To those who will be starting this game, like has been said, even without DLCs it's the best city builder on the market. I have been addicted to it for years, now.
But even if you're not going to purchase DLCs, I'd recomend visiting the Workshop and download three mods in particular:
1)Citizen Lifecycle Rebalance - it randomizes life span of citizens, saving you a headache when you have whole blocks or zones dying at once (because you built them at once, naturally)
2)Traffic Manager: President Edition - Traffic is the biggest issue in any marginally large city. Being able to manage lanes is a crucial skill for keeping it in check
3) Move It - For those who want everything neat and tidy, being able to drag buildings and roads around and rearrange them without the need of rebuilding whole areas is awesome.
Totally agree, those are three essential mods. In addition I
also use these mods:
IMHO essential
Automatic Bulldoze v2 - automatically destroys abandoned and burned buildings.
Network Extensions 2 - A super helpful stock of additional road types.
Fine Road Anarchy - This mod adds additional options when building road.
Fine Road Tool - This mod allow you to set finer road elevation steps and also provides different building modes.
Nice to have
Extra Landscaping Tools - Allows to place natural resources in-game + provides configurable tree brush&pencil, terraform and water tool. This mod was previously called ' In-game Natural Resources Tool '
Precision Engineering - augments Cities: Skylines by adding angle snapping, guidelines and additional information to assist you when building roads, train lines, pipes and power lines.
Advanced Vehicle Options AVO - This mod let you customize various options about vehicles E.G. Bus and metro passenger capacity, vehicle speeds.
Really not necessary, but great to have
Roundabout Builder - This mod automatically builds roundabouts for you. It clears the area of the roads and snaps them onto the roundabout. Road anarchy* is recommended.
Ultimate Eyecandy v1.5.2 - Ultimate Eyecandy allows you to: - change the Time of Day; - change the sun's latitude and longitude; - change sun and ambient light intensity; - enable rain, snow and fog instantly and change the intensity; - change LUT's in-game, so no more having to exit to the game's Options Panel; - save all your settings as a preset; - overwrite existing and delete unwanted presets; - automatically load the last used preset when restarting the game.
Loading Screen Mod - Share textures / materials / meshes: Assets from the same author often contain the same resources but the game does not care and loads identical copies. These options replace such copies by references, saving RAM. The mod contains an optimized custom asset loader that is significantly faster than the built-in loader.
Useful assets:
P and B pavement - super nice and super popular combined pedestrian and cycle pathway.
East euro powerline beta - I small footprint alternative to the in-game power lines.
Hedges - er, hedges. Straight or curved.
HxO Water Treatment Tank - A really helpful water source.
Snakeway Highway Exit - A compact highway intersection
All of these seem to be working fine with the recent update.
