Chronicles broke mod, how to update mod to new DLC?

Age of Empires II: DE II - Modding
1

I have a mod that I’ve been working on for months, but with the release of Chronicles it seems to be unusable.

It does not include the new civs, and there is no way to add the new civs to the existing mod dataset without manually remaking it, something that would take months and have no guarantee of success.

Does anyone know how to make this work?

2

Yes
Check out how this mod did it:

Basically, there’s a couple of additional files in the same folder as the .dat file. Copy this files (without the dat of course) into your mod folder right next to your .dat file and it should work.

Don’t ask me what the files actually change because i have no idea honestly, but for me it worked

Edit: it could also be the second link I’ve added, can’t remember which one for sure, probably the latter. Might want to check out both just to be sure…

3

Yes, the civilizations can be overriden via a civilizations.json file.
See:

So long as the number of civilizations defined in the data mod matches the number of civilizations in the civilizations.json file, the mod should work.

Assuming you have all but the latest 3 civilizations in your mod, you can copy the base game’s civilizations.json file to your mod’s dat folder and remove the 3 new civilizations from that file.

4

This doesn’t work, as it doesn’t allow the new architecture or civ units to be compatible with the dataset, it just creates three nonfunctional placeholders.

5

If you wanted to add the new civs to an existing mod (instead of letting the existing mod be playable without supporting the new civs) the steps would be quite a bit more involved.

I surmise you would need to do the following:

  1. Open up two windows of the Advanced Genie Editor, one for the mod and the other for the base game file.
  2. Open the civilizations tab and copy the new civilizations from the base game file to the modded file
  3. If you added any custom techs, effects, units, etc. move their IDs down (by inserting placeholders) to ensure they do not clash with any IDs used by the base game file. Note that after the IDs have been moved, you will have to adjust any referenced IDs. For example, if you moved your custom effects down by 1000, any references to those effects from techs will also need to be increased by 1000 as well.
  4. Copy the techs, effects, etc. that have been added or changed in the base game file

In theory, this should work but I believe it would be a lot easier (and less error-prone) if you start with the latest base game file and reapply your changes to that file, instead of trying to bring over the changes from the base game file to your mod.

6

I just gave up and moved all the mod data over to the new base data set. Luckily, AGE allows for copy-pasting, so it was only mildly annoying trying to figure out what all the devs changed and didn’t properly label (which was a lot) and redoing all the sound files 1 by 1.

Honestly, I figured that this would be the best option anyways because of future compatibility and a lower chance of any errors.

7

The 10x shared civ bonus mod is working well, I don’t know why 50x shared bonus T90 is not able to work out at all.