Unable to play for some reason

**Darius0101** · February 05, 2016, 04:44 AM

Hey there, so I've been playing Third Age Total War for many years, I stopped after awhile and recently decided to rewatch the LOTR.. well it got me in the mood to play Third Age again, I had heard about some changes to the way steam runs the game but nothing else. I tried launching the game as I always had, through the Americas installation but it literally did nothing. Did some searching around after that and tried launching it through the .bat file only to find that didn't work either, eventually after yet more searching I figured out I needed to make a copy of my medieval2.exe and rename it to kingdoms.exe then launch the .bat, well after trying that I get the following error:

"The program can't start because mss32.dll is missing from your computer. Try reinstalling the program to fix this problem."

Errr... what? Would appreciate any help as I used to love playing this mod and it seems the submods have come along way, would love to try some of them (any suggestions? Divide & Conquer looks like the best bet so far)

**♔atthias♔** · February 05, 2016, 10:47 AM

Originally Posted by Darius0101

Hey there, so I've been playing Third Age Total War for many years, I stopped after awhile and recently decided to rewatch the LOTR.. well it got me in the mood to play Third Age again, I had heard about some changes to the way steam runs the game but nothing else. I tried launching the game as I always had, through the Americas installation but it literally did nothing. Did some searching around after that and tried launching it through the .bat file only to find that didn't work either, eventually after yet more searching I figured out I needed to make a copy of my medieval2.exe and rename it to kingdoms.exe then launch the .bat, well after trying that I get the following error:

"The program can't start because mss32.dll is missing from your computer. Try reinstalling the program to fix this problem."

Errr... what? Would appreciate any help as I used to love playing this mod and it seems the submods have come along way, would love to try some of them (any suggestions? Divide & Conquer looks like the best bet so far)

try copying all DLL files from the main MTW2 folder into the TATW folder

**Darius0101** · February 05, 2016, 04:30 PM

Originally Posted by atthias

try copying all DLL files from the main MTW2 folder into the TATW folder

Thanks for the response, the only DLL files I see there are 'cine.dll', 'IDV.dll' and 'steam_api.dll', I moved them to the TATW folder and still got the same error message :/

**ElvenKind** · February 05, 2016, 05:24 PM

What Windows do you have? Can you play vanilla M2TW and Kingdoms campaigns?

**Darius0101** · February 05, 2016, 05:55 PM

Originally Posted by ElvenKind

What Windows do you have? Can you play vanilla M2TW and Kingdoms campaigns?

I never actually tried, I just have and it seems I have the same problem. :/ Clueless as to why as I've not touched it and it worked in the past, I'll try reinstall.

**Darius0101** · February 06, 2016, 03:16 AM

Small update, after reinstalling MWT2 and then verifying integrity of game cache I've managed to get MWT2 and the Third Age Total War to work, however I've now managed to run into issues getting the Divide and Conquer mod to work.

I followed the installation instructions, but when I launched the game it still ran the normal bog standard TATW, so I went into it's folder and changed the name of the .cfg to prevent it from launching, however now when I launch DaC it runs M2TW instead. Any ideas? Would be appreciated!

Edit - I think me having the name of my folder named different than what is mentioned in the .bat file might have had something to do with it, so I renamed the folder so it should work..... launched it and now I get this message and it just crashes
"Medieval 2: Total War encountered an unspecified error and will now exit."

**Darius0101** · February 09, 2016, 01:33 AM

I've managed to fix all the problems, I reinstalled it and managed to get TATW running again but was unable to run the mod DaC, I then reinstalled a second time and it seems to have fixed everything except custom battles on the DaC submod, which I'll settle for. Thankfully I currently have a fast download speed so it wasn't too much hassle.

Thank you for the responses atthias and ElvenKind! If someone else has problems, I'd recommend reinstalling again and again. One thing I did differently on the third time was on the installation dropdown menu, I specifically clicked on the folder instead of copying+pasting the destination (even though it was exactly the same, and the only thing I changed in the installation compared to before), other than that I have no idea as to how it fixed my problems.

Other than