Best Civ 4 Mods?

[Phage]

As the thread title implies, I'm looking for the best Civilization 4 mods.

I've played Rise of Mankind + A New Dawn, and frankly I wasn't very impressed. As much as I enjoyed certain mods included (Enhanced AI/Diplomacy, Barb civilizations, Realistic Corporations, a few of the new leader traits), the sheer quantity of random shit added to the game made it perform a lot worse, and bogged it down. I understand that its more historically accurate, and some people may enjoy the sheer quantity of things you can research/build, but I found it all to be rather shallow at the end of the day.

I've played a few games with the Probably Improved Gameplay modpack installed, and that was overall an improvement.

Having said that I've tried those two out - what are your recommended mods for Civ 4?

 

[Brotherman Bill]

I don't use mods myself, but the BUG mod is a mod that only does interface improvements. It's quite popular.

 

[Seven-headed Gentleman]

As much as I enjoyed certain mods included (Enhanced AI/Diplomacy, Barb civilizations, Realistic Corporations, a few of the new leader traits), the sheer quantity of random shit added to the game made it perform a lot worse, and bogged it down.

This is the biggest problem with mods, they add tons of shit, half of it barely makes any sense, its typically poorly balanced and breaks the AI and often the whole game mechanics.

Legends of Revolutions is fairly restrained in its changes, and most of them make sense and are balanced okey. It had many features I didn't care much about but it was easy to turn those off. I also needed to tweak the revolution mechanics so that the AI wasn't collapsing all the time and some other issues, which required some .ini file tweaking. I'm picky when it comes to strategy games, I wouldn't recommend it out of the box - I found it very good when I tweaked it to my liking, though.

Rhye's and Fall of Civilization is fun without any tweaking. The AI in it is pretty docile but its still good fun for a while to complete the Civ-specific goals or some challenge games. Very different game experience to the stock game, and mirrors the real history somewhat well considering how abstract the game system is.