), and parents. It's interesting to take averages of personality points and see trends (sims in that hood became progressively nicer and lazier, on average, as the generations wore on.)

Because I play with such a large neighborhood, I play with clean templates and never make townies. If I run into a point where everyone's paired off and I've got one or two lonely sims who need partners, I might make a new sim or two who's unrelated to the rest of the town, to get an infusion of fresh blood.

I find that this playstyle keeps me occupied. I played through Generations 0, 1, 2, and 3 of that 'hood for about the last four years. (Now I found a bunch of new CC genetics and want to start a new 'hood to play with those, so I'm boxing that 'hood for the time being.) But it's my favorite playstyle, and the reason I won't get Sims 3. Sims 2 gives more control over every family in the hood, from what I understand, and I don't like townies.

You can play without any townies at all? I also use a clean template but I thought you had to have the townies. I do make my own so they are not the Maxis bunch of regulars. Do you just make a large number of playables to populate your hood at the very start?

Yes, you can. It takes not only clean templates, but also MATY hacks of notownieregen, and TwoJeff's Visitor controller, to make them go away, if they get spawned (having community lots does that). Simbology is TJ's forum, where you can get the visitor controller.
You can set the controller to ban any and all townies, and they will be zapped the second they come on the lot.
I've found that I'm irritated by the lag the townies make when you have them come onto a lot, so eliminating them is good for the game, actually.

I never play in rotation, never did it when playing TS2, and now that I play TS3 that would make playing in sync easier because you can have town aging on, I use awesome so I can have TS2 style aging.

I do how ever try to play all the families in the hood, so they do stay loosely in some type of sync, but I choose them based on who I feel like playing, instead of who I have to play because it's their turn.

To keep the town manageable I try to keep the number of families down, so I don't end up with 200 families and only one that I want to play. If I have boring people I'll have them live with their more interesting siblings, or if they are boring but have nobody to pair up with, and it suits their story, I'll have them rent a room in their house to somebody who is interesting, so then I can play the interesting Sim and the none interesting one doesn't live for ever. The renting rooms system works well also because I have the no20K hack and 10x bills so most of my Sim's couldn't afford to move out of their parent's house if it wouldn't be for renting. If my calculations didn't go awfully wrong, I think I currently have about 12 houses, with only one of them terribly out of sync, it consist of two people and elderly man and his YA niece, the man is the brother of my legacy household's generation heir's 4 wife (I'm now on generation 7), the YA niece also has a brother who is a few years older than she was, but him I played so much that he grew old and died. The other houses are mostly on generation four and five (they are originated from the same legacy founder's bloodline), as well as a few "new" families, who are townies that married the legacy house but then divorced and so became their own households. The reason this one house is so out of sync is because they are beyond boring, but boring people are good victim material for my serial killers so in the end it's all good.

I think if I played in rotation I would get bored and if I would mark thing's in an excel I would fall asleep. But it's really interesting how many actually do play in this way.

I find it really difficult to play in rotation... =/ I'm not sure why, but I typically get really attached to certain sims or houses, and tend to play them more than the others. It's especially hard for me to go back to playing families after the kids have left. It gets a bit boring to me, I guess =P (Unless I move my newly-graduated sim back in with their parents, which I just did for the first time with my most recent family.)

I don't do the whole send-sims-to-university-in-birth-order thing, either. I wait until all, or most, of my current generation is in their teens, and then I ship 'em all off at the same time I hate going through the whole university process, but I want them to get the benefits of it, so I'd rather send them all at once, and get it out of the way for all of them.

Yes, a lot of my families are all mixed up when it comes to ages. I have one elder sim that still has toddler twin brothers! But it really doesn't bother me too badly... Sooo... I guess it's okay... for me... =P

I thought about playing in rotation, but some of the families in my NH are so dull I don't want to play them. The sims in my NH are all over the place. I've got two sims I created in university. One is still an adult whilst the other is long dead of old age with loads of great-great-great-grandchildren.

I have families like that, but it's not because I stopped playing them. I have some male elder romance sims who I couldn't help but let them have another kid before they die.

I play in rotation, and with a large NH, as many have pointed out, it can take quite a while for everyone to get played. I was just doing some calculating yesterday in fact, since I am getting ready to write my next rotation. I generally do some loose scripting and planning before the start of a rotation to have a shadowy idea of where I'd like the hood to "go" in the next round of play. In the past, I've traditionally found that 5 day rotations feel the best. And I divided the average sim's life span into stages. Given that most of my sims die at around 72 days old (1 sim day = 1 year) if they are born in-game, and have even a moderately decent life, then five day rotations generally divides their lives into approximately 14 stages--though it is actually one more than that since I count infant and toddler separately, and neither of these are 5 days long. Also, I always take the "grow up" option rather than wait for automatic grow up at birthday, so this reduces sims' lives by 5 days by the end of a life cycle. At any rate, I was noticing that the entire rotation process takes approximately 2 months of play--with somewhere over 200 playables, not sure of the exact number. And I do play every family, no matter the yawn score--some of those people are just more accident prone Now what this means is that if every two months Sim A only ages 5 days, then it would take me 2 mos X 14 life stages--it would take me over two years for a new born in-game sim to finally reach the end of their life span. And even longer for those sims who live upwards of 80 something, and I have at least three or four in each generation who see fit to do so. So, if every generation takes me 2+ years to play, and I'm just now seeing the emergence of generation 5, I don't think that there is any way to ever see gen 10, which is the final goal. (If the NH doesn't explode before then, and it probably will, but that's another story.) So, I got to thinking maybe an 8 day rotation would work better--and decrease the number of life stages to 9: 8 X 9 = 72. This would mean that--if I could still complete the rotation in 2 mos--that it would only take 18 mos for those sims to reach the end of their life span--still long, but somewhat better. There is, however, still the problem that early simhood does not correspond to 8 day increments, and if is desirable to end rotations at birthdays, which I like to do, not every stage will actually be exactly 8 days.


Any way the life spans might work as follows:
0-5 Infants & Toddlers
6-11 Childhood
12-18 Adolescents going to college
12-21 Adolescents not going to college (age sims can move out on their own with ACR)
26-35 Adults
36-44 Middle Aged Adults
45-54 Even More Middle Aged than Before
55-63 Young Elders
64-72 Middle Elders
72+ Ancient Elders

The other issues cited above, with regards to how uni affects play--this is really complicated for me. To begin with, I noticed that sending sims to college without playing their parents while their gone overly extends the lives of the parents, especially if the sim plans to move back home after returning from college. If Parent Sim is 30 when Child Sim is born, then Parent Sim will be 48 when Child Sim goes to college (if child sim goes at 18, which is how I play). Child Sim leaves at 18, but returns and is 26--8 days older. Parent Sim is still 48, so now the age difference is only 22 years. So to rectify the disparity, I play parents of legacy sims 8 days while children who plan to live with their parents are away at college. It can become quite complicated when trying to keep the gap between generations make sense though. And I think it might have to be a headache that I resolve in sim pe from time to time to keep the ages making sense, and to avoid the problem where someone's nephew is in college with them--which I still do have, even with all of these calculations and intricate timings going on. Another thing I've recently started doing to avoid this problem is having female sims start birth control after 45 to reduce the chances of a very late pregnancy--which in all honesty is just annoying.

M3g7e - I play almost exactly the same. And yes I have born-in-game sims I've had in the game for over 2 years who are still there because of my rotation play (and infrequent playing (once a week at most)).

For my last neighborhood, I didn't play in rotation at all, although I had thought about it, it seemed like too much work and less "living." You know? Yeah, I had this one sim who had just graduated college and had adopted a little boy, and then her parents went and got pregnant... I aged them up then. And there were those college-age twins with that little brother whose family I never played.

I play seasonal rotation in all my hoods. All teens wait until they are 3 days from adult to enroll in college. Sometimes it ends up being a little more, or a little less depending on when their birthday is in regards to how far into the season I am. Meaning, if their seasonal play-thru is nearly over and at the end of it, they'll be 1 day from adulthood, I'll just wait and send them to college at the end of the cycle rather than two days earlier. But generally 3 days is my rule. When at college, I play it seasonally too. One college year (two semesters) is equal to one season at home. So technically that means that 20 sim-years pass (give or take) while the kids are in college, but it works for me so I go with it. I tried it other ways and it was just irritating. Plus, since I have Inteen, my college kids get married and have babies and generally have their lives so it's sort of similar to TS3 except they don't start actually aging until they transition to adults.

I do seasonal rotation too; every family gets played for a season (5 days), before moving on to the next until everyone is in the same season again. A sim's entire college life is equal to one of these rotations as well, so while a Sim goes through 4 years of uni the 'hood back home advances one season.

I used to use Pescado's Lot sync timer, until I got OFB and Seasons, then found out that it doesn't work beyond OFB-the reason being that for some reason, EA changed the coding in the game somewhere so that the "lot jumping" would not work anymore. Pescado never did do anything about that, nor did he promise to.

Needless to say, I'm sad about that-so I had to stop using it as a time reference and have to use the seasonal approach. Of course it still works as a "day" reference, but I don't need it for that-just the handiness of jumping from lot to lot.

It's going to take some getting used to the seasonal approach. I've started my hoods off, and once they're all on fall, every single one of the houses will get 5 days attention. Hope they're not boring!

Playing in rotation used to be easy, until I reinstalled University life. Then it got a bit more difficult. I assume that four years on uni equates to a full season in the standard game, but I have to mix things up if I want a Uni sim's younger siblings to be a "year" or two behind or ahead of them in uni. What I do is play a new generation of uni freshmen forward a year, then go to the standard hoods and play the lots with teenagers for a day or so. Teens who arrive within the general jumping-off point for teenagers to go to uni (4 to 6 days left as teenagers) apply for their scholarships.Then I play another year in uni, adding the new teenagers, then back to the standard lots until a full season has passed. If I do it right, my uni lots have various ages and everyone is *mostly* within sync.

It's still a general mess, though, especially for sims who have just "left" university: I forget to play them until I've finished a generation of uni sims.

I have found the easiest way to "work the students" through Uni-Christianlov's "Fake Diploma". The same day they grow to be adults, give them a diploma and they're set. No more Uni mess, no more hood confusion.
That is, unless you want to play Uni. I could not understand the "charm" of it because it really is rather a silly waste of time-and you can forget the kids so easily..they could be in college for the rest of their lives, and the NH would grow old without them.

I treat University as a huge community lot--you come back the same time you left. Only difference is, the Sim is no longer a Teen but an Adult.

When I first started playing, I found it odd that I had Elder Sims whose parents, still Adults, were calling them. It then dawned on me that I had to PLAY the parents too!