Well hello to a forum I haven't posted in for a very long time...........

After an eventful 12 months which has seen life getting in the way of playing much games - moving in with my girlfriend, getting engaged, that type of thing - (Although I do seem to have fitted extensive sessions of TF2, Cod4, Crysis and Sins of a Solar Empire in there somewhere) I'm looking to play something more in depth. I've played the Beyond the Sword expansion to Civ IV to death now (well, almost) and seeing as there is a dearth of good tactical turn based games out there these days I though I'd come back to Afterlight and give it another run through.

So the question is what are the best mods to play? Personally I found the original game fairly well balanced - until you get to the lightening ball launchers at the end and storm the beasties base - so although Shadow warriors Total Rebalance mod looks good I'm not sure that it's entirely what I'm after.

Is the advanced missions mod fully operational? That looks like exactly the thing that I'd be after - so long as it's compatible with the mod that allows expedition armour trading (OK I know that's very minor in the great scheme of things but I found having to use the rets running around in their pyjamas extremely annoying) then this would be fine. I'll take any other recommendations there might be as well

Other than that, erm, hello to everyone here again

Welcome back, and congratulations on the engagement!

The Advanced Missions modification is in fine shape. There are still things to be added, but it should work well with the Expedition modification.

As for the TRM, I think you should use it. Up to you of course, but since you already played the vanilla version of the game once, it would be better to go for a different experience IMO. The TRM adds lots of new weapons and the likes, and will make sure that you get a different experience this time.

Besides those, you may add a skin mod to get a different look, and one of the mods that add more enemies (not sure I would, but Martian Assault Mod is one alternative). In addition Red seems to feel you have to add the vision mod if playing the TRM mod (see his comment on the TRM download).

Thanks Slaughter - I tried loading up the advanced missions mod this morning, but I'm suffering from "white" background syndrome - the ground textures are not loading properly

I don't know what's causing this - one of the things I did last year was to buy a new PC so I'm now running a duel core processor, 2GB RAM machine on Vista with a 768Mb Geforce 8800 GTX - so I need to sort this out first before I load anything else up! So far compatibility mode hasn't made any difference, so I think I need to do some more searching on the altar forums to try and figure out what is causing the issue. All my drivers are up to date as well s o it can't be that either....

If anyone has any suggestions then this would be much appreciated

Drivers is sort of a two edged sword. With some older games, older drivers will work better. That being said, you should probably do some searching at the official forums, and ask there. Good luck!

Fixed. It does appear to be a driver problem. You can either keep the most up to date nVidia driver but only run the shader option in "low" (This is not the reason why I have a 768Mb Geforce 8800 GTX!) or roll back to the last driver and use that instead.

Glad to hear you fixed it! Problem with drivers is that they're not always as "backward compatible" as they should.