I think I broke something by unpacking,HELP

Many days of making changes to mercenaries file. I had everything modded the way I wanted, had run the game to test each new merc I added. Then I did two thing which have caused me pain ever since.

I wanted toadd just one more merc to the set, and I wanted to unpack the game files for doing other mods. I dont know which if either action caused my problem...but here it is:

I select a faction for imperial campaign play: Scots, Eng, Neth, NGerm, SGerm, and all is well. My mercs come up as schedualed in my mod.

But when I get to the bottom part of the merc region pool list, starting with Poland, then Steppes, then ...well all the rest...and I try to get a general to recruit an available merc, no merc si on the regional map. I can move the general to Eng, Netherleands, S+N Germany ...etc...But for poland, milan, africa ...all the regions on the bottom of the list I get "no mercs available".

So I went back to a 'known good' merc file, copied and pasted a new polish 'pool' into my merc file and still I dont get mercs. And so for the others...nothing.

I did dmanage to make the game work by going back and getting a 'clean' descr_merc...txt file. But somehow the guts of the modded merc file have been corrupted. I am using MSWordpad and may have done a RTF save instead of a TXT save...But the cut and paste of 'clean' txt text should have sovled this issue...but no I still got "no mercs available.

Something must have happened to some other file or the unpack did a job on something somewhere...But I cannot figure it out. I have been trying different ways to test the problem and after three days on it no help.

I am getting punchie and blurry ( punchy and blurrie) now and need some relief. HELP


Can someone tell me what to do?

make sure the unpacked stuff is no longer in your data folder, and I hope you copied the content of the M2 folder before unpacking so you could later put the "good gamefiles" (if it makes a diff.) back in.

I've unpacked the files 2 times, the first time it messed up my partition, not the game, the whole partition, as you are warned about at start of using the unpacker ...

anyway imo simplest way to figure out whats going on, use disk-scan on your HD and have windows check it out, than reinstall the game (make sure you backup the unpacked files so you dont have to risk a bad install/partition/hd/os again ..)


on a sidenote, I cant say I know wordpad, I do know that lots of these tools have some sort of formating (like auto. adding an enter when a sentence gets to long)
not sure if we are talking about the same but I use notepad, the simplest little tool that comes with windows and it doesnt try to be "helpfull" ... ;)


G

You might have some error in your merc file, did you check the game log?
Maybe there's some typo in your polish entries.