For 2+ years, Third Age Total War has worked absolutely fine for me. I have all the necessary updates and patches for M2TW gold, however recently, out of the blue, TATW has stopped working altogether.
Here is a synopsis of events leading up to the sudden malfunction of the mod; This, I hope, will allow the reader of this to pinpoint the issue and help me out. I will try to include as many details as I can and be as precise as possible.
January 2nd, 2014:
I grew tired of Vanilla TATW 3.2 and decided too try the MOS submod. The submod was working fine, I was having a grand old time, then I decided to upgrade to the latest 1.6.2 version of the submod and that's where things started to go wrong. Whenever I tried to launch a campaign in 1.6.2, the screen would go black and crash to my desktop, with no error messages mind you, as if I had not even been running the mod at all. I thought must have installed the 1.6.2 patch incorrectly, so I uninstalled Third Age, deleted the residual Third_Age_3 folder left behind in the mods folder for a fresh re-install, reached into my "Downloaded Mods" folder (A folder that I keep downloaded mods in so I don't have to re download every time I re-install something) and re-installed Third Age Total War 3.0, 3.1 and 3.2 all in the correct order. To make sure that it was indeed my error and that I had incorrectly installed the MOS submod, I launched vanilla 3.2. Everything worked fine, I went and chose a random campaign to start as a test, and everything started up nicely, just as it had before. Before trying to install Mos again, it was getting late, and I decided to try tomorrow and went to bed.
January 3rd, 2014 (the day Third Age stopped working):
"What better way to celebrate Mr. Tolkien's birthday than with a game of Third Age?" I thought to myself. Remembering the trouble I had last night with Mos, I decided to just play regular old vanilla TATW 3.2. A curious thing happened though; I launched the mod, the "Third Age Total War 3.2" loading screen came up, everything seemed normal and then: blackness. The screen went black for a few moments and then quickly crashed to my desktop. No error message, nothing, as if the mod had not even been running. Exactly the same thing that happened when I tried to launch a campaign in MOS 1.6.2 the night before, only this was the un-modded TATW 3.2 and instead of a campaign, it was the mod itself. "What the heck! vanilla TATW was working just fine last night before I went to bed!" I exclaimed.
So, I uninstalled Third Age but this time, I uninstalled M2TW Kingdoms Gold as well. I Even went as far as going into my Program Files(x86) folder and deleted the residual Sega folder for a fresh install. I re-installed M2TW, re install M2TW Britannia, downloaded the Official 1.5 patch for kingdoms gold and re-installed that too. I launch the vanilla game to make sure that it wasn't the game and not the mod and everything worked fine.
Now it was time to re-install Third Age after I had debunked that it was not a problem with vanilla M2TW Kingdoms, This time, instead of going into my "Downloaded Mod's" folder and re-installing the pre-downloaded TATW files, I went on over to Moddb and re-downloaded the entire mod. My theory behind it was that the installation files that I downloaded 2 years ago (give or take) and saved on my computer became corrupted somehow and I quickly removed them before downloading the same files again.
Finally, I finish downloading TATW 3.0 part 1, part 2, 3.1, and 3.2 and I re-installed them in the correct order. I launch the mod and... same thing. Loading screen comes up for a good 1-2 minutes, goes black, crashes to desktop, no error messages. Dumbfounded and running out of time, I gave up as I had my own things to do that day.
January 4th, 2014 (today)
Running out of ideas as to why TATW has all of a sudden, decided to stop working, I did a Virus Scan. A few hours later, Norton comes up with nothing (except a few cookies of course). Norton Isn't great, I've had it before and I know it can miss things, So I drove on down to BestBuy, and grabbed McAfee. I Get home, uninstall Norton, Install McAfee, Do a Virus Scan. NOTHING.
All of my little experiments over the past couple days has showed that it is not a virus, and it its not a problem with Vanilla M2TW Kingdom Gold, so what could it be?
I am currently at a loss, no more ideas as to why It has stopped working. The thing that is really infuriating though, and I cannot stress this enough, is that It was working fine a mere 3 days ago and the +-2 years before then.
Any Ideas, Thoughts? Or am I screwed?