You gotta really want to dive into www.Simtropolis.com if you’re going to go down this road.
The absolute requirement is the Network Addon Mod. I believe I talk about it extensively in the Simcity 4 thread.
Found it:
Network Addon Mod:
That greatly increases the accuracy of traffic calculations and makes roadways provide a much more realistic amount of traffic before becoming congested. I don’t think this is cheating at all by the way… the default game’s traffic numbers do not mesh with reality whatsoever in terms of throughput, possibly because they realized their highways were nearly useless due to the inaccuracy of their travel calculations. This whole mod fixes that whole affair, as well as makes regional commuting more accurate.
Get Road Top Mass Transit as well:
Once you see how awesome it is to just plop a bus station onto the road instead of having to fit a 1x1 square station into your megalopolis… you won’t ever go back.
Also on Simtropolis EXchange is just a ton of buildings that are nice to have. For instance, smaller hospitals, police stations, schools, and railroad stations are pretty awesome for your starting town, as they give you a balance between space and effectiveness of the social service. The larger buildings are great for variety for when your city is built up.
Some of the farming mods are nice since the default game has very little variety in farms. If you like making farm regions, definitely grab those.
And there’s a post in a fairly recent thread that didn’t get much attention by Djscman:
