SimCity 4 is arguably the best game of the series and probably the best all-round modern city builder that has been ever developed. It gets pretty much everything perfectly balanced: strategic planning and micromanagement, local and regional development (a big change from SimCity 2K and 3K), fun and realism, visuals and hardware requirements... But the strength of SimCity 4 lies in its active modding community which has, over the past twelve years, created some unofficial add-ons that expand the gameplay without breaking the balance or looking out of place (among those, Network Addon Mod is a must have. CAM is good, too, but it depends on much user-created content that should be installed separately due to copyright reasons). Bottom line: if you haven't yet got it elsewhere, you ought to get it now and register at the modding sites (Simtropolis, SCDevotion) to get the most out of it.
