city skylines traffic manager president edition

Definitely a personal preference, since realistic population numbers greatly change game balance (low-density housing is really low density, but high density houses a huge amount of people, which will require good transport infrastructure). Realistic Population 2 - Makes building population numbers more realistic (low-density residential will only house a single household, while high-density will house a lot more than in vanilla). This fixes that, and also adds a bunch of other stuff to make aging more realistic. This causes 'death waves', where entire neighborhoods age at the same time, and then die at the same time, causing massive population drops. Lifecycle Rebalance Revisited - In vanilla, all citizens move into your city at roughly the same age.

This mod lets special buildings actually function ingame (for example, the skyscraper can now serve as a residential or commercial building). Ploppable RICO Revisited - In vanilla, any special structure you place outside of using the zoning system (for example, large skyscrapers) have no ingame function outside of being tourist attractions. Probably not needed for light modding, but essential if you're going to be using asset mods (since those eat up RAM extremely fast)

Loading Screen Mod Revisited - Shows information about the mods being loaded, as well as the RAM usage they're causing. Harmony - A requirement for most other mods. Basically mandatory, since it'll warn you about incompatibilities or outdated mods. I'm in a similar situation (i.e., playing Skylines 1 again), and this are the more notable mods I've installed for my current run:

City skylines traffic manager president edition