Sims 3 town too large- constant crashing, lagging solutions

[Deirdre]

Hello, so I've got a sim 3 town that is way too overloaded with sims, partly my fault partly story progression's fault. There is over 400 live sims on the game, and I found out from nrass master control over 1000 that have lived in my town. I have tried to transfer sims to my other towns which need sims, but this crashes the game. I am hesitant to delete families as I need them for my other towns. Any quick way to clean up towns with excess sims and to make the game run faster? Such as the culling of townies whilst being able to transfer other families without the game crashing? Getting desperate here, my game takes a night to load, and hours and hours to save. Thanks.

[Candyd]

Use Porter to move your families without losing relationships.
Use total annihilation in Master Controller to delete townies in excess. You can do it to several sims at a time I think.
If you don't have Overwatch, install it. It will help cleaning up your game.

[MrsFlynn]

The tips in both these posts are similar, but may help with the crashing and lag.

General Crashing Issues
http://www.carls-sims-4-guide.com/forum/index.php?topic=20732.msg425173#msg425173

Tips to Relieve Lag and Freezing
http://www.carls-sims-4-guide.com/forum/index.php?topic=24709.msg422978#msg422978

Also removing some (maybe half) of the families from your game may be the best bet. As that's a lot for the game to handle. It may just not be able to handle over 400 families in-game. I don't think Sims 3 was made to have that many families in one game-save.