So the term "Hood ADHD" probably applies to me. To be fair, the term ADHD in general probably applies to me, or so a psychologist said.

Nonetheless...I start a neighborhood, make all the buildings, make all the sims, get a few rotations in and go "Well, we had a good run". Why am I like this . Any tips to actually stick to a neighborhood?

I'm using a megahood so I use Strangetown as the main hood, Pleasantview, Bluewater Village, Veronaville, and Sunset Valley as subhoods to it. This way when I'm done rotating through one hood, there is another to get through. There are various stories in each hood so it changes it up enough to stay interesting I think. I do like to use the premades since I'm not good at creating initial story lines. I also am in process of making everything integrated in that all the businesses are ones that my sims own which makes it more fun for me at least.

Are you making background stories with the sims you make? Or are they all the same general happy story line? Maybe creating some variety there will help you stay interested in your game?

Sticking to one hood is hard, very hard. My advice is starting a hood with a challenge and not playing the game not as often. That's how I'm able to stick my Beginning Pleasantview hood. Almost 20 rounds in (the most rounds I ever played) and I'm not bored of it yet.

I don't, I have a few.
I have my main interdependent integrated hood. I find this form of play keeps me far more invested in a hood. If you haven't heard of it this form of play is about all the sims in the hood participating to make the hood function. So you don't ring an NPC or use very little NPC/rabbit hole services, instead you use your playables. The families rely on each other and all know each other, they are not random or separate. An example would be the school. This is run by a playable couple, another playable is an extra teacher, the kids in my hood mostly all go there for school and I play the actual school.

Then I have my separate sims 2 folder with my medieval interdependent hood

I have my building hood for when I feel like building

I have my challenge hood when I feel like playing some random unrelated challenge.

I occasionally make an odd hood to start something else but most times that falls by the wayside.

I would suggest trying an integrated hood. There are plenty of posts around on it. If you are doing this and are still bored you could be giving them all too much too soon. You want things to look forward to, things to work towards, don't add everything right away.

I have well over 40 hoods I play off and on so I guess I can't stick with just one either.

If what you like is building and setting things up, there's nothing wrong with that.

I don't stick to one neighborhood, but I do play long term, and that's because I get invested in the neighborhood and people in it. With one-day rotations, lots of community lot visits and parties and whatnot, I play intensely and pay a lot of attention to the sims as characters and the neighborhoods as networks of characters. Sadie flirts with Ashley at a party, witnessed by his wife, her husband, her brother, and her cousin - his frat brother. What will the effects of this be throughout the hood? How does it impact the relationship of Sadie's little sister with Ashley's daughter? What are the indirect effects of Sadie's brother throwing down with Ashley on community lots before I play either of them again? What happens at Ashley's daughter's graduation party? Well, one of the things that happens is that Ashley's sorority sister falls in love all by herself with another guest in the kitchen while Ashley and his wife are fighting in the parlor! Meanwhile, another couple of old enemies are making up over chess...there's always some new development to follow up on and explore, if that's what you're into.

Ninety per cent of this game happens in your head; so if you're bored, you need to think about what interests you about the game, and how you're interfering with yourself in doing that. If all you want to do is make perfect little hoods, that's fine. You do that; but perfection is static. Long-term play depends on dynamic situations, new changes and new challenges. So either get it out of your head that you're "supposed to" play a hood long term, and have fun with your worldbuilding; or figure out how to build dynamic worlds instead of perfect ones.

We're supposed to have more than one?!

Because I'm a huge fan of following families through the generations and if I didn't stick to one hood it'd take even longer to advance the various story lines.

Also I use sub-hoods to create a bit of variation in terrain and communities.

One of my favorite aspects of the game is the genetics and seeing what kids grow up to look like. So sticking with a hood long term helps me do that, and the Build A City Challenge gives me a really fun framework to tell stories.

With that said, I think you should play the game however you get the most joy! There are a number of RPGs I play where I find that rather than actually playing through the whole main quest line, I play a character for a while until I get bored, and then make a new one with different stats and skills and start from the beginning. For a while I had this vague sense I was doing it "wrong" since I never actually finished any of the games, but then I realized, i was having fun playing so who actually cares? (And if anyone does care they can die mad about it because I'm not changing the way I play a game that's fun for me to please them!)

1300 Sims (yes, even larger than last count!)
When I get bored I add another subhood or a new sim.

I only really play Rematra despite recreating it multiple times. I love the idea of an interconnected world of all the Sims 2 Sims from all the official titles and my own creations, so it feels unnecessary to create another hood (to me anyway). The only other hood I touch is my corruption test hood. Guess which of the two is a ticking time bomb?

Also plan to hit 32,000 residents simday. Can't do that so easily whist creating multiple hoods.

I don't, and I'm okay with it. Seriously, I'm a serial 'hood starter, so I obviously cannot offer up any advice on how not to constantly start over and over again. *laughs*

One hood? You have to be joking!

Or as the saying goes, "Variety is the spice of life."
I have multiple hoods, in multiple variations-medieval and modern day. Between the two I can keep myself amused.

I have 3 - one is my hood that I play most of the time and I am expecting it to blow up into that space thing at any given moment - it is huge with lots of subhoods and families and generations and I love the hood and all the sims in it. It also has all the bin sims, townies, downtownies, social townies and whatever other townies there may be. I love this hood and the fact that it is so busy and it is a challenge to me to make sure all the sims in the hood know each other. (I do have backups, but regret not having taken more screenshots over the last 4 to 5 years). I intend to take pics of all the twins there before it blows up if I can (As Peni says - invested. I am truly invested in this hood).

My small military hood, Kipling, was started as my first empty hood (and perhaps the last one) - I may get back to it sometime.

I have a farming hood - not really so much for playing as for testing all the mods available for farming and keeping the ones I like.

I also have a hood for building and a hood for testing the lots.

Sometimes, I play around in Riverside I liked that one from the beginning because it has lots of sims! As for the default hoods, these days I don't play them at all, but I may pop into Desiderata Valley once in a while (I loved Strangetown, but think that I have played that one to the max).

I'm with Peni on this one. If you like setting up new things and struggle with long-term play, that's what you do. Personally, I'm the opposite - I hate building and setup, but I love creating worlds and watching my Sims' stories unfold. My dislike of modern play means I don't really do much with the premades, so I kind of have to build, but once I'm playing, I'll play until the hood explodes, then probably rebuild it. As I've said, Kulo Seeri is 12 years old in April. That's because I get attached to everyone and want to find out what happens next.

For your style of play, building and setup might be exactly what's right for you. On the other hand, if you want to feel you're achieving something within gameplay, it might help to have goals that are reachable in a few rotations. For example, I once had a mini-challenge in Kulo Seeri where things were being "stolen" from lots. My mum knew which of my Sims was the thief, but I didn't, and every so often I'd have something go missing and she'd give me a clue about who was doing it. That spiced up a period of flat gameplay... before half the village turned into zombies, including the thief.

Basically, I always say, "Play to your strengths". If you always have short-lived hoods, embrace that and come up with a way to enjoy playing that doesn't require long-term focus.

I have been away from Sims 2 for some months, and slowly getting interested again. I lost interest because it became overwhelming to me, with dowloading new cc and I tried playing the premades, got bored, lost interest, I have always had the want to build a custom integrated neighborhood so I would fiddle with SimCity 4 endlessly to create the neighborhood of ideas I had, start to decorate and then abandon it, because it was not the perfect hood I dreamed of. I have so many ideas of story and sims and what have you, but nothing gets done, because I have an obsession with the idea of perfect or nothing. Honestly this holds true for a lot of hobbies in my life and I know right well I am robbing myself of the joy I could have by just letting go, and playing, so I am trying to find a new approach to find a way to not obsess over mods, (that I convince myself I must need this right?),and I must have the most perfect skins and eye sets to have fun and stay interested right? It becomes unfun and I quit sometimes before I start, so hence the post a few days ago about a fresh start install. For me I have trouble sticking with one for more than a few rotations without losing interest, a mod issue or something else going wrong so this topic is very helpful to me as well. I can not be the only one who has this problem am I? I find Peni's advice very helpful ,now if I could only set forth and play and enjoy. Please share ideas.

Start simple.

What's the core idea behind your integrated hood? A character? The economic system? A storyline? Set up the game with just enough stuff to embody that core idea adequately.

If the important thing is a character, then build that character in CAS along with the absolute minimum of family needed to make him into himself (what is Dustin Broke without his mother and little brother depending on him? I don't know, but he's not the character we all know), and put them on a "good enough" lot on a "good enough" map. Lots can be bulldozed and rebuilt; terrains can be replaced, so - start playing. If the core concept is building everything from absolute zero, then build yourself an empty neighborhood on that "good enough" map by suppressing or replacing all the stealth hoods and add in mods for resource gathering and building, but nothing else. Devise a simple set of rules in an easily-edited format, and start. Rewrite rules and add (or delete!) mods as you need to, as you learn more about what's fun for you and what keeps you engaged.

There's a trick in creative work of stopping for the day before you feel finished. I don't get up from writing a story I'm serious about after I write the last sentence I have in me for the day, but immediately before. This keeps my backbrain primed to continue and makes getting started and doing more substantial work tomorrow much easier. Time constraints do the same thing for me in the game. Those one-day rotations almost guarantee that there's something left hanging in each household, ready to run with next time I play them. Experiment to find what works for you so that you never feel finished.

You can also use the story album, a spreadsheet, or even just a notebook to keep track of your plans. At the end of a rotation or a play session or whatever, take a minute to prime the pump for next time by jotting down a note on the next thing you want to do, or summarize what happened in this session, or track your progress toward some goal. Resist the urge to plan more than one step ahead. Leave the sims room to surprise you.

I agree, start small with only the important details in place. There is no perfect hood, but there are good enough hoods.

If you want to start from scratch by making your terrain do so, but you don't have to. You could download a map, a decorated hood, a hood with buildings or a full inhabited hood. I chose to download a hood with buildings but no sims and used empty templates so no pre-made townies. I'm someone that likes to jump in and start playing rather than spending a long time on set up. I decorate and change things as the mood strikes.

What is your style of integrated? There is more than one way. Are you doing what you like or are you doing what you think you should do? Make sure any rules are fun for you. Integrated hoods can be simpler or more complex.

A hood is only perfect if one enjoys playing it - in my opinion I have never bothered a lot with hood deco or skies or terrain/road replacements (although it makes sense if you go medieval, which does not interest me). That is not because I have anything against a lovely looking hood - but because the characters are a lot more important to me. Sometimes I think : one day I will add that sky or that tree or that whatever to my hood - but, to be honest, I just don't, because it is not my priority.

My priority is playing, playing, playing and I am not worried in the least that most of my residential lots have no foundations at all and most of them are just one level as well - because I like keeping an eye on everyone in the households. And there are a lot of households, so it basically keeps me too busy to decorate the hood.

Yet my hood is perfect - to me

I agree with Peni on the notes. I could never have kept track of the various neighborhoods if I did not keep a daily diary of each session. It's fun also to read it to refresh your memory of events. Sometimes you can be surprised at how things do/don't develop as you play.

My hoods each have their own Sims2 folder.
Since I like to leave the CC in place instead of swapping it out for a diff. hood.
Currently I'm playing Strangetown/apocalypse hood.

Then there's the medieval hood (Part of the storyline is inspired by the old pc game,"Daemonica".)
Lots of 'story' in that game... so I've tailored the sims to look and act a bit like the game characters.
LOVE it that the sims 2 has death , illness, and ghosts !

Then there's "Voleste"... my magical village. Available for download from here, I think.
It's been a while.

A Mars space hood that I set up and have been neglecting.
A hood based on the movie "Beetlejuice".
A hood based on the "Myst" pc game.
A hood based on the "Dune" series by Brian Herbert.

So, yes, I like to get inspired by computer games and some movies !

Part of what I love about this game... I take the original story and add/subtract from it ; and most of all -- keep the characters alive and continuing with their 'lives'.

I play an Uberhood. Over 80 families to rotate through so I'm constantly on the go! There's so many stories playing out at the same time, some of them intertwine together. I find it a lot of fun but also very hard to keep track of who's in love with who, who's done what etc. Other than that, I love my Uberhood. It's all down to how we play and how we like to play. I love my Uberhood and how I play it, and that's why I haven't stopped. :D

for those who do not know, ADHD is "Attention Deficit with Hyperactivity Disorder" and ADD would be "Attention Deficit Disorder".
before this thread; heard both terms being applied to just students.

in past times playing, most gameplay was in base game's pre-made neighborhoods; and I think Pleasantview and Strangetown were played more than Veronaville.

I make myself a goal/milestones or a reason why the hood exist. Praperduvis will be "completed" once every frrom lot bin premade house and community lot is owned by residential servos only (excluding an already living zombie, since they're immortal), Wonderland with pretty much a similar purpose (till there's no remaining to build a lot and house families). Then there's a testing hood for trying out experiments and tamper with game breaks, and the "2019" (name by the year I played, which of course digitally it changes; I also name my hoods weirdly since I pretty much 'keep things to myself') with a town that (only and will keep it that way) has one household, which I'm playing for generations until the town gets corrupted and vanishes.

If you're still having trouble "sticking to one neighborhood", then I could advice perhaps just giving yourself a challenge to simply (though, harder than it sounds) just strictly sticking to one neighborhooud without creating other hoods for a year . If you already have one, what I would do is remove them from neighborhood folders and place them somewhere else so they don't inter fare with the restrain.

How do you guys stick to one neighborhood?

For myself I find that the best way to want to stick to one neighbourhood is to fall in love with one or more of the Sims that live there. If your "One" lives in a neighbourhood, then you'll want to hang out there as much as possible.

I created two Sims when I first started up the game in November 2012. It took me about 2 Sim hours to fall hopelessly in love with both of them. Over six years later I'm still in that state. They are of course young Andrew Jones and his mother Gloria, and they live at 19 Chorus Court, Veronaville. I have other 'hoods that I play now and other Sims that I like -- even love. But Veronaville remains my real home in the Sims' world, and I keep returning there. Because, even when I'm playing other households there, there's always a chance that Andrew or Gloria (or one of their long established friends from my earliest Simming days) will turn up. And my heart quickens when they do. :lovestruc

Over the years, new houses have been built in Veronaville and new shops opened, especially on the Italian side of the canal. But the neighbourhood retains its essential character. And indeed the Eastside, where the half-timbered houses are, is a conservation area, where it's hard to get planning permission to make alterations to your house. So, even though it's still in essence the Maxis 'hood, I find Veronaville a very attractive place to look at. But perhaps the real reason why Veronaville is beautiful in my eyes is because someone I love lives there.

I don't really stick to one, but I have three that are closely connected by stories. I treat them all as one extended area, maybe the way others play Uber or Mega hoods, so I think it's really one that just accidentally takes place in three hoods. I have enough variety there that I don't need another one and I don't really enjoy the setup part. I also really have no patience for different ways of playing so I like to have them all pretty much the same, same mods, same default CC I use everywhere, same sims... so that's how. If you do enjoy that part, I think that's great. Have fun!