I love making and playing with different sims - I could never stick entirely to just one hood, but I find that I end up creating a kind of master rotation out of all the hoods I am playing. I get different things out of them - one is Strangetown, renamed and updated heavily and now running autonomously on its own storyline: Tank Grunt has two little boys that are just so adorable, and General Buzz is now a father of SEVEN children, five boys and two girls. Vidcund is a hippie weed dealer who lives alone in a tiny trailer on a small plot of land that will eventually become a commune, and the Beakers have three kids to raise and a laboratory to start.

At this point, with big clans like the Grunts and the Curious' overlapping and spreading out further, I sometimes want to go back to the beginning when I had just one or two households to manage, or at least, less than 30 odd. So when I want a break from complex family trees and screaming toddlers, I play Maclandon. It's the hood I started as an experiment (often those yield my favourite storylines), and it's only a university at the moment. There's nothing at all in the main hood, and I plan to have my soon-to-graduate first class start building businesses and homes. I look at it as a test-hood for new shiny mods and different functionalities that wouldn't be ready for my more advanced hood yet.

I also love the maxis playables. I fell in love with them all slowly and now I couldn't imagine never finding out What Happened To Sally Riley, or Rose Greenman, or Lilith Pleasant. I don't like the idea of an Uberhood, since I like for each of my hoods to represent its own 'state' kind of thing, a separate entity from the others, (the only sims who are considered 'moving from one state to another' are the ones in the bin - I allow them in every hood so they're always moving from somewhere... ) so in order to play all these wonderful stories, I need to play all the hoods at some point. I like it. I keep a chronicle of events of each play session and I name it for the hood's newspaper (Scarborough Times etc.) and it keeps me from forgetting things like which sim is pregnant, which needs to get married, who's supposed to start a business, and generally speaking, where everyone is and why and what they're (probably) going to do next.

In the past, I've generally had 3 or 4 hoods on the go at once, each with its own distinct theme. One might be an urban hood with high unemployment, another a wealthy agricultural community; one might be a semi-integrated BaCC that starts out with just the founder and a couple of others and slowly builds up, another might have several immigrant families move to a slum at once and try to earn their citizenship. Currently, I'm just playing one hood, which will eventually become an uberhood - new districts will be added as the king's younger sons grow up. Like the separate hoods, each district has its own lifestyle; some areas are rich and some poor, some urban and some rural.

I wonder if the reason you get bored with your hoods so quickly is that you create and move in all your families at once, so they're all at the same point in their lives and careers, with the same lack of skills? I found using the Simblender to adjust adult ages according to whatever children they're starting out with, and giving them some skills at the beginning, makes it a lot easier to get into a new hood - otherwise, you have everybody aging up in the same rotation, and later everybody dying in the same rotation, which gets depressing. Also, do your hoods start with some kind of scenario (post-apocalypse, new colony, the Great Depression, etc.) or do you just have some disconnected Sims? I'm not a fan of Desiderata Valley, for example, because Maxis seemed to focus on individual quirks rather than giving the hood itself any real character. If you haven't already, you could try looking at some of the longer-term challenges and see if having a challenge goal keeps you more interested in a hood.

Like, I'm really lazy. So after creating a hood and sims and playing them - I don't want to do that all over again. and again. and again. That's one factor, the rest are just as others said about seeing how genetics pan out. Sims don't get boring to me because I invest time and attention into them and make stories and details about them. I take pics of them, I build for them, I share information about them, I get new mods and cc for them - and it's led me to play my neighborhood exclusively for over a decade.

I find this thread very interesting. I too am a serial hood restarter, though for different reasons, it seems. For me, I had to sit down and think about why and when I start a new hood and what I learned is that I have two main reasons for starting a new hood: First, is because I want to start over--either I didn't like how the hood's, or an individual sim's, story went or, more often, I want to try something else and see where that takes me. Although I'm trying to be less controlling and let my sims guide the story more, there's not much to be done about this. I just love the beginning of a good story.

The other reason I start over a lot is because I feel stuck and/or that I need something to continue playing that hood. And by 'something' I mean a lot/building. Yup, I usually stop playing when I need new buildings, ! I do like building but it takes a while for me and even longer for me to feel like I got a lot just right. And for some reason, building doesn't really feel like playing to me (even though of course it is), so whenever I want to have a quick play session, I put off my older hoods because I want to finish my hood renovations there first and so I go find a different hood to play. I'm seriously not playing 2 hoods right now because of this. The first is Belladonna Cove; my Kimberly Cordial has started a coven and got some members to infiltrate society's highest/most prominent families, but... now they all need new homes. And once I built the homes, where would they go? So of course I started redesigning the hood a bit. Then I realized that there's so many lots in Belladonna I don't use/like, so those got added to the list, as well as some new lots the hood was missing like schools and banks. The same with my main hood, Pleasantview. I decided to redo downtown entirely after I realized my favorite lots could use a refresh, plus there were some lots that I've never used or even entered after over a decade of simming. Did you know there are *three* bowling alleys downtown? I only ever use two. And yet there's no skating rink or gym or bank, etc., etc., etc. Writing it down, it sounds silly to say I went off to start an entirely new hood because I didn't feel like building, but my Broke family is trying to start a mafia and they need a variety of places to rob, several families are waiting on new schools so they can mix and mingle with other playables, and my upper class sims need posh hangouts because the Goth teens should not be mingling with the aforementioned Broke criminal family in their spare time. Long story short, it's another huge 'To build' list.

...And I just realized I stopped playing my Strangetown for the exact same reason--I got Johnny and Stella engaged and graduated but stopped playing when it came time to build them a new house. In Pleasantview at least, it's been a little better, as I still play while slowly making over sections of downtown, but it's still stalling a bit.

So, I'm taking the advice from this thread! While I do save the lots that I've finished, since I'm wanting new ones, I'll download what I need. Some things that are good enough right now, that I can makeover & use quickly, until/if I decide to make something myself.

I realize this is all highly situational to me, though, so my advice is to sit, think, and take note of when you stop playing. Is it really when you've finished setting up a hood? Then perhaps setting up more hood goals would help. But maybe it's really when too many households are in the 'just married, time to make a baby' phase, or it's when after most of a generation has topped their careers and done all the things you've planned for them to do, or it's when every houshold feels the same. Etc., etc. Once you know what you don't like to do/why you stop playing a hood, you can figure out how to keep the hood interesting to you--if you really want to keep playing it, that is. Don't force it.

There are always going to be families that are more interesting and less interesting for whatever reason, and the same family can cycle through both. I find if a family is boring me right now or more often it's not that they are boring they are just less interesting then the family next door at the present moment. I purposely load up the less interesting family first and play a day before loading the family that I want to play more. I do that every load up so this way the less interesting family is still being played. Hopefully, after a day or two or three, they will in turn be more interesting. Right now I want to go play my family with the triplets but first I will load up my elderly empty nesters and play them a day while thinking on what they can do next.

In order to space out the building projects and force Calamity Hills to grow at a slower place I implemented some house rules - the town has to buy all of the lots with town funds first. (Or get them as a reward which still puts a roadblock in place). So even though the Dagny's have hundreds of thousands of dollars it doesn't matter; the town doesn't so the result is we're waiting on funds to build houses and businesses. So far it's worked a treat. I'm not overwhelmed building an entire neighborhood at once and it gives me time to truly anticipate/plan/appreciate the new builds we add. If there comes a time the town has too much money and I'm overwhelmed with building projects I'll just increase the rates the town needs to pay in order to keep that speed bump in place.

For houses that aren't interesting for me to play at the time, I just skip them and go back to them later. If I still don't want to do anything with them I just use the hour/day/seasons cheats to keep them in sync with the rest of the neighborhood and skip their turn altogether. I'm having a lot of fun playing the game again and I'd like to continue enjoying it so if something starts to feel like a grind I change the "rules" and what I'm doing to keep it relaxed and fun.

As others have said, I like seeing how the hood grows over the generations. Seeing children grow up, get married, have their children, have grandchildren, combining families in interesting ways. I like the idea of a sim marrying someone who would shock their 1st Generation ancestors.

It's not for everyone. But I've created a hood big enough to have as many variations in stories as I want, so I never get bored.

One reason I do have multiple hoods is an idea will pop into my head about some kind of theme or story line that I've not played before.

For instance, Tinsel Town is based on the idea of who makes it to the top of the entertainment food chain in simulated version of Hollywood. The winner will get an Oscar in the end and fame.
There's Farnham with Lord Fitzwilliam who wants to be King, but he's got a ways to go. With his various tenants living on his estate and having their own families/lives/drama. (and of course his chasing a woman not his wife while trying to not get caught doing so..)
I've set up Newcastle just recently to test out what would happen if 24 pixels were dumped on the island by the Crown because they were the 'scum of society'. Who gets to rule the roost in that one?

Sometimes I like to start hoods that incorporate new hacks/mods. But of course the curiosity fact is always the main reason: "What if this theme/idea was played? What would really happen?"
I always play all the households in the neighborhood every round, but I've relaxed alot about doing it, because I've become used to watching the pixels make their own lives. I just try to sit back and resist the temptation to force them to do anything. Thus they're free to run amok, and believe me, they take every chance they can get to do so.

In my case, it's because I have one very long storyline that I want to follow. Every time my game needed a reinstall on Sims 2, I would simply make a note of what I knew of my Sims and put them into a different neighbourhood (or neighbourhood terrain), because the narrative device of the cyberstorm allowed this, in the same way as regeneration on Doctor Who allows more than one actor to play the role without resorting to reboots. I have a background narrative, which started with four sisters who brought magic into a town that had newly gained independence and self-governance from SimCity. The factions became more complex, the population grew and the interactions between them more intricate and interesting. Plus I had ideas being brought in from discovering and exploring Sims on the internet.

I'm considering starting a second hood, provisionally called Tristan do Simha... ...19 years after I started SimHampton back when The Sims was a fresh installation on my computer. I'm not even sure if I want it to be a 100% separate hood, or if I simply want to be a heavily-restricted "subhood" of SimHampton, restricted to its residents and those Sims who would plausibly be allowed to visit (e.g. Sims considering becoming a spouse to one of the residents). I've had subhoods based on colonies on other planets, so it's not the most implausible idea...

That said, I can see how playing lots of hoods can be fun too. So play the way that gives you the most happiness

In terms of families being more or less interesting:

I struggled with this at first, quite a lot! I used to hate playing single sims, or elder sims, or couples without children. But that was also because I was making my own sims in CAS. It's not to say that you can't make interesting sims that way, but I personally just couldn't seem to get it right. I would make one sim I loved, and give them the chubby turn on for example, and then go make a chubby sim and try to introduce them. All fine and dandy, but when those two sims are going through the friends period, they both need to live somewhere, and do something, and if you multiply that by 10 or 15 sims, you can see why I was always bored lol. For me, playing integrated hoods solves that problem because instead of creating sims for just one specific purpose and then realising I don't know how to play them properly beyond that, I don't create sims at all. I let my sims organically evolve to do certain jobs.

Every family is more interesting because there are certain goals for them - like starting x business, or founding x society or what-have-you, but each sim also has character. They might be the grandchild or child or cousin to another sim, the best friend of one, the partner of another. There's just more to them than my CAS sims who popped up like mushrooms to run the grocery store, or marry x townie.

And for my hoods, the same curiousity that drove me to determinedly play all of my townies is what makes me play other hoods. To me, each hood both maxis and custom is part of a little tiny digital planet that lives in my computer ((hypothetically speaking of course lol this is pretty bonkers by my standards by stay with me)). So each hood is a different nation, because each one has the propensity to grow to a big number of subhoods and such. I don't think of subhoods as 'sub', they're just other towns within the overarching region, just like the main hood. And all the nations are separate and self-contained, except for the sims that travel between them - the bin sims. The Bin Sims unite SimNation under Terula, perfectly divisible, with liberty and justice for all ((sims)).

So yeah. I'm insane, but that's why LOL.

For me it's called utilizing the shopping districts and creating a mega hood. Therefor while you're playing a different neighborhood, the game internally recognizes it as part of the main 'hood. Win-Win of both worlds I think.

I don't stick to one. I currently have...mmmm....10?...hoods? I think? Eleven if you count the custom "downtown" uni template I've just started making. They all have different rule sets and they're all in different states of development or play. Some are in play and have been for various lengths of time. Some are still being built. One is waiting for me to test out stuff in another hood and then to refine its rule set before I continue with it. The overall idea is that I rotate between them, so that I don't get bored with any of them. If I feel like playing, I'll play one of the ones in active play, depending on which rule set I feel like playing. If I feel like building, I'll work on one of the ones that are currently being built. If I get bored with one, I'll switch to another for a while, cycling through them so that each gets some attention. I guess the key for me is to have lots of options, to suit whatever I feel like doing in the game in any given session.