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Lab Assistant
Original Poster
#1 Old 14th Jun 2019 at 8:42 PM
Default Community lots and neighboorhoods/sub-neighborhoods (amount, combined lots etc.)
Hello,
recently I've been planning out a new neighborhood I want to start as soon as I have a computer again. I've planned all the residential and community lots I would like to have and I've ended up with about 50 (!) community lots.
Since I've always played small neighborhoods until now (and haven't played Sims2 in general for a long time), I'm wondering if 50 community lots is too much? How many community lots have you had/do you have in your main neighborhoods? Does the number of lots in a neighborhood negatively affect game performance? Especially if you add in the fact that I will also need quite a few residential lots and like to use hood deco.

Considering this, I've also thought about attaching a Downtown to my main hood and putting some of my planned community lots (and residential lots) there. But I'm not sure if this is better or worse for game performance and keeping a neighborhood as clean and corruption-free as possible compared to cramming tons of lots into one main hood. So for those of you who play large hoods with many lots, do you generally stuff all lots into your main hood or into an attached sub-neighborhood? What are the advantages and disadvantages of either method?

I've also thought about reducing the number of lots by combining multiple community lot ideas into one big lot. For example, a cinema, a night club and a seedy bar on one lot instead of 3 separate lots (or grocery store, post office and bank on one lot). Generally speaking, is this a good or a bad idea? I'm worried that my community lots won't look/feel very lively if I combine multiple things in one lot because sims will spread out to all kinds of different "attractions" instead of congregating in one main place. If I have only a bar on a lot, all sims will go there, but if I have multiple buildings on one lot, I fear there will be 1 or 2 sims wandering around in each building which will make all of them seem empty/unrealistic. How do you guys set up, structure and combine your community lots?
Please share your experiences, knowledge and playing preferences with me regarding this and the other questions
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Theorist
#2 Old 14th Jun 2019 at 9:09 PM
If you have a main hood and downtown the game will load faster than it will with everything in the main neighborhood. The sub-hoods load on their own so there is that going for you anyway. I haven't played in so long that I haven't even used a Downtown in a long while but I remember after I had them actually preferring to use a Downtown as my main neighborhood (if you load and play in it, next time you load it will go there instead of your main neighborhood) because if I had Sims who wanted to do something at night the sidewalks weren't rolling up at nine o'clock.
Theorist
#3 Old 14th Jun 2019 at 9:10 PM
Quote: Originally posted by quweenie
Hello,
recently I've been planning out a new neighborhood I want to start as soon as I have a computer again. I've planned all the residential and community lots I would like to have and I've ended up with about 50 (!) community lots.
Since I've always played small neighborhoods until now (and haven't played Sims2 in general for a long time), I'm wondering if 50 community lots is too much? How many community lots have you had/do you have in your main neighborhoods? Does the number of lots in a neighborhood negatively affect game performance? Especially if you add in the fact that I will also need quite a few residential lots and like to use hood deco.

Considering this, I've also thought about attaching a Downtown to my main hood and putting some of my planned community lots (and residential lots) there. But I'm not sure if this is better or worse for game performance and keeping a neighborhood as clean and corruption-free as possible compared to cramming tons of lots into one main hood. So for those of you who play large hoods with many lots, do you generally stuff all lots into your main hood or into an attached sub-neighborhood? What are the advantages and disadvantages of either method?

I've also thought about reducing the number of lots by combining multiple community lot ideas into one big lot. For example, a cinema, a night club and a seedy bar on one lot instead of 3 separate lots (or grocery store, post office and bank on one lot). Generally speaking, is this a good or a bad idea? I'm worried that my community lots won't look/feel very lively if I combine multiple things in one lot because sims will spread out to all kinds of different "attractions" instead of congregating in one main place. If I have only a bar on a lot, all sims will go there, but if I have multiple buildings on one lot, I fear there will be 1 or 2 sims wandering around in each building which will make all of them seem empty/unrealistic. How do you guys set up, structure and combine your community lots?
Please share your experiences, knowledge and playing preferences with me regarding this and the other questions


What time of lots are they? Are some of them sorta dups of another or have things that another one or two have that you could eleminate any?

Doin one or two downtowns as well as other neighborhoods is a good way to spread things out. I don't have the community lots I want to use, but this was my idea too. In addition to spreadin out the com lots it also gives the ability to spread sims out as they start to multiply
Mad Poster
#4 Old 14th Jun 2019 at 9:53 PM
Number of lots will not corrupt your game. Loading times, lag when on lots, etc. will vary with your computer system. Different configurations can handle different things better.

Combining lots is a good way to give your sims plenty to do without changing lots if that's an issue for you, but don't make them too big for your computer to handle. A big, complex lot is more likely to overwork your machine or activate program failsafes built in when the game was designed for the computers it was expected to run on. The game may be so busy rendering the lot that it has nothing left over to bring sims onto it, and what's the point of a community lot with no out-of-household sims on it?

Ugly is in the heart of the beholder.
(My simblr isSim Media Res . Widespot,Widespot RFD: The Subhood, and Land Grant University are all available here. In case you care.)
Forum Resident
#5 Old 15th Jun 2019 at 12:13 AM
Quote: Originally posted by quweenie
So for those of you who play large hoods with many lots


I'll jump in too, then, because that describes my playstyle.

I always use multiple subhoods off the main hood, and always a downtown, though the main reason I like having so many different areas is because I want to play a SimNation with regions that feel obviously different from one another. It's also a priority for me not to have community lots that overlap in function (so there will be one place with karaoke in any given subhood, one pizza place, one place to buy pets---but if you go to a different subhood, they may have their own pet store [which would feel very different from the one elsewhere in the hood] but then they might have only a fancy restaurant, with a take-out food place as the alternative---so sims wanting to go out for pizza would still have to go to that other subhood, or maybe in this subhood they just live lives where they don't go out casually, just cook unless they want something fancy).

Although I always have a largeish facility for games/indoor recreation (like Archimedes Arcade) in the downtown, I also make sure a few (and only a few) of its functions are split out into mini-size community lots that are spread out among the subhoods, so that sims living in "outlying" areas don't always need to go all the way downtown *if* their needs are simple and focused: a tiny casino with only a couple poker tables in one subhood, or a mini dive bar with a stereo and one pool table in another subhood, maybe a little espresso shack that possibly has a mobile-electronics kiosk. Maybe it's just the fact that the compact local ice skating rink also boasts a photo booth at the back of its little lot! The way I see it, if you have multiple lots "with everything," why would you or your sims bother to regularly use most of them? And then that really does become a waste of space and processing load, not to mention possibly of your time in building them.

It's highly satisfying to me that every one of my community lots, in every subhood, is regularly used---whether that's because sims come from every subhood to visit this one especially fancy hotel or because the locals like to do staycations at this very modest inn. Same for whether sims choose to be buried at the fancy, big cemetery or the tiny, out of the way one---where there's lots of quiet time to think when you visit the deceased. So there's another two questions in planning the feel of a community lot, or deciding if you really want it at all: is it a hoodwide attraction or modest local spot, used mostly because it's convenient or sentimentally important? To me, those two types of lots are designed verrry differently, with the latter kind being much, much more restricted in size and the number of activities available.

Maxis' Belladonna Cove is an example of a level of community-lot density that I would only do in one subhood or in downtown---although yes, I always have one area that is that dense. To me, it's a lifestyle choice to want/need to live around that much going on, and in my megahoods, I want there to be room for sims to make other lifestyle choices too. In a way, where they choose to live, and why, is part of how I give sim households character and backstory, which is in turn another reason that it's important for my subhoods to have substantially different community lot types and styles.

Overall, my preference is mostly for smaller (often mini-size) community lots and more of them, and not because my system can't handle the large, fancy ones (it can). It just makes the most sense to me to have the library be separate from the movie theater, which is separate from the outdoors store (in my current hood, that store's a pretty big lot, since they have an area where you can demo the tents---romance sims and families with tired kids love that...). Mainly because then, when I play a given community lot, the other sims on it usually are interested in doing what I brought my sims there to do too. That makes the lot seem lively in a connected way, instead of just busy in a background way---plus, you aren't always trying to get another sim's attention from across the lot! And sim wants and fears usually change whenever you change lots, which can get interesting if you're doing a bunch of lot-hopping.

However, it's sometimes useful that larger lots simply attract more sims at once, so I always do keep a few around. Also, some types of activities just go together because in combination, IMO, they create just enough to do on a lot for uncontrolled sims---thus an art museum will usually have a table-service cafe somewhere, and a library will usually have a guest-speaker area and vending machines. Then again, if you want sims to watch and tip a musical-group performance, maybe don't put too much else on the lot; that's why the amphitheater (Little Fallorayne) on the Academie La Tour campus works so well as a moneymaker, even though it isn't small.

Whether you choose to combine or not, I recommend using the Lot Compressor on all community lots in the hood. This shrinks their size and helps everything load faster. Community lots even stay compressed until you next manually edit them, because in normal play they are not written to.

I guess I should add this disclaimer: not everyone loves going to community lots. I adore it, and so everything above is written from that perspective. Not only do I take my sims off their home lots nearly every day (and sometimes multiple times per sim-day), but unless a sim is going out for something very specific (dinner, groceries) and I want to rush them back home to continue with something going on there, they'll almost always make multiple stops---and usually ask other sims to join them at some point too. What I'm saying is, no matter how well you plan out the community lots in your hood, if you just don't like the process of taking your sims out, the planning probably won't change that much. So I guess if you're not sure how much you like community-lot play, place just a few community lots...and then actually play for a while to see whether you like sending sims to them regularly. If not, then many things I've said above could be different for you; for example, you might want only a few all-in-one lots, so you can get it all done and get your sims back home more quickly.

*Ongoing TS2 informational projects (come on by to contribute, get info, or spectate!): (1) the SimPE Preservation Project and (2) Conflict Tracking for the 3t2 Traits Project Mods
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