I discovered you can test your mod by simply building the project in ModBuddy. After that, it becomes available to enable ingame on the Installed Mods list of the Mod Browser.

Don't upload your mod to the server before testing to make sure it actually does you think it should. I mistakenly believed you had to upload it first to be able to play it, and as a result my first few versions had some really bad bugs!

You can also make a new upload "private" if you discover a problem and want to remove it from the public mod list. There doesn't appear to be a way to delete it.

I've had the mod buddy build me my mod and try to test it but it won't actually effect the changes I made. I saw your issue earlier and you used updates to make the changes. Is that what we have to do now? Or can we still just copy the original and mod it accordingly.

Yeah, I was glad to see that they have a streamlined testing process.

I wish the mod browser had a means of marking some mods as beta or in testing (aside from naming conventions) so that devs could get some solid feedback from those who don't mind testing, and without dumping mods into the wild with only limited testing.

Jennar, there's a really useful guide here:

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=385009

I used it to figure out the necessary steps. On page 4 is a description of how to format your XML files. For basic XML modding you have to:


Create new project
Add an XML file to the project (solution explorer, on right side)
Put your changes there
Right-click the project (solution explorer) and select Properties
Make sure you have on the Actions tab, an entry like this:
OnModActivated UpdateDatabase myxmlfile.xml
Build the file