A system for loading mods?

Civ 4, a very modder-friendly game (a trait that made me buy it when I found out - I was so unhappy with Civ 3 I put it off for a long time), had, in addition to a lot of other practical tools for modders, a system in the "Advanced" menu that allowed you to load a mod, upon which the game would reboot and you could play the mod. This, at least for me, was a very practical, as many of the other mod-loading programmes out there plays havoc with my system stability.

Since RTW has so many separate and very distinctive mods, something like this would be greatly appreciated by the modding community and players - and would, in all likelihood, enhance profits by catering to "the long tail" of game purchasers. Heaven knows the only reason I bought Barbarian Invasion was because Rome Total Realism kept my interest in the game alive.

As long as we're on the subject, it would be interesting to see what attitude CA overall has towards modders with M2TW. XL nothwithstanding, RTW was the first Total War game that received the full brunt of game modding. So will the problems faced in RTW be resolved? Will larger than vanilla faction limits be allowed? What about province limits? Strategic and Battlefield AI?

No CA-hassling, please.

an ingame mod-switching feature has been suggested before. It would especially be usefull in MP: you double click a game that is hosting a mod, a message pops up asking if you wish to load this mod (provided you have it installed) and the game restarts if you click yes, loading the mod.

Ringeck, have you heard of JSGME? It's a mod swapper utility that a lot of people use for RTW. I tried it the other day and it was simplicity itself to use. I found a good threat on it in twcenter but can't locate it right now.

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Originally Posted by econ21

Ringeck, have you heard of JSGME? It's a mod swapper utility that a lot of people use for RTW. I tried it the other day and it was simplicity itself to use. I found a good threat on it in twcenter but can't locate it right now.

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It makes my RTW unstable for some reason. It's especially bad with EB, who I play the most.

Simon, it is really unreliable.

Ideally if you create your own mod folder, and point the .exe file to your mod folder, the game should then treat everything in your folder as an override of the default material, thus creating an easy to use mod. You could then have a dozen such folders and mods and no need to reinstall the game from scratch everytime you wanted to play the latest version of Uber-realistic-mod-o. Was this how the mod switch in RTW was supposed to work? It's a simple enough concept and I hope such a thing (or an even better built in GUI driven, newbie mod friendly device) is incorporated in the next title. It isn't too much to ask.

the current -mod switch already does that for 99%.

@ Adherbal: is there anything like that for RTW ?, if yes, where to find them ?, please

The -mod argument allows you to put the modded files in a seperate folder and the game will reference them from there. It doesn't work for all files so therefore it doesn't work for all mods, but it does most.

For those other mods, there's the fanbuilt Mod Switcher

I was looking at the thread about the -mod switch last night. It isn't perfect, so it's another one of those areas I'd be very disappointed in if CA haven't made it better. Ideally things such as the Mod switcher shouldn't be required.

The -mod: switch really has my highest recommendation (I even rearranged my sig for it). I don't really play a mod anymore without converting it to use the -mod: switch and I haven't discovered any limitations with using it that we haven't managed to correct. My only beef regarding the -mod: switch was that CA never told us how to use it properly and it's only thanks to people like Stuie that we ever learned how it could be used and now most of the major mods use straight file overwrites :sad:.

I use JSGME as well, typically for when I'm doing incremental modding of a main build so my modded files are segregated and can be easily distributed. I had one problem with it once (I think I was was overwriting multiple mods at once) but because the underlying files should be vanilla it's very easy to restore your backups.

I would be very much surprised if something like the -mod: switch wasn't included in M2TW. It was one of the top items which the community requested in terms of modding support in a list which I know got to the relevant people at CA.

I meant the Fan made Mod Switcher thing, JSGME shouldn't be required if CA gets things right this time around. Lets hope they've made things in general a bit more mod friendly and a lot less hard coded. Although of all the great new things in M2TW, 'Amazing new diplomacy, terrain, shiny armour' etc, I don't recall hearing about extra mod-ability, although I perhaps haven't been paying enough attention.

Be nice to have a simple graphical/menu driven device to say what mod(s) you want loaded before playing the game, ala Morrowind.