Gameplay and Aging

My gameplay has changed a lot in the last year.

Old gameplay:
Originally I played in 1 week rounds so that I could easily keep track of which families I'd played. Aging was the maxis default and I played each house from Sunday evening to sometime Sunday after 6pm before moving on to the next house. Anyone that aged up to adult and moved out at the beginning of the week (before Wednesday) was added to that round's list of yet to be played households and anyone that aged up at the end of the week was added to the list of already played houses. This threw some ages off at times and made for a very long play schedule. When I implemented a rule that everyone had to go to University it fixed some of the confusion because I simply added the graduates to the next round after they graduated, but I also just took everyone that was going to age to adult during that round's week (so, all teens with 7-1 day left) and sent them at once. Which caused all Sims in that 7 year span to be the same age.

New gameplay:
The round that I will begin soon will be my first round using a two-year system based a lot on Sullivan's system. This way I can play with aging off and manually age my Sims. I'll be able to play in each house as long as I want without worrying about them losing sync with the rest of my town which was always my concern. Playing for only two days would allow for quicker rounds but wouldn't give quite enough time to actually accomplish anything. This way they only age two years each round but I can play them as long as I'd like (/duh, *should have thought of this earlier*).





The infant stage will last 1 year. The toddler stage will be 1-4, children will be 5-11, teens will be 12-18 and the adult stage will be 19-60.

I currently have 49 families, so, divided among 24 months, we end up with 2-3 per month. To accommodate this I've decided that it would work best to do 2 regular updates each month and then the extra updates (only 1 at this point) will be for special holidays. So, in this case the extra update will probably Halloween or Christmas. In rounds where I have a few more above the basic 48 households I will add Thanksgiving, Fourth of July, Easter, Valentine's Day, and whatever other random Holiday that might be interesting to play out. For the University updates I am debating doing them once or twice a year. Right now I have 7 University households. The first update will be in September (right after classes start) and the second, if I decide to go that route, will be in April or May (right before graduation). Hopefully this will be my last year with such a large number of students. There is one household of Seniors, and then two each of Juniors, Sophomores, and Freshmen.

The three schools in the hood are Dieudonné Elementary School (K-4), Dieudonné Middle School (5-8), and Dieudonné High School (9-12). These will also probably get two updates a year, possibly November and March? The schools will be consolidated as the population evens out. I hope to eventually have an Elementary School and a High School with no need for the Middle School which mixes children (grades 5 and 6) and teens (grades 7 and 8).

Which brings me to the last important information. After having so many children in each family and my population expanding so quickly, there is now a two child rule. Of course, this doesn't mean that I will always follow it, but the goal is to have most families only having one or two children so it is the rare family that is allowed three or more and those families won't overpopulate the town too quickly.