What to use to improve game play?
So I don't have any mods or CC in my game. I would like to get some mods that improve my game play but I do not want them to ruin my core script of the game. What are some mods I can use to have fun ...
Forum Discussion
For some (somewhat) informed perspective on this, if you're being super cautious, then cutting out all script mods might help avoid game-breaking stuff. But, game-breaking stuff is also pretty rare to my understanding, and in my experience, and sometimes it comes from Maxis itself. Like the Lin-Z relationship bug that was briefly in existence.
So best practice if you want to avoid game-breaking bugs is probably to accept that it may happen sometimes no matter how cautious you are and keep regular backups of things you care about: Saves, Tray folder contents, etc.
Some script mods do some fairly deep changes, but many of them do relatively simple stuff. Usually the worst a bad script is going to do is trigger a LastException error, which usually just means something happened that is considered unintended or undefined behavior and the game caught it. For the most part, undefined behavior is not as creepy as it sounds. Many errors will just result in the attempted script failing to work as intended, with nothing notable happening apart from that. But again, backups are the best defense against game corruption because there is no 100% defense against it.
This is a game with so many possibilities and combinations of possibilities that can occur, it's near impossible for someone to offer a reliable guarantee that nothing horrible could go wrong. However, I can say with confidence that in the majority of cases, if you grab a mod from trusted sources and it's up to date with the latest patch, it's highly unlikely that anything game-breaking is going to go wrong. And for those cases where it does, backups is going to save you where avoiding some types of mods may not.
That being said, I totally understand the sentiment of wanting to avoid script mods. There's a lot more possibility in them for things going horribly wrong than with tunings. But so far, I've not heard of it being an issue that often for this game with this modding community. We have a pretty strong community of scripters who have a pretty good understanding of the pitfalls of various aspects of it and the game code is insulated pretty well, to where an error in one part doesn't necessarily mean an error in another part.
So best practice if you want to avoid game-breaking bugs is probably to accept that it may happen sometimes no matter how cautious you are and keep regular backups of things you care about: Saves, Tray folder contents, etc.
Some script mods do some fairly deep changes, but many of them do relatively simple stuff. Usually the worst a bad script is going to do is trigger a LastException error, which usually just means something happened that is considered unintended or undefined behavior and the game caught it. For the most part, undefined behavior is not as creepy as it sounds. Many errors will just result in the attempted script failing to work as intended, with nothing notable happening apart from that. But again, backups are the best defense against game corruption because there is no 100% defense against it.
This is a game with so many possibilities and combinations of possibilities that can occur, it's near impossible for someone to offer a reliable guarantee that nothing horrible could go wrong. However, I can say with confidence that in the majority of cases, if you grab a mod from trusted sources and it's up to date with the latest patch, it's highly unlikely that anything game-breaking is going to go wrong. And for those cases where it does, backups is going to save you where avoiding some types of mods may not.
That being said, I totally understand the sentiment of wanting to avoid script mods. There's a lot more possibility in them for things going horribly wrong than with tunings. But so far, I've not heard of it being an issue that often for this game with this modding community. We have a pretty strong community of scripters who have a pretty good understanding of the pitfalls of various aspects of it and the game code is insulated pretty well, to where an error in one part doesn't necessarily mean an error in another part.
