Requiem Overhaul for Skyrim completely revamps how the game is played, you need to mostly pick an archetype, casting spells with armor on institutes a huge penalty in mana cost etc unless you pick talents for it that aren't available until late game, damage has been tuned way up for everyone so you have to ideally dodge most attacks and enemies drop loot that makes sense like their heart and some claws instead of finding 50 coins and a mace on a wolf.

Just installed it yesterday but the Multiverse mod for FTL basically turns it into a sequel and improves every aspect of the game. Go from 10 playable ships to around 100, have to actually consider choices instead of "I will blow everyone up for marginally more resources" and just an overall more Star Trek vibe with races having different factions etc.

The Living Desert for New Vegas, because I could follow those guys around and see what they do forever. It's so cool to give the game more organic interactions.

Fall from Heaven for Civilization 4 is a fantastic overhaul mod that turns it into a fantasy world with interesting factions and characters and mechanics.

Last time I got a copyright letter was for torrenting Civ 4 in 2015 without a VPN. The game came out in 2005.

There are too many good ones. Enderal, the entire Viva New Vegas modding guide, Tale of Two Wastelands, it's truly difficult to nail one down as my favorite. I play Bethesda games entitely modded these days and wouldn't have it any other way.

too many to list.

modding is praxis

nobody mentioned Long War so i'm mentioning Long War. ever think 30-40hrs wasn't enough for your XCom 2 campaign? ever thought it was kind of immersion breaking that these incredibly well equipped aliens couldn't swat down a ridiculously high-profile smash-n-grab resistance op foolishly headquartered in a single hovercarrier? Long War turns your chaotic gunfight missions into guerilla insertion and extraction missions, broadens your conflict from a months-long to a years-long endeavor, makes it MUCH harder to eject the aliens from earth while simultaneously making it a much slower process for the aliens to complete their doomsday plan, really makes you undertake missions on a global scale as opposed to the one- or two-region conflict that the base game tends to become, extends the available troop roster while forcing you to actually use more than an elite core of troops (because you have way more bases to cover), extends the max troops on a mission from 6 to 12 while allowing the aliens to field a LOT more forces (think 40+ enemies in some situations), making for some really HUGE fights near the endgame. really a spectacular rebuild mod, two thumbs up.

another really good mod for Stellaris is the Star Trek: New Horizons mod, a total conversion mod that was so good paradox got the envy and put out Star Trek: Infinite, which is just their own stab at a total conversion mod for Stellaris except they expect you pay 30 bucks for it, plus DLCs. New Horizons very worth it, give it a shot if you like trek and already have Stellaris

I really liked the RTS mods for the modern Fallout games. Building towns and collecting resources is my SHIT

DFhack probably. The best mods in my opinion are the lightweight ones that should be base game.

There's a mod for New Vegas that adds item descriptions to any item that you can pick up and they made up lore for all of them and a lot of the unique items have jokes in their descriptions. It really adds a lot to the game

Star Wars Empire at War is a pretty mid rts with great mods:

Medieval 2 Total War was the last total war game that's workable without dev tools. modders have been trying to recreate the ability to change the map on later titles for 15 years lmao

spoiler

Third Age Total War you've already heard of it, everyone has. before we had Fantasy Warhammer sucking up all the development at the Creative Assembly, we had Third Age sucking up all the oxygen on the total war forums. it's so old and was so extensive when it dropped that it's easier to think of as a base-game in its own right, for which there are dozens of sub-mods. most major is probably Divide and Conquer, which makes the map a lot busier and exciting in all the corners. its also gone through so many developers that anyone who's played it a long time probably has a couple of faction designs they miss (white-armored samurai variags squeaky's dorwinion ) then there's Last Alliance, which takes you to that 5 minute prologue bit at the beginning of Fellowship and goes pretty buck-wild with the faction designs that didn't appear directly in that movie sequence---bronze age coded wildmen & rhun. it's pretty fun but suffers from similar problems as og Third Age regarding boring parts of the map. there's a few more big projects but i wouldn't call them totally playable (Silmarillion, Reforged)

Stainless Steel is a similar heavyweight, its last mainline release is still a good expanded version of the original game that doesn't depart too far. but my god the submods & things built upon it. i don't even think you can list them there's so many. Bulat Steel is a major russian one that is semi-famous for extremely detailed units, they also helpfully install the entire original game for with it

Tsardoms is the most finished and historically accurate mod out there, i'm an enormous fan, it's about the rise of the ottomans, can't recommend it enough. Balkans, Anatolia, Italy they even have 2 separate releases, one for experiencing the precipitous decline of the roman empire in the 1340s and one for dealing with an already gargantuan Ottoman empire from its peripheries in 1450s

Broken Crescent is old and not too historically locked in, which is a shame because its the best mod with a focus of western asia, one copes with it by adding in units from other mods so it looks more up to date

some would say EBII is super historical and fun too and to that i say EB projects version of 'fun' is punishing players for having it but fr it doesn't run very good, its map is full of empty space like RTW and all the shit they put in to make it hardcore and historically accurate just makes it a slow slog

as for Bethesda game mods, i've played a lot and certainly have opinions but i'm still on the bespoke build mindset so any 'favorite' or recommendation comes from a place of "for what" because i don't think you need or should have mods for things you aren't going to be doing. there's much mods for Fallout 4's settlements but if you aren't going to be playing wasteland sim city there's no point, yknow? every mod besides patches/bugfixes is optional. besides big naked booba ofc

I like all of Drayano's Pokemon ROM hacks. Essentially just puts all of the content you would want from a Pokemon game into it. All Pokemon catchable, more challenging trainers but not overwhelmingly so, side content the works. Storm Silver is probably the best one. If you've thought about replaying a Pokemon game, play the Drayano version of it

The mod in Morrowind which makes it so that your weapons actually hit things for sure, it makes the game playable.

But like actually? Kaiserreich comes to mind for Hoi4, Calamity for Terraria fits in really well with the base game and Legacy of the Dragonborn was the last Skyrim mod I built a playthrough around

Hm. Stalker Anomaly is up there, if it counts. I played the originals to death and Anomaly brought GAMMA eventually, which is probably the most up-to-date and approachable way to play stalker nowadays.

My favourite has to be Vanilla Psycasts Expanded, though, for Rimworld. The vanilla psycasts are very meh, and only the player is able to use them. VPE adds new psycasts and reorganices the ones already available and the new ones into new trees, allows enemies to use those same psycasts, and allows you to set certain psycasts to be used when ready. Makes it a bit less micromanagy, and gives you a chance to give more personality to each of your pawns if you're into that kind of thing.

Regarding Stellaris mods, Gigastructural Engineering & More gives you the ability to build absolutely super high sci-fi structures.

Other great Stellaris mods include Ancient Cache of Technologies and The Zenith of Fallen Empires. There are a ton of great Stellaris mods, really.

Im not a big fan of Hearts of Iron 4 but by god does the My Little Pony mod - Equestria at War slap hard.

Enderal for Skyrim was real good

I love silly mods like the googly eyes mod for Darkest Dungeon and the smiling leader portraits mod for Hearts of Iron 4. Those are truly one of the best genre of mods.

MC Tammer's NIF bashed weapons pack for Fallout 3 and New Vegas is totally awesome. Theres a gazillion guns of all sorts including a lot of non-lethals, it adds some extra attatchments and ammo types too. All of the weapon models are made up of parts of weapon models from the games themselves so they actually match the aesthetic pretty well. Highly reccomend the mod itself since its well integrated with the game with NPCs selling and carrying the new guns. One of the custom vendors (which are all optional) is a stereotype of russian people (think FPS Russia but hes a gunsmith) and that was kinda cringe at times.

Project Reality is probably one of the best mods ever made. Single handedly spawned a unique genre of games, and trained dozens of amateur devs that went on to industry work.

Same with Long War spawning Terra Invicta. @ProgAimerGirl@hexbear.net

I was very impressed with The Last Days for Mount and Blade: Warband. Seems like they are working on a sequel for Bannerlord

Assetto Corsa has a ton of great mods, my favorite is probably Shutoko Revival Project. There were some pretty incredible ones for the original rFactor too like CART Factor.

I prefer mods that add extra content rather than just being "let's make the game playable because the original devs didn't bother".

gregtech

the gregtory most grow

Automate for Stardew Valley.

Save Our Ship 2 for Rimworld is incredibly good.

Elder Kings for CK3 is also fantastic.

Seamless Co-op for Elden Ring. Instead of the jank-ass summoning system, it lets you just play the entire game, start to finish, with between two and SIX players.

Honorable mentions:

• Total War Warhammer has a bunch of mods I consider essential (level 4 settlements in minor settlements, reduced penalties at higher difficulties, legendary lords joining another faction if theirs is destroyed), but individually none stand out that much.

• Mount and Blade: Warband has a ton of total overhauls that are usually interesting even if I wouldn't finish them. Gekokujo is set in Japan, so no shields and now guns exist. Warsword Conquest is the jankest fucking version of warhammer I've ever seen, where all the fantasy creatures are made by just stretching and warping the basic human in ways that look horrific. Prophesy of Pendor adds an end-game and ramps the difficulty up to a million. All of these suffer from not actually changing up the core gameplay too much, though, which means it's still kind of an empty sandbox full of cardboard cutout NPCs no matter what.

FTL multiverse overhaul

Favorite game to mod? Rimworld.

The aether mod for minceraft

Gonna keep it to things not already mentioned.

Big standalone fangame/total conversion:

• Chronicles of Myrtana: Archolos, built off of Gothic 2. Was my GOTY when it came out, and I consider it better than anything the actual developers released since Gothic 2. I really dig the way it expands the original game's systems, like apprenticeship. I have some complaints about it but it's nothing major, and I overall greatly enjoyed my time with it, planning a new run when the big 2.0 update drops.

Mod packs:

• Morrowind Sharp, it's like Viva New Vegas for Morrowind, I always use it as a base for my own setups, but it's great as is for new players to get a patched, QoL enhanced and face-lifted vanilla-like experience.

Individual mods:

• Global Escalation for Squad - just a huge expansion-sized load of content
• Beautiful Cities of Morrowind, for bringing the game's settlements closer to their concept art, implementing a lot of the new fan-made resources to make places more distinct and detailed while having a clear scope and keeping within vanilla-like territory
• Kenshi Kaizo, touches up and expands the existing content without bloating itself by filling the map with all sorts of new factions of varying quality and lore-adherence
• The Stardew Valley mod that adds a whole bunch of cat skins so I can have my irl cat in the game. And on the topic, SDV Expanded and Ridgeside Village when I just want more Stardew Valley stuff.