Question marks where letters should be. This is madness.

I say, this can't be right. I'm playing a campaign as some filthy stinking barbarians who, it turns out, aren't all that filthy and stinking as they apparently invented soap. The problem is though that, even though I can barely understand their language as it is, some of the letters have been replaces by question marks!

It's in family member traits. Summer is... lets say it's "Samnoz", actually shows up as "S?mn?z".

I'm playing the latest version of EB with the official fix added on top, I have darth formations mod and a mod I got from someone at the forum here which changes the way command stars work so that it's more likely for a family member to be elected consul as Romans, since I wasn't getting any consuls. It just makes the traits "green" give no bonus, "Blooded" give +1 command and "Veteran" +2 command, so I don't think it's any of my mods causing the problem.

I'm not using ALEX.exe either, just regular RTW.exe.

Except that it is your mods that cause the problem. Someone has been editing EB/Data/text/export_VnVs.txt and saved it in the wrong character encoding. It has to be UTF-16LE (i.e. what programs such as Notepad call Unicode) or it will not work.

If I go in to that file and try to save as the only one resembling that is UTF-8. How can I fix it?

Is there one called unicode? (there should be) As Tellos Athenaios says, that's the one you want if your using programs like notepad.

'Tis already saved in Unicode.

Yes but the problem is that the person who edited it did not save the file in UTF-16LE but presumably to a character encoding where these characters are not supported. E.g. ANSI. As a result they were erased from the document. Converting it back to UTF-16LE will not help, because the data is gone/changed.

Could anybody send me a new one then please? I'm not bothered about the command star mod, I just want the question marks gone! =D

Use uniextract portable and extract the file from the installer.

XSamatan