trouble installing on non-steam version; tales of the "unspecified error", nights of constant pain and longing, pop history, and computer illiteracy.

(reposting this from my comment in the announcement thread)

Howdy folks I am loving everything I see here, I'm dying to plug in and play for hours with Hardcore History on in the background. I'm having trouble getting it to start though with an ISO install of M2TW Gold. Every expansion works, the vanilla campaign works. But when I run the kingdoms.exe it shows the normal Medieval 2 loading screen and then crashes with a blank error box. EB2 itself shows up in the launcher, the dialog box says everything is fine "Medieval 2 found, Kingdoms found, 5 mods found" and I have followed a bunch of guides and help threads trying to solve this issue but to no avail. Launching EB2 leads to a quick glimpse of the opening load screen before i get a message that either says "Medieval 2 has encountered an unspecified error and will now close" or "Unspecified error. Please compress a log file and upload it to the bugs and technical help forum" or something similar.

Other problems i've found involve batch files. The unpacker tool lets me do the (y/n) popups but closes before I can even read the first commands. I can't manually run any of the .bat files either so I wonder if there's something I need to fix first.

More things: I can run the recruitment viewer and widescreen switcher. I've tweaked the config files of both med 2 and eb 2 based on things i've read that might help. In preparation for this awesome ass mod I also downloaded and played with the Reshade program a little bit, which entailed I head into AMD Catalyst (on a dell inspiron laptop circa 2015 btw idk) and create a profile for the Medieval 2.exe but that works pretty flawlessly but i've already taken it off and reinstalled med2 and eb2 a thousand times so i don't suspect it's done anything to hurt me here.

Please help me if anyone is capable. I've beat at it a few nights now and I guess since I've wasted this much time I'm willing to commit more. Tonight I suppose I'll figure out how to get those log files and I'll come back here if anyone needs them. Should I reinstall kingdoms? idek how i could, i only have the one disc install, a setup that runs through both m2 and kingdoms, and all the expansions work fine like i said. just not the kingdoms.exe itself.

You might be trying to do too many things here. Start with a clean M2TW (which it sounds like you have), and then load EB2 onto that. If the install version isn't working, try the non-install version (it's a zip instead of an exe), which is one of the download options in the first post of the thread. Also, what's your O/S?

Oh, in the time since I posted I managed to get it working! Thanks for helping, regardless. To answer, I am on windows 8 with an old Dell AMD laptop that has served me surprisingly well. You were probably right, with a fresh install and less overthinking I managed to get it working. Seems it primarily was a launcher problem. With a "combined" .exe of medieval 2 and kingdoms, and the mod manager, I got right into a game with no hitches at all, two campaigns work fine so far. The turn times are abysmal but I'll take it in favor of those models, and the music <3. While I have everything working, is there anything extra I should be aware of? I've seen a few things regarding the AI scripts and advisors? should I make sure to turn something on or enable something or is it all working as intended? I exquisitely suck at the battles even in vanilla so I wouldn't know the behavioural differences but if I'm gonna get stomped I want to get stomped in the way devs intended.