My first mod attempt...

... failed miserably.

Dissapointed by the lack of gunpowder infantry for the Scots, I decided to solve the problem myself and give them one. My first simple attempt was to make musketeers available to the Scots and, despite the fact that their musketeers were completely white cause I didn't want to srew around with textures just yet, it worked.

Now, there was a problem with this. I looked at the model and said to myself "No good highlander would be caught dead in that fancy little outfit the musketeers wear." So I figured, what would be better to add to the game then a guy in a kilt holding a musket.

Essentially, my attempt was to make a hybrid with the Cossak Musketeers (yeah I'm rediculously unbalancing the Scots here, but I only do singleplayer anyway so it doesn't matter) and the Nobel Highland Archers. I esentailly tried to make the Cossaks into Nobel Highland Archers with guns and change the secondary weapon from a sword to an axe.

Long story short, I somehow managed to bring the game to its knees and was given no other foreseeable option but to re-install. I did manage to rescue my save games, however.

Ouch. I'm guessing you were hacking around at the model file, without really knowing what you were up to? I gather it's tedious stuff since it's not intended to be hand-edited really. CA generates it from a spreadsheet or a tool almost certainly. If you managed to trash something about the models, I'd think it would be crazy difficult to figure out what exactly was wrong...

If I've correctly guessed what happened, perhaps you'd share a bit more about the specifics of the experience for the benefit of those who may be trying to get their feet wet?

Well, unfortunatly, I don't know exactly what went wrong. I'm pretty sure, however, that the problem stemmed from the fact that I (very, extremly stupidly) did not back up the modeldb file.

I was following Musashi's tutorial about as closely as I could, just going to the Cossak Musketeers every time Musashi said Reiters. I got to the modeldb file and copied the Cossak Musketeer part out of there into another file so I could play around with it. It was at about this point that I realized the tutorial did not cover what I was trying to do.

The tutorial, as far I could tell, just took the Reiters, painted them purple and gave them to the Byzantines with a bit of stat modification in there. What I wanted to do was take the Cossak Musketeers, put them in Nobel Highland Archer costumes and make an axe their secondary weapon instead of the sword. I think in order to finish what I wanted to do I had to basically make a new skin. So I figured at this point I was in over my head, and just gave up.

But that's neither here nor there. The point is, I think when I copied the Cossak Musketeer stuff out that modeldb mess I screwed something up, either adding a space or a letter or deleting something, I don't know. If I had known I put or removed something from that file that I wasn't supposed to, I probably wouldn't have been able to fix it anyway, cause I wouldn't have been able to find the mistake.

I guess that's a rather costly lesson to back up your files. I suppose I'll just have to keep reading the boards until someone else to make a gun-totin' scot.

Well for your first attempt you should probably try something easier :oops:
Adding units or even changing ownership is pretty hard in M2, a lot harder than some other things (like editing buildings for example).