EB 2 and STEAM

[Tellos Athenaios]

I'm glad to hear that you guys have it figured out,

So are we, btw. It's pretty neat to be able to install EB2 without UAC prompts on Vista/7 in your home directory and have the mod just work t/m with the system wide installation of M2TW/Kingdoms (1.5), or more generally to be able to install EB2 anywhere on your PC and have it work with the M2TW/Kingdoms (1.5) installation which is located in an entirely different spot, launcher integration and all. That's the goal, and it's possible.

It's not as I'm making these claims out of whole cloth.

Nah, I didn't think you made it up or something. However I think it is worthwhile to stress that these claims are misinformed. Squid, as he's known on the TWC, has written a tool to help you make misbehaving mods work with Steam (well, the M2TW launcher application you dislike so much).

but plenty of other mods include what I described in their readmes

Then it is time to burn those readmes? Frankly, many mods simply don't seem to have been given much thought to installing them. With EB 1 we got burned often enough that for EB 2 we/I decided to have no more of that nonsense and figure it out properly. Or as they say in the Zen of Python:

There should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious way to do it.
Although that way may not be obvious at first unless you're Dutch.