Blurgh, I like sticking with my normal. ¬_¬ Playing the same family, doing the same routines just gets annoying and old... so I like new stuff~

Omg I used to ALWAYS be soo attached to my sims. I finally am moving from that. Step by step. This next step will be hard, but I think it'll finally get me out of that attachment cycle. If I can pick a heir and just stick up my middle finger to the other 4, I may actually get the game right. I think one bit of making the game fun is trying to reach the top like that. And if you do get to the top, make one of the kids poor. lolol

It's hard to let the spares go. I'm going to hate to kick my 3 out and only play 1 after I raised them from ickle babies. But alas, I must. :/

Yeah yeah. I just worry though. Because my town is going to be FULL of their offspring. I need to worry less about making sure they are all married. Because it'll be waay too oversaturated with their family if i do... yeah. I need to watch what I'm doing.

I'm playing on Epic, but I have the aging bug so only babies to children age but not teens to elders. It's... annoying!

I boosted elders right up. And I mean RIGHT up. Double that of adults. Elders are only useless if you let them be useless, they make great babysitters / cooks / collection hoarders. Also, I love them with their walking canes, they remind me of old Agnes Crumplebottom in Nightlife.

I'm with Draik, my elders live the longest.

This is what mine is set up to:

Larvae: 3 days
Toddler: 7 days
Child: 15 days
Teen: 20 days
YAdult: 32 days
Adult: 25 days
Elder: 42 days

I have it at 95 days.
Babies: 3 days
Toddlers: 8 days
Children: 8 days
Teens: 15 days
YAdults: 25 days
Adults: 25 days
Elders: 11 days

Though I think I might up elders to 16 and round it out at 100 days, once my family's elder-less.

I finally did do the patch, and I base off the 90 day life span.

I don't know what to do yet. I will think about it.

WOW You guys play short!

I just got the Sims 3 and some EP's earlier last month, and since then I couldn't wait for Generations custom aging feature. I found long to be *too short* and Epic to be *too long*

I've played for about a week with Generations and now that I'm letting the game really just play I'm adjusting as I go.

I was a hardcore micromanager with my Sims 2 game. Right down to almost every single household, although in the Sims 2 that's how it had to be. I'm finding it difficult to adjust to story progression, as a Simmer, while still being able to have control of what goes on.

I feel like I can only control maybe 4 - 5 familes tops in a hood. I'm finding myself using a piece of paper to track certain events so i don't miss them with the "families" I'm controling and switching active households often. For instance I wrote down that Thursday Micheal Swanson would become an elder, and I wanna be in that household then, or Lucy Simmy is giving birth on Tuesday, and Sam Glover turns into an adult on Monday. That kinda thing. This way I can have control of numerous families and not miss the big events.

In doing so, I realized that I needed to adjust so i could share ample time with each active family in my game that I really want to "Micromanage" the best I can.

I have it set like this currently after tweaking...

Infants 7 days
Toddlers 14 days
Children 28 days
Teens 35 days
Young Adults 49 days
Adults 63 days
Elders 49 days

It seems like alot, but when your moving around playing household to household it's really just about right so you can enjoy everything. My main concern was allow my Sims some time to enjoy young adulthood and not turn into elders when their children turn into teens.
So, 84 days for a child to become a young adult and a 112 days for the entier YA and Adult period allows me to give them some "Single time" and have more than one kid. I'm sure there will instances where the youngest kid in a family may be a teen and their parents elders and I can deal with that.

So, being the total nerd I am, I acctually came up with a little equation to figure out how many days each stage should be based on a sim preganacy of 3 days equalling 9 monthes of human time. Of course, it's not entirly accurate considering everyone has a different opinion on how long each stage of life lasts in human years, but it's pretty cool.

It ended up like this:

baby - 8
toddler - 16
child - 28
teen - 32
young adult - 96
adults - 140
elders - 40.

This was WAY too long for me, though, so I just divided it all in half for my game. It plays really nice, but I don't have generations yet (getting it friday after exams!) so we'll see.

I would probably divide those numbers in hald aswell! 70 days is a bit long for adults for my liking though.

And that's funny! I'm getting Generations after Exams end on Friday aswell!

Heehee :D Awesome. *crosses fingers* three more to go! I can't WAIT until it's over! And yeah, I assume adult and young adult years could be exchanged and such. Expecially with that whole mid-life crisis thing that is going to be in Generations, but right now I find young adult and adult are exactly the same... so I don't care lol.

You need to get WA mister!

I changed my lifespan some more (and I'm sure I'll keep changing it over time!),

Larvae: 5
Toddler: 9
Child: 15
Teen: 18
Y Adult: 36
Adult: 44
Elder: 36

I wanted to make sure that my sims were adults by the time their kids grew up, unless they had kids at a young age. Even though toddlers are still pretty useless(Seriously EA, no new toddler/toddler interactions with Generations??????) I like having enough time to potty train them, teach them to walk/talk and have them maximize the blocks and/or xylophone skill while still having enough time for my Sim parents to BREATHE!

Shit that's right xD I'm afraid to get both. I should get WA first. Bahaha. IDK!

I finally changed the lifespan last time I played, although I didn't change it much.

Larvae: 3
Toddler: 6
Child: 10
Teen: 14
Y Adult: 21
Adult: 21
Elder: 12

It's something like that anyway. I haven't actually played though (I'm building right now) so they could still change.

Wow... I feel nasty now.

Larvae : 1 day
Toddler : 6 days
Child : 11 days
Teen : 17 days
Young Adult : 35 days
Adult : 25 days
Elder : 5 days

No love for babies or elders :(.

I really need to reconsider my playing style. Whenever I start a family, the first generation usually does three things:
1) Grow a century worth of life fruits - because I hate playing by EAs time schedule *
2) Upgrade everything upgradable - because I hate stuff breaking down or getting filthy all over the place
3) Learn the painting skill and get filthy rich off the paintings (which is disgustingly easy). - because i hate watching that same fugly house for hours on end

* it's annoying the working moms MUST take their pregnancy days off and thus can't work on their career. Anyone ever sufferend three kids in a row, equalling three sim-weeks without a single working day? Goodbye 21 days, goodbye career. So I end up getting the career done first, and feeding the family life fruits so they're not too old when the kids finally do pop into their life.
Of course, as a result, the game looses it's fun pretty quickly. I've never needed elders as babysitters or whatnot, because by the time I finally have elders, my family has one or two spare young adults with too much free time on their hands as well. I hoped Generations' lifespan change would help me fix this problem, but so far no luck.

I must agree with you for different reasons, NekaraNef. I mean, I always do the same things. But, however, I'm not that upset, because I have been playing different scenarios. I hope my next Gen to be the best though. I'm going to do a whoreish sim. It's going to be a completely different idea from the bunch.

I've tried that. Actually, no expansion comes or goes without me trying it. When WA came out, I made an adventurer sim with commitment issues and a dislike for kids. It was nice, but it was over pretty quickly too, since starting family didn't suit him. When ambitions came out I made several career-only sims, but as I wanted to continue with the family beyond generation one, the same thing happened all over again. In Late Night, I made several binbats and celebutons and... what's the male version called? Anyway, I did get to design an awesome house (which I lost when I had to reinstall the game completely), but the same thing happened all over again family-wise.
But I've just had a nice story idea, so I'm going to try that out :).

That's always the problem. You need kids. But I want scandal. I want there to be multiple wives. I want there to be multiple affairs. I've never done it. But I also feel like I'll need a longer lifetime for that, so I may boost it to 180 or whatever the step after 90 is, modify it maybe.