I was wondering about the span of both TS2/TS3 generational gameplay. Which game do you personally find that you can progress through further generations within a single family, with and/or without mods? Which game is more generation-friendly before your saved game goes kaput, with and/or without mods? Obviously, this thread is for those who have played both games.

I'll start. In TS2, I've only gotten as far as having grandchildren, without mods, because I'd always move on to the next family. But in TS3, I've gotten as far as the sixth generation, without mods, before my game started to become choppy and laggy with doses of freezing moments.

It's easier in TS3 because of the open neighborhood thing

I've only reached to grandkids in both games. I play the whole town, for both games, on a rotation system. It takes me a LONG time to get past generations, especially in TS3 with more premades in town.

Well, I'm playing with the same family - or should I say family line - that I started with when the Sims 3 base game hit the stores, so I'd say Sims 3. I never got past the fourth or fifth generation in Sims 2.

Both have their pros and cons. The open neighborhood is a BIG BIG plus for TS3. I love that you can move sims out of the house and they will continue on their own. I hated playing TS2 rotations and so my family was all messed up -- relatives, having a sim hang out with his great great great great uncle who is younger than him was one.

A big minus for TS3 is corruption. I haven't been able to get to far without the town starting to go wonky. Some people port the whole town over to a copy town. I've never done that, but I might some time. I am hoping once all the patches are done (you never know, it seems...) that the game is more stable.

A plus for TS2 is the stability. A minus --- playing in rotation YUCK YUCK YUCK.

I think I've gotten to a fourth or fifth generation in the Sims 2, and only lost interest because everyone was a Plantsim, having Plantsim clone babies. Sims 3, I've only ever gotten as far as grandkids, but I do like the game more than 2.

TS2, easily. I played TS3 first, so I play TS2 the same way I do TS3: one family at a time. I kick out all the spares, maybe dabble around in college, but mostly stay focused on the main family just like in 3. I found I was able to reach around Generation 6 much faster with TS2 than TS3, mainly because the game runs faster. On the other hand, even TS2 games can become corrupt if you're not extra careful. I avoided all the VBTs in my first legacy game and it still went up in a big fiery etc. around Generation 6. But if you can stick with one family, TS2 is fine for generational play. Another plus is that with TS2, you're not forced to bring in custom sims if you don't want all your children to be identical. That said, I prefer TS3 :p

Interesting comment but I don't understand how open hood effects generational play?


So how far are you with this family line?

For me it's been TS3. I also have the same family line hanging around my hood that started with the one guy I created when TS3 came out. The official legacy line is on generation 8 being a child. But I also have other sims from this family line in generation 4-5. I don't play with hood aging so I've actually had to play each family in the world to get to this point.

In TS2 I loved my starting families but started loosing interest when the kids started to grow to adults. Generation 2 or beginning of generation 3 was the moment I would restart the hood. Once I got to generation 4 baby being born. It was a teen pregnancy thing so I got there faster than with normal gameplay but the moment that baby was born I lost interest.

I tried doing rotations but by the time you hit 20 households one rotation lasts so long that I felt my hood is not going forward at all. This is why I currently play so that one rotation consists of which ever sims I feel like playing. Not all of them. This of course means that sims in town will be out of sync with their ages but I don't mind.

Now to the part of the question of how far did I get with or without mods. Answering this will be a bit hard because I started playing with awesome when it first came out and this was about 3 months after TS3 was released. Currently I use awesome + twallan's mod. So I only played vanilla game for the first three months.

In TS2 the first thing I did when I got the game was delete all the sims I didn't feel like playing in pleasentview. A big no-no but of course I didn't know this back then. What shielded me with the worst of TS2 hood corruption is the fact that I restarted so often I never get to see a hood corrupt and burn to the point it's unplayable. I did see some signs though, like empty thought bubbles of the ones with the jagged lines. The only hood I ever corrupted while playing sims was a TS2 hood but that was because of using mods I didn't know how to use properly and most likely didn't even have the correct patch level + no control on what I downloaded. I just took everything I saw. So yes, there has been a moment in my life where I was just like an official sim forum user. No idea what I'm doing and then crying because mods broke my game

I'm currently playing the 11th generation; triplet girls. Each generation has had 2-3 kids. There would be a lot more generations but my wip caw world has also taken a lot of my time. After Late Night was released I played with the long life span awhile but changed it back to normal after Pets.

See post #5

I'll just say it again. In an open neighborhood, sims you don't play will go on to do things on their own. With a good story progression engine, like Twallan's, they will get married, have babies, keep a job, get promotions and if you set it up right, have a chance to move out of the city or die unexpectedly. (I don't play with those options) If you don't care enough to play your spares, you can watch them play themselves. After 4 or so generations, your main family should have lots of cousins and other relatives that grew up naturally on their own in the neighborhood and you didn't have to do all the work of controlling them and making all of this happen.

In TS2, if you don't play the sims, nothing happens to them. They don't even age. So you if you want things to be realistic, you have to play "in rotation" meaning that you play all of the households and control everything. If you really want to do this, it will get too big to control after a few generations, unless you decided to move everyone who you don't play out of town.

In TS3, it's nice and more natural to see sims you like but don't care enough for to play doing stuff on their own.

About the identical sim thing -- Twallan's mods fixes that except for role sims. And they can easily be fixed with Master controller if you care enough. Most people ignore the role sims, though. They are just cash register monkeys.

I do like story progression (especially now that I got Twallan's Story Progression to work), because it just makes the town feel more real and alive. Playing the random townies just to keep the town from stagnation never appealed to me, so TS2 felt very static and constrained, especially when it came to romance. I had families where multiple generations had their first kiss with the same girl, or where I kept having children with the same male Sim because he had good genes (a woman would have multiple children with multiple men and he was one of them, not anyone marrying their dad or anything).

Of course, now I have the opposite problem in TS3, in that almost everyone marries their high school sweetheart. 99 problems and a functional, realistic romance system ain't one.