Stupid Newbie Question
 

How do you use the various types of mods? There seem to be .dm & .tga files for most changes to the game engine or adding units. New maps seem to be .tga and .map files.

Where do all these files go in order to get them to work? Just plop everything in the mod directory? Then how do you get them to actually affect the game? Or do they affect all new games you start.

I am sure this is something that has already been posted, but I have not found it yet.

Re: Stupid Newbie Question
 

Let's say that you download a nation mod. It comes in on a .rar or .zip file. You extract the files from the zip/rar in to the dominions3/mods directory.

Then you open Dom3 and go to "preferences" and choose "mod preferences" to toggle your chosen mods on/off.

Downloaded maps are extracted into dominions3/maps directory and you can see them as map option when you start a new game.

Re: Stupid Newbie Question
 

What Burnsaber said.

Also: Make sure you have the proper mods on when starting a new singleplayer game. After that, the game automatically loads/unloads the appropriate mod when continuing.

Also: If you design a pretender for multiplayer, make sure mods are on. If the game detects an illegal pretender, you'll end up with something useless. Mostly, anything that might change a pretender chassis. Needn't worry about banners and hotfixes and stuff when creating a pretender, just the big stuff, like rebalance mods.