I use community lot time and take full advantage of it and my rotations are usually one day though that might vary in the start with a newly settled town since it would only have one couple living on their homestead in the town and one community lot at first.I added that to avoid playing the day twice on all day outings to community lots and have them out for the day and the clock runs fast as though they were at work all day on return until the time they left for home.

I love this thread; it's been very helpful/enlightening!

It's funny though--I forgot about rotation order. I definitely don't play in a particular order; I play everyone for the same amount of time, but play them in whatever order I feel like. Except when it comes to sending kids to uni, I hardly ever keep track of aging and can't be bothered to figure out who is older than who. Too much work for me to keep track.

I think that's incredibly fast. I started my current rotation in Veronaville in October, and I've nearly finished it now. That's the fastest I've ever played it. It used to take me years. (Of course my rotation were very loose - more a case of asking "Who hasn't been played for a while?" -- this is the first time I've really timed a rotation.) Although I say Veronaville, it's Veronaville with a lot of CAS Sims added, a lot of townies made playable, and three attached sub-hoods. There are now 46-47 households in the rotation. How many are there in your megahood? (I think I'm talking abut your megahood 2.0.)


I certainly did that in Veronaville. Not by design, but by accident. I started off in November/December 2012 playing just three households -- all CAS Sims. (You know some of their names!) About February March/I added two more households -- one of them living in Downtown which I had attached. Up to this point I more or less ignored the premades, but then Puck Summerdream got involved with the downtown family, and I began to include the premades in the loose rotations. I also moved the Veronaville bin families into houses in the 'hood. Over the months and years since I have continued to add CAS Sims and attach sub-hoods until I'm now approaching 50 playable households. Starting small and building up slowly has helped me to keep my interest in the 'hood. Like Peni, I play with lots of community lot visits and interaction between families. There's a real sense of community in Veronaville today.

I honestly think this is the answer to playing a large 'hood. It's nearly impossible to really get to know a large number of Sims at once. Trying to play with longer rotations just means it takes longer to get round them all. One refinement to Peni's ideas I might suggest: I understand you really got stuck in your megahood when you got to Bluewater. I think the problem with Bluewater is that all the families there are more or less the same -- they're all running businesses, and frankly I think all their businesses are under-capitalised and are struggling a bit as a result. (Even Malcolm Landgraab.) Instead of playing all the Bluewater families one after the other, try to spread them through the rotation. You don't want to have to worry about balance sheets and cashflows for days at a time!

I record my game in the game's storytelling feature, and go by the date of the storytelling files, to see who to play next. The oldest dated file is the next household to be played.

Sorry to be a bit slow in posting this.

Three day rotations unless a sim is at college, then one day rotations until the sim graduates or drops out. Each year at college is one one day rotation. This is to prevent sims from being twelve to fifteen days older while the YA sims stay the same age. Even if I send my sims to college as soon as they have seven days left, their younger sibling who didn't go to college would be older than them by the time they graduated! It's worth mentioning that I use a shorter college mod because the dorms lag.

I used to do a one week rotation but now i'm going to do a Monday - Thursday and Thursday - Monday rotations, with college being in there somewhere approximately.

There's one other thing that I forgot to mention:
I didn't mention the fact that before I start any rotation play in the game, I go into SimPE and number each household in the numerical order they were made in.
That way it shows up on the Lot SyncTimer and the neighborhood screen. Much easier to deal with especially if there are 2 or more families of the same last name. I also rename them to the head of the household as well. For example: the Goths are 1. Mortimer Goth and so when Alex grows up he gets his own place and number.

To be honest I can't be bothered to count them on the spreadsheet, But how many total premade families are there in all game neighborhoods + bin fmailies + stealth hoods + all 3 unis we are starting to get up there in count for sure.

The reason I felt like it was slow is because think about it, if my child lifespan is 8 days - that's 8 entire full rotations of whatever the total number of households is before they'd age up - playing it in 1 day rounds as I prefer to do. Or adults into elders that'd be 32-36 full rotations. That'd probably take actual real life years to accomplish and I don't have that sort of attention span

I used to do 7 day rotations but that got really irritating once I found myself rotating through 88+ households (Uberhood). Now I just do 1 day, but even then, I feel like that's too short and will probably just not have any rotations at all because it stresses me out with the whole syncing thing, writing notes etc etc. I feel like I stress out when I tie myself to rules, so I guess I need to break my own rules. As hard as that is. Oops, sorry- kinda went off a lil' .. Sorry! :P

I usually do 3-4 day rotations, but I play the households in whatever order I feel like. Sometimes I'll notice I have one or two households far back, and then I play them up to the same point as the rest of the neighborhood. For example, most of the households have been played to Fall-2nd Day, but I have one household on Summer-4th Day, and another on Spring-5th Day. And maybe one or two households are still on the first day of fall. Whenever I notice that, I play them until all are at Fall-2nd Day, then continue on.

Some lots are so boring, I can play them only one or two days at a time, so I interleave these with the other households so that they ultimately sync up. I do my best to make every household interesting, but sometimes a sim or a household just leaves me with a blah feeling.

I plan on one day rotations most of the time in my apocalypse challenge and in the Pleasantiew Epic Challenge though a boring household will get played with me watching them play themselves and me intervening if needed.I'll start with just laternating between my first family and building at first until nore families arrive and get played.