This is something Ive been grubbling with for weeks because after I started the makeover of my custom hood and somewhat in a chaos. Everytime I starting a protect (like building houses), I get bored and start over with it, coming almost nowhere except for editing relationship (due to that many sims are relative with eachother, its impossible for the sims to find a spouse on their own, so Ive to "match make" them together.).

I don't like the idea of killing off sims "randomly" (like roll a dice) or brutally (locking them in a burn them to death, assymlym, serier killing etc) and dont like making them into townies and ignore them (my sims has a relastic aging system), but I don't mind get rid of sims by having intentional "accidents" or random events (like death from childbirth). But the problem is, I love the majority of these sims and most of them have different purposes, although I do know have too many of some kind (like 9 royal princes).

If roll a dice, turning them into townies (as in ignoring them) and randomly "murdering" sims are not options, what are other things you could do?
How do you choose which sims to get rid off or which sims to add these random events for - Like their background, accidents based on their lifestyle (like a cusine ambition daughter having a fire accident, killing off everyone except the heir?) or something else?.

I did have an idea of sort of fast fowarding all families so all children are married (like adding 30 years later plot and match make them right away and have them married), but only allow them to have one kid each. That would reduce the hood in half. But Im sceptical, because Its feels like the sims will loose their character because I dont have any story plot to go for the next generation. Has anybody tryied this?

I know there are threads about overpopulation, but this thread is more about - how would you add" random events" if you dont want to do it randomly or brutally?

Population control is a must with custom hoods I think. You either breed too much and get one family line dominating or it explodes out of control. I remember at one time someone made a list of random occurances of events that happened to sims (based on the roll of the dice). I know some people still do that - perhaps that sort of thing could help?

Add a subhood. Suddenly you have extra space you can move sims to, and extra sims you can use to marry them off to.

It's the former. Maxon. Over breeding. (and about a year ago, I were even worse than I am now).
They get married off when they are teens so they have alot of time of having children. I micromanaging who is breeding with who though, but Ive sort of a genetic addiction and let them have 3-4 kids in average. Pleasure/Romance sims can only have 1 (or twins) with each of their lovers. But due to that I had about 20 founders, its too easy to reach 40-50 households the next generation.

The actual amount of sims isnt bothering, but even when I try to micromanaging most of the things, like want everything to be perfect "my own houses, finding spouses to them stragetically and have strict rules) the projects get longer and longer and thats my problem.

Edit: I only know there is a random challenge based on TS3. But its more about family and lifestyle structure (amount of kids, martial structure, hobbies etc) and that something I can manage myself.

Ive clean templates and notownieregen so an extra subhood wont give me extra sims, plus townies are "banished" in this hood (including making cas/playable into townies) because avoiding interbreeding and nearly-incest are the actual reasons I started this hood. I wanted the gene pool challenge.The future generation may only marry their 3rd cousins and Im 1-2 generation from being there..

Apart from a dozen npc's, all sims in my hood are playable (or diseased cas) which is approximately 250-300 character files.

Another way to get 'rid' of them is turning them into townies with Inge's teleporter bush. That way they lose their family ties and are free to marry off to whomever.

I should probably remove some fire alarms from my less-than-rich sims' houses, cause hardly any of my sims die for any reason other than old age. :P

Reducing the population in custom hoods - How to choose which sims to get rid off when you love most of them?
I can't! . . .probably not the answer you want!!

I'm just far too emotionally involved with my Sims to ever kill them deliberately. And now that I've gone and given all my Sims a constitution guaranteeing them "inalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness", I'd be risking being summonsed before the High Court of Veronaville on a charge of murder if I ever tried! If, despite all my precautions, one of my Sims does meet with an accident, and dies as a result, I might just accept it and run with It. After all such things can happen in real life. But actual deliberate killing is a 'No, no!' in my game.

In a pre-modern society too many royal princes means higher taxes, as almost the sole purpose of taxation was to keep the King, Queen and Royal Family in the luxury to which they felt themselves entitled. It might also lead to a war of succession, with several princes laying claim to the throne. This war would of course lead to a reduction in the population, especially the male population, but women and children could also be victims if there were sieges. This is the reason why, in countries that are still monarchies like the UK and Sweden, there is generally celebration over the birth of a royal heir. Today it may seem frivolous, but in pre-modern times, the birth of an undisputed heir would mean a clear succession, and thus peace (and possibly prosperity) in our time. War and disease, the other main cause of sudden drops in population, were (and are) essentially random and capricious in their nature. They are as likely to take the Sims you love as the ones your don't care so much for. Play either scenario realistically, and I am afraid you are likely to be joining in the general grieving.

I think possibly the best solution for you, to save your own tears and those of your Sims, is to use a sub-hood as SciBirg suggests. (I thought that was what you were going to do anyway.) You could use the LocalWalkBy's hack, and possibly the Simlogical Electronic Prisoner Tag (not the Prisoner Token), to stop the Sims who move there appearing in the main 'hood. Then just don't play the sub-hood. Story-wise the Sims there have merely moved away, and unlike dead Sims, they might return one day if it suits your story. At that point just age them up to what they would be if they had stayed in the main 'hood.

The only fall back with leaving the sims in a subhood (or making them into townies) is because Ive modified their aging and very picky with their family trees. Each sims has a realistic age, for example, the future king is now 14 years old and were born 1645. After I finish the rotation, I go back to my spreedsheet and change their age and I do this with all playables sims.

I do have a couple of sims in the main hood that I dont play but there are so few so its easy to local them adjust their age when needed. BUT I was planning to reduce the population in half and dont really want to do this with 100+ sims scattered somewhere else in this neighboorhood. I can leave elder be (because they dont have a "x days left") , but anybody else has realastic aging that I manually adjust each rotation.

So thats a reason, I dont like "leaving them alone" (or making them into townies) and did state that in the first post, it is NOT an option.
Either killing them off from random ocurances, which I cant figure out how to do this OR keep playing them are the only option.

Diffferent gameplay preference, I guess. :P
Im not sentimental when it comes to killing sims, but I like them to die for a reason or a story plot, not because "oh well, these sims are soo boring, I will just lock them in and burn them to death or arrange some serier killer" kind of way. Everytime I do something too randomly, I often get bored and replace the hood with an older back up and re-do the story.

I can't do that either. They stay and I go off building another new hood

Justpetro.
Ive been trying to create a new hood, but I get bored with it right away and go back to my current one. Im too stubborn.

The kind of sub-hood I was suggesting represents "the rest of the world". After all, people from Europe were beginning emigrate to the Americas in large numbers in the period of your game. Occasionally one of these people would come back, but for the most part their loved ones at home never saw them again. That's why I said not to play it. You really don't need to bother about their ages because in 99% of cases they're never coming back.

If you don't want to do that, then I reckon you're left with war or pestilence. War you would have to simulate yourself, and that would almost certainly mean rolling a dice or something similar to decide who lived and who died. Pestilence however could be done with a "realistic sickness" hack. Personally I hate these and consider them totally unrealistic in a modern 'hood in a developed country. Modern medicine protects us from these scourges. But in the past they did happen. The Black Death did devastate whole communities killing good and bad indiscriminately, in just the way these mods do. And there was in Europe a serious pandemic of bubonic plague in the mid 17th century, which is just your period. So a realistic sickness mod might be just what you need. It will produce a devastating and traumatic drop in your population, while taking the decision about who lives and who dies completely out of your hands.

But my spredsheets "are" worried about them and would make my notes out of order If I forget them totally. Manually aging them up according to their "real life" age is something Ive done ever since I started the hood. I know many dont give sims real aging, but something I do and wont pretend a teen/ya/adults are 60 years old.. So even if I dont play them I do NEED to go to their lot and edit them regulary and that wont get rid of them

I know about realistic sickness mod but read it can kill too many sims very easily. Problem with it, it might kill sims i dont want to kill such as the main sims related to the founders and because of that, I want to control most of the sims who will getting rid of , but I cant decide which ones.mainly because I like many of them.


EDIT, TO Everyone who read the replies which I mentioned in the first post.

Roll A dice to kill sims
Leaving them be
Making them into townies
or brutally murdering sims just for the sake of it. (A sim died from a fire due to bad cooking is one thing, but removing the door to burn them to death are something completly different. )

are not options due to personal gameplay preferences. I was asking for OTHER options.Like creating random accidents. But since its about 100 sims, I know I will go in a rut and do similare stuff on most of them. Thats why I was creating the thread.

Maybe is one family one child policy good idea then, so no need to choose. Unfortunately it is not quick solution.

You may not like this because it's similar to dice rolling, but I thought I'd mention it because it might help you.

First, decide which sims absolutely must NOT die. They are exempt from the following. Then:

1. Assign a risk percentage to each career in your game. I don't know if you play more traditional careers or businesses, but separate them out into categories and decide how risky each one is. For example, in my game certain careers (criminal, law enforcement, adventurer, military, etc.) have a 5% chance of dying every time they go into work. If you want more sims to die, you can raise the percentage higher, or have certain careers be more risky than others.
2. Each time they go into work/each day/whatever criteria you want, use an online randomizer (I use random.org) with numbers from 1-100. If their risk percentage is 35, and they roll a 36 or higher, looks like they managed to stay safe that day. If they roll a 35 or under, they die in a career appropriate way as soon as they get home or as soon as you'd like to kill them.
3. You can mess with each sim's risk percentage based on other factors too. Like if you're playing a Medieval society, you may want to assign a greater risk to members of the lower class (or the royalty if there's a fight for the crown going on), or to mothers who newly gave birth (to simulate them dying in childbirth).
4. Again, if there's a sim you need to stay alive or just can't bear to lose, don't bother rolling for them.

I know that depending on how seriously you take this, it could take a lot of work to manage (especially if you're giving each sim a risk percentage based on factors other than job, and keeping track of which sims you don't want to have any risk percentage at all). And I know you don't really like the idea of random death. But I feel like if you use this method everyone will die in a way that makes sense storytelling wise, and while you will preserve certain sims you also won't have to completely choose which sims will die.

I dont like roll a dice to whipe out 100 sims with no specific reason, but an accident at work will probably give different storyplot reasons than having all of them burned to death or drowned. Before I started the thread, I had childbirth in mind because that would allow me to thin out the bloodline of some families and I probably prefer half-sibling over interbreeding so that could help with the gene pool as well.

But I didnt have their career as a storyplot guide so thanks for the idea.
My hood is not in such state where the princes fight for the throne so there wont be deaths because of that. Maybe later.
I havent add all social groups yet so thats the reason I need to reduce the amount of household (without having them too crowded, I dont like playing with 10+ sims! ) so the next generation offspring can marry them.

If you have Seasons installed, I've found that summer and probably winter are pretty effective tools in killing sims, especially the elderly. In this past summer cycle Johnny Smith died of heatstroke after stargazing for too long. I have another hood where people live out in the elements, and just about everyone died or got taken by social workers by the middle of summer. So if its an option, one could use the forces of nature.

You could get the 'real sickness' mod and mark those who are not going to die someway-with Simblender, I suppose.

It's not deliberate insomuch as it is one of those things that happen in real life and sims' lives.

I understand the overpopulation is already at hand.
But next time it might be better if you try to keep it small from the beginning.
Prevention is the keyword here. At least to me.

Well I would never start off with so many sims.I'm wondering why you want so many to start with. I only make sims that are needed. If you start off with a huge population and you like to breed you know what will happen-population explosion by gen 1. So in my medieval town every founder I make is needed. One is the blacksmith, one the tailor, one the Dr and so on. I don't fill all the roles at once, only those I feel a town must have with a few extras. So I would start off with less, then your population of gen 1 babies will not over run your town. It's still substantial but then you can have ways to keep it under control.
As to the breeding, yes I do rather like breeding and seeing what sims my couples can produce.

What I did in my overlarge integrated hood was to make a nunnery and a monks order. Any sim I didn't want to breed would live there. This way I had a whole group together to play at once and no birth rate at those two places. A few also made good live in servants such as a butler or a nanny, again never getting married or breeding. They got played when I played the family. I dislike playing single sims for the most part, but played like that as part of a group or a family I don't mind so much.

I don't kill off my Sims. If I get bored with a branch of the family, I'd either turn them into townies or put them in a lot. Then when other Sims age up, I'd age them up too. Eventually the aging up would mean death by old age. I like some realism in my game, life can't be all sun and roses, but premature death is very rarely a thing in my game. I have enough of that in real life. I don't know what the world is up to, but since 2014 deaths have been a rather frequent thing in my life. I recently lost a friend, aged only 22. It was bloody awful, and while Sims aren't real, I'm happy if I can spare them that aspect of real life.

However, in the hypothetical situation where I for some reason wanted a portion of my hood to die I would use real sickness mod. That way it's not up to me exactly who dies and not, it's random. If a Sim I really didn't want to lose died, I'd quit without saving. But perhaps limit myself to a certain number of saved Sims, so that I can't get too emotional about it. I also find death by sickness a little less awful than the other kinds of deaths in game, and more believable if many Sims are to die at once.

I realize that's exactly what you didn't want to do, but that's just how I'd approach it. I don't want to decide who dies and who doesn't. The few times I've done that, it's been to create a backstory for a Sim. For example, a while back I made a Sim in bodyshop that I really liked, only to realize when I finished that it was the elf ear template (did not know there was one, prior to that). Re-doing it would be impossible, and my game is very much real-world based, so sudden elf ears does not fit. So I invented a backstory where the Sim is an orphan who lost her mother in a fire. She was also caught in the fire, leaving her with burns. The orphanage could not afford the plastic surgery required to restore everything, ears being somewhat complicated, so they settled for getting her face fixed and patching up the ears somewhat. Which is why her ears are now pointy, because they were just sowed together rather than sculpted. Weird perhaps, but whatever. Makes more sense than nothing at all :P

When I am on a house with too many sims, they play satellite roulette. The whole household goes to watch the clouds. After one (or two) are hit, then all is better. That way it is not my decision who lives or dies. If I have a favorite, they may stay inside but normally, it is a family activity.

Or at one house, there were two that would cancel out what I told them to do. So they went swimming....the ladder did not disappear, but I just kept them away from it.

I am a mean goddess....lol

Mirjampenning] and JoandSarah

If you were playing a hood that dont have aliens or plantsims without townies (and dont allow distant relatives to marry eachother - would you get able to reproduce the hood with a small population?

Even with 18 founders, I barely have enough suitable spouses for my sims. Thats why I started out with a larger hood and like I said to earliers on here. I dont have any problem with dealing with this many, its just that when creating a whole makeover and wanting to build everything on my own, thats the main problem in my case.

I wanted to reduce the population so I could finish all of the lots and give them suitable businesses which is a project Im struggling with because I find it tedious and not fun at all and imaging Ive to do this with 40 families, so everytime I try to build the lots or business, I get bored and going back working on their relationships and use max motives on them. This task was just too big for me so Im trying to find a solution so Im working on "backwards".

If I had done this from the scratch, I wouldnt mind having 50 families...or more. I was too focused to get pass the 3rd generation which is area in the game, I was screw up and start over. Now when being on generation 4, almost, 5. I dont feel the urge to scrap this hood. I dont even longer want to have another hood until this hood is corrupted.

So unless I played "china" style with one kid policy, its impossible to prevent the population from going too big after a few generation or constantly killing them, which isnt exactly my cup of tea.

Gummilut.
I have an aging system because I hate "so this sim is x days from adult" thing determine their age so my sims have an average lifespan of 60, so my sims dont usually have premature death either.
As for killing, I dont avoiding it unless Its for a storyplot or to reduce the population.

My gameplay preference are never based on my real life preferences/experiences though. I dont like fairy tales where every live happy ever afters but I dont killing sims just for the sake of either (...or for "fun").

I dont want wipe out these sims all of once like a plague, but only doing it to temporary "fix" the areas Im struggling. So if killing off sims, I prefer doing it manually and slowly to develope storylines for each household.

My hood has no townies, it has no plant sim babies and as of now it has no aliens. I'm not adverse to having 2 or 3 of them or so at some point, but they would never make any real population impact. My medieval hood does have townies but they are just background decoration for the most part, my modern beach hood has 0 townies.

I have 13 couples or 26 founders and yes that is enough. I've done it on an island with 8 couples. Now that was pushing it, and I had to really think who to hook up with whom, and not mind cousins, which is why here I made some more. I know someone on the test of time challenge area did an experiment and 8 couples was deemed the lowest starting point if townies were not used. So i know I can do it with 13 couples. Once gen 1 babies grow up I will soon have plenty of sims but in a manageable size. You are overestimating how many you need to start with, hence the over population problem. If you start with 50 families that's fine so long as you don't mind quickly having hundreds of sims. You don't need 50 families to avoid in breeding. There is nothing wrong with having lots of sims so long as you don't mind A) Population explosion and B) Just find them all too much and toss them in. Also if you start small and run into a marriage problem you can always make a few more sims.

Ive 40 families now after reaching the beginning of 5 generation (when the 4th generation have matured enough, I'll have 50 households plus some 5th gen. kids. I calcuate households after the amount of boys because each family is patriarch.) . In the beginning, I only five more than you did. I did overbreeding though, but that was something I didnt calcuated, so I cant say Ive overestimated the size. I started out with 18 households, not 40 when I started this hood, expanded 2,5X almost each generation (the 4th generation were approximately 100 kids, even gender).. Now, Im on the third generation (gen 5) born in game kids. I did try having lots of founder before, so I know 50 founders would be overkill. :P