How do you handle the rotational play hydra?

I keep aging off most of the time, but I now have too many played sims as I add a new sim or family occasionally, and often play premade sims too. I have decided to not play some of the premades I was playing. I also make ( or download ) a lot of venues/community lots so my sims have a lot of things to do. My sim households are all different. Some nuclear family, some roommates, some brother and sisters, a grandmother and granddaughter, single parents with a child, a generational family that has 4 grandparents, mother father and 2 children. And some single sims or couples. A few households have animals. Households have varying wealth levels, many have active jobs. Some households focus more on family, others on careers, some love taking vacations. Some socialize a lot. This way rotational play is less boring,

Invariably if you're playing multi-generational, either you have to stop playing some of the family branches and set them to unplayed (if you want them to keep aging), or the rotation becomes really big and you move through generations very slowly.
Either can be fun :)
And not everyone has to have kids... I'm playing a 10ish household rotation at the moment and the childless characters are some of the most fun and unique because they can be very invested in their jobs, social lives, hobbies, travel, allowing me to explore more aspects of the game than are easily available in family play.

I play with aging off, and as mightysprite said not everyone has to have kids or a partner...if you really want a more versatile experience try making different kinds of households, so you can always play what you are in the mood for, that's how I do it...so I dont have any kind of rotation schedule either, I play whichever household I want for however long I want (the freedom of agelessnes).
But ya know, that's just how I like it, might not be your style.

Yes it's just inevitable... I'm playing my generation 4 and I have ~10 households, this has been a manageable amount, but I'm dreading gen 6 etc...

A few things I do to prevent a huge amount of sims/households:
-Not everyone is having kids
-Only some have more than 1 or 2 kids
-I try to have my sims live in the same households before they start their own family. Ie. cousins going to uni together so I save time not having them go there one by one, friends living together in their young adulthood, some kids staying with their parents to take care of them... One idea for future is to move my elder sims together to "retirement home".
-intermarrying at some point, when different branches have grown apart enough

I'm determined to play with every sim, not marking them as unplayed. It means things will slow down eventually. If it get's too burdensome I might reconsider since after all I want playing to be enjoyable.

"ktalexander;d-993416" wrote:
I'm trying rotational play for the first time and I'm foreseeing a problem.

My typical play style is to start with a single Sim, have them fall in love with a townie, get married, have 1-3 kids, and then I get bored and move on to a new save.

I have set the challenge to myself to work through all of the careers and aspirations (possibly collections too...) in a single save with lots of different families. My concern is that if my Sims marry townies and have more than one child, there is a net gain in the overall number of Sims to keep track of. I don't mind some intermarrying among my families, but even if I went up to 100 Sims that I rotated through, that's still a really small community to have families overlap too much.

I have a spreadsheet (I love Excel!) for keeping track of things, including which Sims are roughly the same age/generation so I can keep the timeline consistent. Already I'm seeing the total number of Sims I control grow very quickly. How do others handle it? Do you eventually choose children to age up, move out, and mark as unplayed?

Why is it an issue if sims from your families intermarry? As long as they are not related there should be no issue with marrying sims that you play. Still, if you insist on them marrying only townie partners, then I see no issue with keeping track of them. Basically, when you play a household, everyone else is a townie, so you treat them as such. Once you get tired of them, you switch to another household and repeat the process. You can track your progress in Excel so you know where you left off with one household if you wish to return to them some day. If you play with aging off, you can do this indefinitely for as long as you like, and only age them up with cake if you like. If you worry that there could potentially be too many sims, you could allow them to die when they accidentally die and when they get old.

I have roughly 40 households in rotation with the original goal to work sims through every career, aspirations and I started each one as a single San Myshuno. I started with 4 singles. Each new Sim up to about 35 sims were all new, none were offspring. They are now spread through other worlds as they married or it felt like they may be best suited for life in...I don't know... the desert perhaps.
I have aging off and seasons expanded to two weeks. The game play through my 40 households is slow and that's on purpose. It's a growing community of sims I adore.

That said, I might spend one Sim week with one family or an entire Sim year. It really depends on what I'm enjoying at the moment. Of those 40 households, most are now married (after dating around to find the right match) and I have only just started with children.

My first kids to enter the game were through adoption and as they reached young adult, I saved just them into my library for later use in another save and deleted them from the family
(The story line being that they returned to a location in the jungle with their original family and were in Myshuno for education)

After that I've only had just 4 families with genetic kids and one more adoption in Hensford

The game play, for me, isn't rushed. I don't tend to rush into families but let my singles mingle until I really, really like the pairing and then they get married. I still have plenty of singles.
A lot of mine are also rags to riches which take longer as well. These are usually my collector sims and eco sims.

I've had two kids age into young adult that stayed in the game as they became high school sweethearts and are set to marry.... when I get back to them at some point. The rest are still chugging along in grade school (I try to max their manners, empathy, emotional control etc)

Some of my singles got evicted and are now just npc townies that I fully adore but they don't serve a challenge purpose or just because lol. They're friends with my families and still get party or festival invites without me having to take care of them anymore (of course I can always bring them into active mode if I want)

Not all of my sims will have kids. Some are loners who enjoy solitude with just their partner and they train animals, fish and garden. Some are workaholics. This is okay with me that not all have children.

My biggest tip for rotation is to take your time, add sims slowly, try not to get hung up on how long or short you've been with a household, be flexible enough to kick some into townie mode as just loveable side characters (or save them to your library for other save loads and give em the boot) Build a community all while knocking out your game challenges.
As for kids, if you're not in a hurry, the overlap really won't happen as it expands. If it's rushed, there will be more overlapping.

If you try to pair up your sims, they can have 2 kids without expanding the population. I like creating couples within the families I’m already playing so this works for me and I rarely let anyone have 3+ kids.

I don't have that many families per Rotation Save. I started my Main Save with just the Cantrell family: Parents, I each, and five children, four boys and a girl. The first four kids start off as Teens, the youngest a Change of Life surprise so he's much younger, still a Child, but does end up a Teen by the time the first four head out for Uni, together. I ended up adding the Golden family with identical triplet girls, also Teens, and used MCCC to set how many days into that age level they were so that they were just older than Brianna (the only girl) who is the fourth child in the Cantrell family. After Uni is where the true Rotation began: I had the first son, Aaron, and the third son, Joey, Jr. marry Sandi and Astrid, respectively. Erik (my Global Superstar) was already promised to Kayleigh from high school. I placed a lot for Aaron and Sandi in Henford-on-Bagley. The lot more or less next door is the 50 X 40 lot with the Wild Foxes Trait. I placed Joey and Astrid in this lot, unchanged for the most part. (Although I did add an area for a chicken coop. The price of eggs is too high for a Med Student.)
I've just moved Erik and his bride into their recently built Custom Home into the vacant 50 X 40 lot that also has the Wild Foxes Trait. Brianna and her hubby now live on the only 64 X 64 Lot overlooking Erik's new digs.

I play for one week per household. Didn't get very far with Erik, (I had a mod issue, and at one point failed to return the Mods folder inside my game, so that he lost ground as a Rock Star.) I resolved the issue, but he was only friends with Kayleigh. :) Spent much of that Sims' week getting them back to where they should be. She's just now in the family way, but if I rotate now, their baby will likely end up with a name I abhor!. So, I may resume, by changing the color of my highlighter and doing the second round of rotation from the last back to the first. (This may satisfy my need to stay with Erik's household.)

So, as you can see, I keep it small.

I keep aging off, and I have some different family dynamics to make it interesting.
I have a "Frozen" save file that I can use as an example, but I have normal save files, and other files as well that are a mix of fictional works I like, and normal Sims as well.
First, if you find the families boring after awhile, maybe set the family dynamics a bit differently. In one family there are grandparents, one daughter and her husband, and their daughter who is still single. The daughter who is married had two kids, and then I had them try for another kid in the game. Two of my families are made the same way, but without the grandparents, and one of those two families have had all girls born, and I moved out the single sister who adopted two kids of her own. The family similar to that one still has the aunt living with them, but there was a mixture of girls and a boy.
In other save files I have teens living alone, and having them go to school, and one teen I have is breeding pets on top of her school work. In another save file, I have two sisters living together, with one sister having a kid, and the other sister just adopted two kids. I also have two sim sisters that started loving in the same house, and one sister married another female sim, which I made, and the married sims moved out. The married sims have two daughters they adopted, and the single sister adopted a daughter as well.
In another family, I had a mother living with her five kids, and then moved in another Sim, who she married, and they have a biological son together. So, the family lives with their mom, stepdad, and half-brother.
Setting up different scenarios may help you not get bored with the families you are playing. It may also give you a bit of a break too, if you don't want to play that family that day.
I tend to rotate with one family, and sometimes make decisions before I play them, or on the fly, for which I feel is best for the family.

I have my 1st Legacy Challenge with my Snow White, her 7th youngest child & her daughter. I keep taking a break from this busy household cause it's alot for me. So, I go onto my only couple play for a while, then a single sim household, then one of my crazy farms with the new animals. And then I realize that my Snow White Legacy Challenge isn't as exausting as I thought.
Oh & by the way, I actually have 6 different timeline Game Saves. One Game Save for one timeline is just way too boring for me.