How do you handle the rotational play hydra?

"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.