I'm sure I'm the only idiot trying to do this, but in case there are others who made dumb mistake like me and thinking it's the faulty patch. FYI, this is my computer spec.
8GB Memory, Intel-Core i7-3612QM CPU @ 2.10GHz, AMD Radeon HD 7730M with 2 GB of RAM.
I thought it was a patch glitch but I'm starting to think this is the actual reason for my wasted hours trying to figure out what was causing excessive lagging and saving errors. I have yet to have expansions, but I wanted to populate Sunset Valley as much as I can to make the long-term game more interesting. If I was God from the time of Genesis or Deus Ex Machina from the Matrix, this would've been an interesting setback lol.
My first attempt was to manually create sim households and fill the empty houses. This was a great start, but I could only fit maybe 10 more households. But another unexpected problem arose. If the estate is worth 40k+, the designated family disappeared as I was playing the game. Either they played unemployment till the bitter end, or they tried getting a job but their start-up pay can't keep up with the mortgages. So they bailed. Not sure if they disappeared or they just became homeless, but this was an unacceptable result.
Hence, cheats were used. I would switch to the different family I created through town editor, and use cheats to manually give them middle-high position jobs. Unfortunately, it was not that easy as the sims could potentially get fired at later point if they lacked the skills. Hence, I had to spend a little more time investments to raise their skills as there are no cheats that directly affects the skill levels. My strategy is to go to classes in daytime ASAP, and buy all the skill books needed and make them read day and night by controlling their statuses. (Ex. constantly raising up the hunger, hygiene, social, energy, etc). Typically the skills I would focus on are the ones needed for their designated jobs, but I would at least bring the skill level upto 3 for cooking for at least one of the family member (cause sims don't eat out all the time)
especially if they had children. I force-aged babies for middle-sized families as they are very time-consuming and nearly impossible for two working parents. But if there were enough adults who can work to pay the bills and have some left to leech on the house, I tolerated babies.
And this lengthy step went on and on for all households with middle-high class houses. I tried to emphasize families with children because of the anticipated demographic crisis. My original sim household had teenagers, and it would suck if there were only handful of their peers while the older generations dominated the town. (A real case in many real countries, especially in Far East Asia and many parts of Europe. Thank God we have so many immigrants to keep the demographics in check... sorta) I also tried to balance out the male-female ratio, though I think it ended up with more females more or less. (My bias, unfortunately. My perversion knows no bounds) I often opted out this process for starter houses ( <20k) as they usually didn't end up being evicted. I dosed them with some additional money as an insurance by using familyfunds cheat.
And when God said it was good after the creation, I said ***** this. It was still not large enough, particularly when I wanted to build more community lots to accommodate store pack goods. (Bistro, Greenhouse, casino, etc) I also thought maybe I could build more typical rabbit hole community lots (deep-fried restaurants albeit with different names and designs, different business buildings, etc), to give the impression that there were no job market saturation. (Because we all know how *****ed up it can be in real life lol).
It is very difficult, if not impossible to put too many sims population in a map mainly due to terrain difficulties. (Trees from non-existing lot areas or rough terrains) Even if you managed to place a lot, you would manually have to flatten the lot and build manually on top of the lot (which is very time-consuming. I wanted it done in days, not weeks) Flattening the land exactly for sims to move from the lot to other areas can get tricky in some areas)
Fortunately, I ran into a near-exact copy of Sunset Valley map (named Sunset Valley2) where the terrains for the most part are flattened to the core. The map was large enough to accommodate 228 sims easily. (And when I say easily, I mean easily. I built nearly all store pack community lots, nearly double the number of residential community lots as shown in original Sunset Valley, and still had enough spaces to build perhaps another 100 - 200 sims depending on how well I can micromanage the spaces. To save my time from manually creating a lot of sim families, I copied the household + residential house from Sunset Valley and Lucky Palms + all the newly created sims I made + the houses. Newly created sim households really emphasized the large family concept to counter the demographic crisis. (2+ children per family)
Then the horror began. The lagging became so serious that it was impossible to create new sims before the system crashed almost immediately. Even in gameplay, it was lagging and often froze in 5 - 10 minutes with my computer specs. I blamed the patch, but I played the other normal map with standard population, and the game ran smoothly. Why it took me 2 days to figure out that my twisted agenda, not patch 1.63, was responsible for the madness is beyond me. To be fair though, I did find a lot of googled results in regards to complaints about patch 1.63.
