installed NAM now cities take forever to load...

[Raremob]

Before I installed this "needed" mod my cities would load instant, I click city loads I play. Now I have to wait around 30secs or so which does not fit my playstyle as I tend to switch back and forth in between cities a lot.

Does this happen with anyone else with this mod?

[Stracci909]

Yes this is expected to happen. Depending on which options you have installed, you could be adding around a gigabyte of new content the game has to parse on load. This includes hundreds of thousands of lines of code required for the roads and networks to work correctly. That is not possible to load without overhead.

If you like you can lower the footprint by rerunning the installer choosing only the functions/features you want to use (custom install instead of the presets). Other than that, if you want extra content, you will have to accept longer load times - there is simply no other way for now, considering the game is nrealy 20 years old.

[MGB]

As of NAM45, a 'Lite' version has been added that just adds the key bug fixes, traffic simulator improvements and a small amount of additional content that's quite indispensable for all players.

But for the full experience, you are adding about 1 million lines of code which need to load on startup with the No RHW controller option. If you want to run the RHW as well, you need the Full Controller, which adds over 5 million lines of code and requires your SC4 game be patched so it can access more memory and a 64-bit OS with more than 4GB RAM installed.

The former will add about a minute to loading times, the later will add maybe two or more, depending on the PC. Installing both SC4 and mods on an SSD and/or DATPacking your Plugins can make things quicker. Also bear in mind, this increased load time is only the first time you load the game, switching to and loading subsequent cities will be much quicker. The game was coded in the early 2000's and can't take advantage of the speed of modern hardware, this is the price to pay for around 15 years worth of free addons, but almost universally most people agree it's worth paying.