Question for people who enjoy legacy-type gameplay

As NorthDakota said, I also have the MCCC mod. However, while I do have kids move out and live their own lives, I do check in on them to see how they are doing. I do not interfere unless I have to for some reason.

You can pick an heir a few different ways. You can go with the traditional "first born" selection, you can go with the "first boy" selection, you can do with democracy, have other people cast a vote for the heir, you can have two sims fight (called strength) to be the heir method, or you could do a completely random roll for the heir. It is situational. Depends on what you want to see from your legacy gameplay.

I'm doing a decades challenge, where you start in the 1890s and work your way up to the 2010s. I'm in 1910s right now, so naturally, the heir is the first born boy given those times. It will change as I get into more modern times. So it really depends on how you want to play your legacy, and there's really no wrong way to do it. The legacy challenge website lists all the various ways you can choose an heir!

I've used mccc and it's nice but it's also gotten my sims into trouble childhood sweethearts raised their triplets to adulthood then while cleaning up some extra sims doing makeovers just cause I found he had some children with sims I didn't even know he had met. Fun times, though without mccc I usually pick whichever is my favorite. Whichever I played the most with while they were growing up sometimes their siblings get married and I go make sure they have children and get a new look or I have rotation and just give them all however much attention I think they need. Then of course I just leave them with their parents and focus only on the favorite it depends on what I want to do.

I also use the MC_Command center mod ( love it ), and I have done a few things.

If I have the room in the household, I generally marry off the spare heirs before kicking them out. I will set them both up with jobs and have the female pregnant before the kickout, again if room permits in the household.

Sometimes, I do kick them out as a single ... and if they get married, they do and if they don't they don't. Not 100% get married in rl anyways, some are happy single.

I create different storylines for every single one of my Sims. One Sim may lead a happily married life with a successful job and a bunch of kids, while another may lead the same life but single. Or there may be a Sim who has no luck in love, suffers through divorce or death, and is entirely unsuccessful. It all varies in the end.

I love to play with legacy challanges.

I have the MCC mod, so I can send them off and they just live their own lives with their own families. Most of the time I prefer to make/find a good Sim for the non Heir's of my family. But after that I just leave them be. Just pick your favorite child and send the rest to go live their lives.

I made lives and homes for each offspring. It was exhausting eventually. But I rotated around playing each household. I made clubs for each generation's siblings and cousins to more easily get them together (had a mod to add more members to a club). I don't think I could ever choose just one child to branch off with. The only way I could do that is if I made sure my couples only had 1 child then I wouldn't have to make a choice. XD1

You play like me, Franc! I play legacy on long lifespan, too. The only mod I use is Risky Woohoo. So I don't have anything populating the world for me -just the rare unexpected pregnancy in the household I'm playing.

I pick a "main" character for the next line of succession and focus on them. I'm doing something special with genetics in my legacy so the main has to come from a specific bloodline. Basically, my last main's bloodline (though my rules are a little tighter than that); so it's usually an option between only two children. I don't usually have a ton of kids so it's seldom a hard choice. I just select the one I find myself gravitating towards playing the most.

For the extra children and cousins and cousins' cousins. I move them out into their own lot if it's not already separate from my main household. Even without MCC Commander, your sims will often make relationships or gain friendship levels on their own. Especially if they're in a club.

I play my main household and around the time I'm expecting my next generation or planning on having kids soon, I go and pop into all the relative's households. Then, I marry them to the person they have the highest relationship status with. Sometimes this is just a little green stub, other times I've had them already have max relationship and romance status with someone, but they just weren't dating. Either way, I nudge them along into a romantic relationship with that person. I then play out a little wedding scene for them and have them try for a baby. Then, I exit the household. The wives go through the pregnancies themselves and the game auto-names the baby and generates traits for them as they grow up. Effectively populating the next generation for me.

I like throwing weddings, so I feel it's very little effort on my part -and I always invite my main to the wedding! So I still get pictures of my main focus. In fact, it's funny to see how they act when I'm not controlling them. And relative's romances themselves can often be as brief as a single day. So, I don't feel like I'm wasting too much time doing this at the moment. Plus, it lets me skip a lot of the "baby in a basket for two weeks" that I'm not always interested in playing in my main household.

Sometimes you'll pop in on that ONE GUY who is such a shut in that in his entire life he never made a single friend and knows like two people; both of them children. In those cases, I spend a little more time on them and go hunt down a random passerby from the street. But, I imagine, once there starts getting too many cousins for me to handle and I run into the shut-in. I'll just let that branch of the family tree die out so I can reduce the numbers once again into a manageable amount.

That's how I play it, at least :3

@Chazzzy well there are a ton of options. Basically you would want to enable the marriage and population mods. What have you been using MCC for, if not the StoryProgression?
I had to play around a little with the mod to have it suit my playstyle. Decide which day the mod is going into action, which Sims to marry automatically (played/unplayed/homeless). There is so much to decide and sometimes it doesn't work out as expected. Maybe look into the Mod-Section of the forum when you have some questions. There are some really helpful simmers who know everything about this mod.

I have a legacy of 15 generations, and this is my second legacy. The other one only had 7 generations I think but that's unimportant. I always have lots of kids because I love making huge family trees on familyecho.com and also because I love toddlers in The Sims 4.

When I choose the heir to move on to I usually go with the prettiest one... Or just the one I like the most for whatever reason. It really doesn't matter. With the others I usually move them out and then give them a spouse via the "edit household" button in manage world view. Sometimes I give them one or two kids. I do have MCCC commander that lets the sims you don't play have families on their own but I do tend to create spouses and children manually. Sometimes I choose to leave them with the old parents and pretend they're taking care of them.

If I love the current generation's parents then I make them have less kids so that he household will be smaller and they'll have a closer relationship. Then I have the heir stay with the parents until they die of old age to, well, make the bonds and family ties more realistic. Creating a story, kind of. What makes TS4 especially fun for me is having a kid and then imagining what they're gonna be like when they grow up and what their own kids will be like. What kind of new houses I'll build for them. Always moving forward.

One thing I do is have one child of the parents in every generation take a picture of the mom and dad. Just one picture where they stand next to each other and look into the camera, and then save it as the biggest format and frame it. I do this with every new generation so there's one picture of every parent dating back to the beginning. It's just a fun thing to do and look at when you line them all up in order on a long, long wall.