Help with multitude of mods

[vicjun]

There's probably a gazillion threads about this, but I'll post anyway. Move or delete as you see fit, but I need help with this.

I've gotten stuck in the swamp that is the ETW mod community. And by that I mean there are too many mods out there. I'm not asking all modders to unite under one umbrella mod, I just want a guide to compatibility. For someone who just started checking out the mod scene, I'm really, really confused. From the little that I understand, these are the following "big" mods that usually gather many small mods as well:

-A Proper Empire: Terra Incognita
-Imperial Splendour
-Darthmod Empire
-Regalia of Nations
-The Rights of Man


Which one of these should I get? Are they compatible with each other? To me, they all seems to do bascially the same things, except one might increase lethality of muskets while the other decreases it. I'd appreciate any guide I can get. There should be a compatibility list, at least.

[Augustus Lucifer]

There isn't anything like this that I'm aware of, as someone would have to be a skilled enough modder to determine a load order, overwrites, and conflicts as well as know how to resolve all of them. It's definitely something which would be nice to see in the future, but it hasn't happened as of yet.

On the old engines the concept of a "mod folder" was the revolution, mods started becoming self-contained so you could run them all from one installation. Everyone quickly caught on and nowadays you're hard pressed to find a Rome/M2 mod which isn't modfoldered.

For Empire, if the 'modular' system is truly modular as it says, which also has to extend to game design and methodology(the old TW problem of needing references in a gazillion places would break a modular system), the revolution should be assembled-pack mods. If everything in a mod is in one pack, then you have to write other packs specifically to overwrite parts and work within the framework of it, like sub-mods do now for M2/Rome. On the other hand, if everything which concerned AI mechanics were in one pack, let's call it "APE-Mechanics" and the same range of files were contained in "Darth-Mechanics", both of them modular packs, the end user could choose which mechanics they want to use and mix and match their mods. This can potentially extend to things like factions and rosters, maps, and all manner of other things if the system is truly 'modular' as they purport it to be.

A good example of a well-developed modular community is the modding community for Oblivion. There's a mod called FCOM Convergence which takes 10 or so of the most popular mods, grabs elements from them, and then applies packs to resolve conflicts. The end result is a seamless integration of a multitude of independently developed mods through use of compatibility packs and a properly determined load order. If Empire modding can adapt to this level of modularity, it might yet be salvageable compared to the facepalm-generating responses to the act of modding itself from established modders.