Essential mods for SimCity 4?

With the expertly engineered and thoroughly fun trainwreck of the newest SimCity, it got me itching to dust off SC4.

So, which mods would you say are absolutely critical these days (bug fixes, massive improvements, etc)?

 

I'm very much an apprentice when it comes to SC4 modding. The only one I've tried is the NAM, network add-on mod.

It does enough good things with traffic to be worthwhile, and has some features I haven't played that much with like rail that go on top of roads etc. It doesn't completely remedy the weird always-shortest-route sim traffic behaviour, but it does increase the capacity of roads and makes sims take parallell roads when some are too clogged, I think.

 

The only essential modification you should need to do is have the game run with only one CPU core. Simcity 4 crashes quite a bit with multiple cores running. People recommend disabling the intro too. To do this, make a shortcut to your .exe and in the Target, after the quotations around the path, insert "-introff -CPUCount:1". (no quotes)

However, Network Addon Mods are excellent

 

Thanks, gents. NAM it is.
I also found a rather good site with links to popular mods and guides, in case someone else wonders about this topic: https://sites.google.com/site/sc4modds/

I've actually found that the game runs much smoother without that variable and didn't crash once, yet. Probably depends on the system. Or they'd gotten around to fix it at some point.

 

NAM
+
Opera House Bugfix

are the two absolute essentials. Everything else is personal preference.

 

I know there are some quality looking terrain mods. http://www.wiki.sc4devotion.com/index.php?title=List_of_Terrain_Related_Plugins

 

Guys, can anyone tell me which patches I'm supposed to install?

EDIT: I saw three patches at the Patches' Scrolls: NA, EU and KKTC. I'm playing a multi-language version, in Portuguese. Should I install the EU version?

 

I just don't have the patience for sims any more. Not just city sims, but also flight sims, space sims, etc. They just don't excite me like they did when I was a kid.

 

Actually that depends on if you have Intel or AMD CPU. With Intel you can have multiple cores enabled. AMD needs some fix because applications dislike when they receive negative elapsed microseconds.

 

Other question I wanted to ask: Is there somesort of "Mod Toogler" so we can choose the mod we want to play with and mix compatible mods we want to play together?