Questions about mods

[debufferman]

I have been running into some common problems with different mods and thought I would ask here, to see if the issue may be on my end or not.

1. Ever since I started trying out the mods, my game will exit, but it won't. In other words, when I leave the game, it goes away on my screen but the music continues to play AND when I try to shut down Steam or restart the game, I get the message that the application is still running. I go to task manager to shut it down, but task manager doesn't even show the game as active.

2. I'm getting a lot of text in all capital letters with "TEXT_KEY....."

3. Several mods I have tried, are unplayable because the technology tree gets all jumbled up and I can't select my next research, hence can't push the "next turn" button.

Numbers 2 and 3 are happening on mods that seem to be downloaded, played and rated by thousands of people, so I'm wondering if it is something on my end?

 

[Spatzimaus]

It's not you. Or at least, not directly. There are a few things you have to keep in mind with using mods:

1> Many, many mods are completely out of date, abandoned by their original designers long ago. As a result, most of the mods available through the in-game mod browser are simply not compatible with the most recent versions of the game. There have been two major patches and a half-dozen or so minor patches that made changes that could invalidate an older mod.

The best example of this is the TXT_KEY bug you mentioned. What happened was, about a year ago (March 2011), the developers added one little change to how modding works: if any text key is defined multiple times, then the ENTIRE FILE containing the second instance will be ignored.
The most common place this occurs is in mods that add custom civilizations, especially in the city name list. Someone decides to add a Korean civilization, and sets the text key for the first city name to "Seoul". But the core game already includes a TXT_KEY_CITY_SEOUL, since it was one of the city-states in the core game. Before last March, it'd just ignore the second definition, and the rest of the text keys for that civ would load just fine. But ever since then, it'll now drop all of the other keys; sure, you'll still see "Seoul" correctly, since that text key was already set in the core game, but it'll TXT_KEY_CITY_PUSAN instead of "Pusan" because that one is NOT set in any other files. An intelligent modder would have done something like TXT_KEY_CITY_SPATZ_SEOUL for his own version of the name, as there'd be no chance of a conflict, but most modders didn't think that far ahead.

As a result, before using any mod, you should check on these boards to see if the mod is compatible with the current game. If a mod doesn't have a thread on these boards, or if its thread has been idle for more than a month or two, then it's likely not going to work. And even if it appears to work at first, you might get unintended consequences.

2> Many mods are incompatible with each other, especially any mods that modify UI windows. Heck, I've got four mods in my own mod package, and two of THEM conflict with each other thanks to the promotion limit. So it's not unreasonable to think that you're using a couple incompatible mods somewhere.
Without knowing which mods you downloaded, there's no easy way to tell you which are causing the problems. As the number of mods you use increases, the likelihood of a conflict increases greatly, so the solution is to try using a smaller set of mods for a game. And again, some of the mods might be out of date and so become more likely to conflict with others.

3> It's always possible that your game IS corrupted somehow. Go into Steam and tell it to verify your installation, and it'll search each file in your core game to ensure it's correct. This can happen fairly often, so even if you aren't having issues it'd be a good thing to do every once in a while.

 

[debufferman]

Thanks for the reply. That helps a lot. I was starting to think it was just me doing something wrong. I don't run more than one at a time, except for those that are made to go together, for example, added civs for a total conversion mod.

I'll go check my game with steam. Appreciate the advice and info.