Is Cities: Skylines Good Without Mods?

In short – yes, absolutely. With over 6 million copies sold, Cities: Skylines offers an exceptionally robust city-building simulation right out of the box. You‘ll easily spend dozens if not hundreds of hours constructing your ideal metropolis just using the base game.

However, the majority of dedicated Cities: Skylines players choose to play modded. The over 190,000 mods available, with over 570 million downloads, transform the possibilities. After trying many of the most popular mods that fix AI issues, expand customization, and enhance realism, playing vanilla feels boring in comparison.

The Strengths of Vanilla Gameplay

Even without any mods enabled, Cities: Skylines stands out as one of the greatest city builder games ever made. The gameplay is praised as deeper and more intuitive than wall-to-wall traffic jams that plagued past SimCity titles. Cities has an 81% positive rating among over 450,000 Steam reviews for good reason.

Creating specialized industrial districts connected by cargo rail, designing picturesque canal-side neighborhoods, and fine-tuning education budgets to boost tech level provide immense freedom. Seeing high-density skyscrapers organically grow in thriving downtown centers never gets old. The responsive day/night cycle with crippling rush hour traffic demonstrates complex underlying simulation.

However, as most players discover sooner or later, the base game has notorious weaknesses too. The most infamous being road infrastructure and traffic management.

Must-Have Mods for Traffic and Infrastructure

Without mods, Cities: Skylines traffic systems feel greatly lacking compared to the depth of the rest of the simulation. Congestion inevitably throttles growing cities as vehicle limitation rear their ugly heads.

The single most popular Cities mod seeks to resolve these shortcomings. With over 1 million subscribers on Steam, Traffic Manager: President Edition is considered essential by players seeking more control. Traffic Manager allows fine-grained junction and traffic light management, custom vehicle restrictions, adaptive lane changing logic and much more.

Other mods like Ploppable RICO and Move It take customization even further by allowing adjustment of any building or object. Want to create a perfect grid of houses? Customize parks with precision? Place props exactly where you want them? Mods make it possible.

The Verdict: Vanilla vs. Modded

Playing modded takes the Cities: Skylines experience to another level. A survey on the official subreddit found 94% of participants used mods. Over half reported spending more time browsing the Steam Workshop for assets than actually building cities!

However, mods certainly aren‘t necessary to enjoy the game. Some players prefer to avoid spending hours testing different mod combinations to get their game "just right". Others want to experience the base game progression and earn achievements organically first.

While both formats have their merits, see how average playtimes differ based on mods:

(Statistics sourced from HowLongToBeat.com)

Personally, after sinking over 200 hours into modded Cities myself, I could never go back to playing vanilla. The added layers of customization and realism make city-building vastly more rewarding. Yet new players should feel empowered to stick to base-game mechanics for their first metropolises. Either way, Cities: Skylines stands tall among the greats of the genre.