I've finally managed to purchase every up to and including Late Night (which I am currently really enjoying). But all of a sudden my game files are beginning to get lag spikes, really bad ones.
The last time this had happened, I had just purchased World Adventures and didn't know about removing certain .PACKAGE files. Once I learned how, the game ran smoothly.
I have everything installed from Late Night and back, and I'm actually wondering if uninstalling WA might calm the lag down? Or is there something else I can do so that my Sims don't have to sacrifice travelling?
Also, I've looked for weeks for the answer for this, but it seems I cannot get a straight one: Must I purchase every single expansion and stuff pack for them to work properly, or am I able to simply obtain the ones I know I want? I do know that if I intend to buy an earlier one, I need to uninstall everything that comes after it so that it works without possibly screwing something up. I just wanted to know so that it would save me a bit of time (and money, lol).
To your last question - you don't need every single EP or SP to play, or for anything to work properly. If EA did this, it would cause outrage. I own every EP and SP to date except KPST and 70's, 80's and 90's Stuff, with only a few minor bugs (and one large one, but I think that's bad CC). You don't need to uninstall everything to install an earlier EP (so, for your example, if you bought Ambitions, you wouldn't have to uninstall and reinstall). You should only do that if you're planning to uninstall and reinstall. If you want, you could install WA, HELS, OLS, SN, Seasons, AMB, GEN, LN, PETS in that order and you'd be OK. If you were planning to uninstall anyway, yes you should install them in order.
To your first question - do you use Mods? I would recommend removing the travel.db file (backing it up first, it is a fairly important file) and seeing if that makes a difference. Is this lag in Bridgeport?