i don't know about you, but i have discovered that there are a few ways to make playing more organized. for example, i base a child's aspiration (once they grow up to teens), on the first letter of their last name. that way for example:

names-aspiration

ABCD-FAMILY
EFGH-PLEASURE
IJKL-INFORMATION
MNOP-POPULARITY
QRST-FAMILY
UVWX-MONEY
YZ-ROMANCE

it makes life alot simpler when these teens grow up and are looking for a mate. if you have inseminator, you can call up any sim by last name. handy. also,i like to generalize wants and turn offs based upon aspiration. for example, all information sims want someone with glasses. and ofcourse most information sims have glasses. it opens up the pool for the prospective mates. i also have sororities and fraternities for all aspirations on my colleges to help folks meet and greet others like them.

i know it's anal. but if things are organized, then i find it alot more enjoyable to play. do you guys do this kind of stuff too,or are you happy to let things float and see what happens?

I would think that it would get a bit boring playing through generations of families where all the offspring have the same aspiration and turn ons/turn offs (which they would, if you're basing apsiration on last names like you say). How do you stave off boredom when there's no variation?

I only have 1 neighborhood that I work with and it's largely made up of Harry Potter characters. I set their Aspirations (and Personality points) based on the closest thing I can find to the book-character's personality and let the game do the rest. It's made for some very weird attractions as well as some easily predicted ones.

As for managing my gameplay, I use a variety of hacks to give me control over aspects of the game I want to manipulate, such as InSimenator for family tree management, name changes, aging, etc. as well as to control the basic game function, such as turning off autonomous behaviors that are inconvenient or annoying (What's This?, autonomous bogarting of the swing, too-friendly greetings, and many more).

Yes! I totally do stuff like this and just the other night I was explaining it to my girlfriend and she was laughing at how silly I get about my Sims.

Here is what I do:
I organize all my sims by generation, and play a certain number of days at each house in the neighborhood to control aging. This takes a lot longer. So all of my sims who were adults when I started the neighborhood, are now elders, and they all have grandchildren, who are close in age. This also keeps brothers and sisters organized once they move into separate homes, they are still kept the proper age distance apart.
It really bothers me when I will have sims who played together when they were kids and then one of them will be an elder and the other one is still a kid. I want to find a way to make the townies age, too, but I haven't yet. So to justify my anal tendencies, I just tell myself that the townies are robots and my Sims are the only real ones.
I also am really anal about everything being "realistic". I will look for common ethnic names for a sim baby based on their parent's potential ethnicity. I will try to look at other factors to decide what sims would name their children, like their aspiration, personality, family names, etc. I do the same to determine what they would have in their house... all of those things, based on the sim. Nothing is generic it's all sim-specific.

Yet despite all of this analyzations that I do, I still have zombies, werewolves, aliens and Servos LOL

Normally I dice roll for most game born sims, unless i've noticed they have a unusual amount of aptitude at something. That way there's still randomness. Turn ons are assigned roughly the same way. Otherwise I would have hoods full of knowledge and family sims turned off by stink. I also don't use the insimenator, it's a lovely hack but know I couldn't resist the temptation to meddle constantly.

I have asperation based faternities and sororities too. All the knowledge/fortune/family sims are in one chapter, and the romance/pleasure/popularity ones in another. I also keep lists of births so all the sims born in 5 real life days of playing, (About 3-4 unless there's a baby boom, or i'm home sick or something.) will age at the same rate.



http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/s...pic,4842.0.html

Here's a townie aging hack for you. It's in testing but i've been using it for weeks now with no problems. Ageless townies bug the heck out of me too.

i play obsessive compuslively too. if i **** things up then i immediatly delete the neighborhood and start over. it's a bad habit, and ruins the game though :/ lol, i try to play at random and have stuff all over the place but i just can't! another neighborhood deleted! right now i currently have zero neighborhoods and am just waiting until i buy pets so i can play accordingly again. life as an obsessive-compulsive-over-analyzer.

Mine it's alll random I am entirely not analytic/systematic minded and I choose my sims' names and "back stories" aka aspirations, personalities, future partners and such on a whim or however it feels best to me. I often play with a storyline going in my head. I honestly couldn't play in a textbook fashion

Well I do these things exactly as well. I wouldn't really call myself anal for it though, it just makes sense to me, and I can't find other alternatives eh.

Your method is interesting and brings up the reason why this game is so successful for so many and for so long--you can play it so many ways!

I have to agree with the others who say they do things more randomly. My game play is sometimes thought out (like I will match so and so with a certain person or make an nice mate for him or her) but most things are not planned.

I used to just go completely by the seat of my pants but lately my boyfriend's been helping me to write things down ahead of time. Since I have so many Sims in this one family, it's been rather necessary to figure out what aspiration I want for them, what lifetime want they should have, which job would best suit them, and who I think they might end up with. I don't have a system for determining these things, though I do strive for an overall variety. Mostly I have a good look at the Sim, think of what I know about them, and choose.

i forgot to mention that the aspirations shift each generation. but systematically. to me, it's not boring, it makes the game more fun to have things somewhat manageable. when i'm throwing caution to the winds, i get rather irritated at the randomness. i guess it's all in the reason why you play. i'm a social worker. i deal with random nonsense and consequences over which i have no control all day long. so when i come home and play the sims, it's because i want to feel some sense of control over my sims world. folks like my husband, who don't get any drama throughout their day, can play in a more random fashion, and not get irritated by it. i guess i just get my daily dose of drama at work. if i include it in my sim play, i'll overdose.

it's like i used to say, if i wanted reality, i'd turn off the friggin computer, and go back to real life. this is my escape.

i couldn't agree more on all counts. i play a family until the children reach the next developmental stage, and then i go to another family, to make sure that the children of the same generation are all the same age. this way, they are all children together, then teens together, then college buddies together then adults together. yes, definitely.

I go with whim about aspirations. I like playing knowledge sims, so I have more of them, but I try out the other ones too. (I wish the pc version had the creativity aspiration that the console did. That was fun too.) Other than that, I play until I find out how the soap operas my sims created are turning out, then go to one of the others and see what they start up with. And if this means that a kid ends up in college with his father, so be it. (Although I will try to get dad graduated before that.)

I base aspirations/turn-ons etc. on a feeling usually. For example, I'll notice that this Sims child always read a lot, so she'll b a Knowledge. or maybe this one is really cute and always boast about his grades etc., so he should be Romance. If I create the Sim in CAS, I'll just think about his/her personnality and find a logical aspiration. If he's surfer-style, he might be Pleasure, with a turn-on for muscle and swimsuits and a turn-off for formal clothes.

As for first names, well I'm ashamed to admit that after a series of Sims called anything from Mentos to Hollywood to Curtain (in fact the first thing I would see), I bought a baby's names book (which I carefully hide so that friends don't think I'm pregnant ) which I randomly open in the boys or girls part anytime I have a Sim (or a pet, BTW) to name. It's full of names from around the world, so some names are actually unusual enough to suit a pet (however they do end up being called McBacon or Toothpaste from time to time).

I'm not disciplined enough to play systematically, my neighbourhoods are messy and get nuked frequently! I like to leave them on Freewill and watch what happens, and I never synchronise lots.

I wish I could sync lots... I have to force myslef to play the houses I don't like. But now I have pets, I can add a dog or cat to the ones I dislike, making it more interesting.

yes, the beauty of an expansion pack

I play some-what like this, I have a Sim-Book where I write down all the families I have in my neighbourhood, making a note of relationships, aspirations and jobs.
I have made quite a few Sims specifically for a sim I have in the neighbourhood and hooked them up...but I don't play like this all the time, if my sims attraction is negative I usually won't hook the sim up, I find that they aren't enough aspirations to choose from so I usually just pick whatever I feel fits the charecter of the sim and if I end up hating it I change it using InSim.
So I do have some level of organisation in my game but too much of it and I wouldn't be able to play for very long.
Oh I do select names fitting of the family, my demon family have demon-like names thanks to movies like Nosferatu and books like Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicals, my aliens are named after planets (Mercury, Jupiter and Pluto) and from a TV show called Zixx Level 1... her name is Zixx...I am pretty paticular about the names

Oh man, I'm glad someone else names their sims random things. My current dynasty, the Breakfasts, were all named after breakfast foods through generation 4. Names included: Toast, Juice, Waffles, Pancakes, Banana, Omelette, Pastry, Croissant, Flakey and Crust (twins), Danish and Strudel (twins), Cookies (okay, so maybe not breakfast...) and Pierogie.

As for my style of play, I micromanage to a scary degree. I don't have a system for aspirations and stuff, but I pretty much refuse to play romance or popularity sims, and any new sims I make MUST have 5 or more neat points. Which leads to a neighborhood where some sims gain fun from cleaning the bathtubs, and everyone wants to be captain hero...