If these questions have been answered elsewhere, forgive me, but I did try searching and didn't find anything (perhaps I wasn't using the right search terms or wasn't looking in the correct place).



Where exactly do I put the mods that I download? I'm guessing they go somewhere in the folder "...Steam\steamapps\common\Endless Space\Public\". For instance I downloaded the Colorized Anomalies mod, which, in the unzipped folder, includes a folder called "Localization" and a file called "Index.xml". I see an Index.xml file in the Public folder, but the two files are very different, and I'm not going to overwrite the original one without knowing that's what I'm supposed to do!



Also, the first post in the thread "Mod Shopping Mall" instructs to add "+mod" to the start shortcut in Steam. Is this required for all mods that I add, including the xml-based mods (which seems to be the majority of the mods here).





In the first Mod Shopping Mall post, it also says that you can't use more than one mod at a time - that if you want to use two mods, they have to be merged. What the heck were the developers thinking?!?!?! In this day and age, where gamers get so involved in modding the games they play, why on earth did they create a system that doesn't support modding more fully?





Had to get that out of my system...

Mods go in My Documents\Endless Space\Modding



It's quite normal to not forcibly merge mods. In fact the only game that I can think of that allows that is Oblivion/Skyrim, and lots of people complain it's too complicated to install mods there as a result.

Thanks for the answer, Kolaris.



Actually, using mods with Skyrim is quite easy with the "Nexus Mod Manager". I have about 100 mods installed for Skyrim. It's so easy because all I have to do is download and install a new mod using the mod manager and it handles the rest. If you do it manually, then yes, it can be quite difficult, but the mod manager handles conflicts quite well.



But I digress...



I saw mention of using WinMerge or a similar file merging utility to merge any xml files that two mods affect. I'm comfortable with xml syntax, so if it's just a matter of managing any potential xml file conflicts then I wouldn't have too much of a problem with that. It probably depends on exactly what mods I may decide to download and use, but how often would mods conflict?

Honestly speaking, mods should me made with another type of syntax and not the current "Let's overwrite base files" everyone uses: If the proper syntax amplitude gave us (making new files to inject) was used, merging would be incredibly easy.

... Is this required for all mods that I add...

Nah the +mod is just indicating which you would like to load\activate automatically when the game boots\starts.



As to the mod manager -

Well someone could write a Endless Space mod manager\merger easy enough, the key question though as mentioned is how are you going to resolve the conflicts? Is one going to leave that to the user to decide, or have some compatibly table built of known merge combo's and best compromise merge value? (quite the effort in up-keep I would think) If left to the user that requires the user to fully understand the impact of said values\conflict choice on either\all mods, for the more simple mods i can see it working out well enough, for the more advanced with multiple conflicts, smells like a recipe for some Franken-mod disasters.