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For those of you who play MTW2 with mods like Third Age and Stainless Steel, are they installed into your original install location or should you copy the original to another folder for each mod thus preserving the original game in its original state? This is what was recommended for MTW with the XL Mod.

I just put them both in the original. If it messes up its not that hard to just reinstall

I downloaded the Demo earlier this week, and I've won the two battles it includes (Agincourt and Pavia). I am very impressed with the battle feature, and I can't wait to try all of the strategic features on the full version. I'm downloading the Gold Edition (regular and the Kingdoms expansion pack) as I type. It was on Amazon for $5.

This is one of my favourite games of all time, if played with the retrofit mod, which resolves some important issues. I love playing as France -> if you capture all the rebel settlements in your immediate area, you'll quickly become the biggest faction. Then, you launch an early crusade to gain Papal favour et voila, you have a nice amount of land you can take without the Pope getting stupid about it. Just keep in mind you need a lot of priests for conversion, and pilgrims to make up the numbers so you can use them as town guards. You can also move your capital closer to help keep public order. Egypt should fall quickly enough when you move fast. Basically what you do is you concentrate most of your resources on capturing the Holy Land (you can launch more crusades to get big armies there fast), and when a faction gets excommunicated in Europe (and trust me, they will), you destroy them as quickly as you can (but keep in mind not to kill their faction leader). If you train a lot of priests, you will have a lot of cardinals so that when the Pope dies he'll always be a French pope, who is enormously biased towards you. When you have full Papal favour you can even ignore his threats a couple of times without getting excommunicated (you only lose a bit of favour). It's also important to ally with the Papal states early on.

My favourite part of the game is defending your Eastern territories against the Mongols and the Timurid invaders.