When will lack of plugins cause crashes?

[defacto123 14]

A few years ago I made a city using a lot of mods, and when I went back to open it recently with an empty Plugins folder, it kept crashing while loading. After putting back all the plugins necessary, the city loaded.

Right now I am building a (different) city with the intention of not using any modded buildings (though I am open to using mods that merely change appearance of data views, numerical data, or pathfinding algorithms). If I install the NAM Traffic Subsystem and the Equinox RCI Query mod and later decide to remove them, do you think it will cause my city to crash while loading?

[The Avatar 1,089]

The RCI Query Mod by Equinox replaces the default Maxis query and adds new information based on the stats of the particular building and city. There is also no information in the readme about problems related to removing the mod. Based upon this, I assume that removing the mod would simply cause SC4 to revert back to using the default query for buildings.

The NAM Traffic Subsystem changes many aspects of SC4's traffic simulation, so uninstalling might cause undesired traffic, congestion, longer communte times, etc., and other problems related to those previously stated (abaondonment, etc.), but there is no information in the readme about problems like crashes related to uninstalling the mod.

Crashes related to plugins normally occur (if I'm correct) with conflicting plugins or when plugins remain in a city but are removed from the actual plugins folder. (I think this happened to me once when I had a tree controller installed and then removed the mod without deleting the trees, but I can't remember. The crash might've been caused by having two terrain mods installed at the same time.)

But I don't know... I'd suggest testing removing these mods on a test city before using them.

[nukeu123 307]

rendered city tiles with ground,snow and/or water texture mods tend to do this as well

[z1 566]

Uninstalling the NAM Traffic Subsystem will definitely not cause a city to crash. I cannot see how removing the RCI Query Mod would cause a city to crash either. Neither of these mods makes any permanent changes to the city, so you should be able to install and uninstall them freely.

[SimCoug 5,973]

Like nuke said, the most likely scenario was a tree, rock, or beach mod since out was an immediate CTD while loading. You also need to be careful of removing MMP files once they have been used in your region. The mods you mentioned should not cash your game though.

[T Wrecks 10,209]

When I loaded a city without plugins accidentally, I found out that any part of the traffic infrastructure that can only be built with the NAM was simply not displayed, but the city did load.