That's just... wow, what a short sighted and wasteful idea to build in the scenario search path and then change filenames. I had no idea that's why mods weren't cross-compatible.
@Quintillus I don't either and I don't suppose it's possible to buy the Steam version outside your account region, but now I'm imagining a collection of dummy Steam accounts each from a different region. Can you get in trouble for opening or logging into several accounts from the same IP? $1.24 a pop isn't bad for deployment testing, but the setup may be a headache. Anyway I think it'd take more than PediaIcons since some paths are found in the BIQ or hard-coded, right? (Not knowing how far the translation extends, what about things like leaderhead animations and city graphics?) I imagine symlinks would work but that's a lot of files to touch.
My understanding is you aren't supposed to have multiple Steam accounts, but my understanding is also that it's a "we can terminate the account if you're causing trouble with multiple ones, but largely don't care." I know some people IRL who have multiple accounts, my understanding being so they can have different personas for different gaming communities they are in, and it hasn't caused them any trouble. But they've probably also only bought games in their home region.
However, since Lanzelot is willing to test and is also fluent in German, I think it makes more sense to go with that approach. Re-installing my whole Steam library if the Steam-swap idea went haywire doesn't sound very fun...
Ok, I found Kulko's old instructions (from 2008...) and I think I know again how it works. Apparently the PediaIcons.txt contains the paths to all important things: unit animations, leader heads, buildings&wonders. (But Civilopedia links may be a different file, I'm not sure.) In any case, all Scenarios I played back in the day could be made to work by just editing the PediaIcons.txt. I think no BIQ file modifications are necessary. (But of course I did not play every available Scenario... Only a handful.)
So I would volunteer to provide German PediaIcon versions for the above scenarios and test them a bit. (Only need to reactivate one of my PCs that has a German installation... In 2010 or so, I bought an English version on eBay and have been using that for new installations ever since.
Fantastic! I just sent you a PM, and will follow up later when the preview is available to test with. Upload speeds where I am are about one floppy disc's worth of data per second, so it's not the fastest process (download speeds will be much faster once it's living on a server in the cloud instead of on my hard drive).