Organizing rotational gameplay in TS3?

Hello :smile: . I play rotationally, though not with the same goal as you seem to want it. I usually play a handful of families extensively, a few rarely, and a lot of households pretty much never, except to fix something I can't fix without playing them (which is even rarer, given you can even build their houses while playing a different family). I make use of nearly the whole NRaas suite of mods, plus a lot of others. I use a longer lifespan and usually let time run, with very few exceptions, like if I have simultaneous birthdays in lots of families. The lifespan is adapted to my style of play, which means if it gets boring with one family, I move to the next and usually get through every family I want to without any important event slipping through. I'm not overly concerned if I miss an age-up somewhere, given you can change everything after the fact to your liking (or reload if you really wanted to see something).

That said, I generally have an eye on the whole town via NRaas Tagger and the SP messages, and I usually know where everyone is and what they are doing at any time. Given you can focus on any sim in town and directly give commands via tags (or the portrait panel), you don't even have to make them active to achieve lots of things. You can watch them while you play a different family. Honestly, I find that much more convenient than the TS4 way, where everyone else was either frozen and/or invisible.

I assume you are familiar with the basics of rotational play in TS3, but here's the link for lots of good suggestions:
https://www.nraas.net/community/Story-Progression-Rotational-Caste-Settings

If you want to see how a detailed setup is possible, you can look at the settings of Sarah_Sims as example:
https://simsarahsarah.tumblr.com/howiplay

I'm aware of the point that you use Awesomemod, but I have no idea about that one, so I can only tell you what I use and know.

You may (hopefully) be able to relieve some of the unwanted performance impact that NRaas SP has on your game by adjusting some of its settings if you are willing to give it another try. Many of us find it works just fine, and we prefer it anyway, when the overall speed of progression is Slow rather than Normal. The speeds of the individual SP Managers can also be adjusted further or independently of each other -- the SP Careers manager is the one that tends to have the biggest performance impact, depending on the resident population of each world and some other factors. Having lots of castes or caste settings alone is not known to have much or any impact on performance as long as these settings aren't all conflicting with each other, and even then one tends to get unwanted or random results rather than a slower game. The caste settings, to the game in its own language after all, are really just a massive set of 1s and 0s (on's and off's) for each individual option and the level at which each is set.

Not related to SP directly, but I would have to say that in addition to Overwatch, NRaas ErrorTrap, Register, Traffic, to an extent GoHere, and MasterController for its Reset Everything command on City Hall are vital to many of us to keep our games running smoothly over time. We should add Traveler to that list if any form of world travel is to be used.

My sense is that there are many more players who use NRaas SP and are available to help to achieve what you want with Rotational Play than those who use AwesomeMod alone, or at least we seem to be more vocal about it in the forums where we hang out. :)

And of course AwesomeMod alone has far fewer customization options available to try when one doesn't get exactly the effect one was hoping for.

@Turjan Thank you. I've noticed that using NRAAS SP and Caste settings seems to slow my game dramatically so, yes, I'm avoiding using it. Probably had to mention this in original post.

I like Sarah Sims simblr a lot and use tones of her ideas in my save. Probably I just need to embrace the idea of switching between the families freely instead of set intervals and go with a very long lifespan...

One thing to add: If you start SP for the first time in a town, the first one or two in-game days will be rough, as the mod has to go through every single item and sim and initially apply everything it is supposed to do. This can involve a few longer freezes. After a couple of days, the mod should be through with its setup, and everything runs much more smoothly. So, if you want to try it ever again, keep that in mind and give it some time in the beginning.

Also, I'd leave out all the personality modules in the beginning. Those can be quite a drag on the game if the town is full of sims.

Thank you very much for all the suggestions! I'll give SP a second try I think.