A few slightly advanced modding questions related to the civ concepts that Chu Ko Noob and I have published.

Hey, I've been creating some civ ideas with u/ChuKoNoob you may have seen here on reddit. I've managed to get a functional HD mod working for all of them, with some bonuses changed cause I discovered they cant be coded. Its basically complete, we've played some games against each other and its really fun.

I know reddit isn't exactly the go-to place for modding help, but I thought i'd ask just in case. There are a few minor issues and one major one I cant seem to work out. I dont want to put an undue burden on anyone, but if you have encountered issues similar to mine or know the solution, I'd love to hear from you. The mod is currently set to friends only, but if you want/need to see it in action to see the issues I am describing, let me know and I can give you access. Starting with the minor issues...

I have been working on the assumption that it is impossible to add new civs and units to HD. Consequently we have been overwriting some of the less popular civs and hero units, is this the correct way to proceed?

I have also managed to allow battle elephants to target trees and cut them down (fallen but not removed). Thanks to their blast radius, targeting a standing tree adjacent to the fallen tree will remove that fallen tree, so you can use battle elephants to cut a path through a forest and sneak. But its a little more effort for the player than I had hoped. I have given them the same type of blast damage as Onagers/SO. Is the addition of an attack bonus vs trees the reason they are not being removed first time around?

I've also created duplicate fisherman for a civ (and disabled the normal ones) which have the capacity to gather from fish traps. Even though I disabled those funky fishermen for all other civs, somehow all civ's vils can gather from fish traps. Is this an issue with how I have gone about coding this bonus, or something hard coded within vils?

A followup from that question, vils gathering from fish traps count as idle. Why is that and how could I fix it?

One of our civs has a siege UU which is kinda a Onager/BBC hybrid. As a unit of that type, its essential that it can attack ground to help counteract micro. It appears to me that certain unit numbers are hard coded to have access to the siege commands, and all others have the standard patrol ect. Is this the case, or is there a way I can get a unit to attack ground without overriding an existing unit which can?

Another civ has 2x2 farms. They are super cute, speed up farming by about 15% (only tested dark age), and help defensively by compacting your base. While they can be automatically reseeded via queueing in the mill, you can reseed a dead farm by right click, and have to make one from scratch. While this is only 2 hotkeys, it would be nice to know if I can fix this issue.

Now for the big issue. Most of the ingame text that gives unit/tech information in building interfaces is completely useless. I understand this is a result of how i copy/pasted my units/techs to retain some of the essential formatting. I am investigating using the modded strings.txt file to create new strings that I can assign to my modded units/techs. This is really important to me so that people who are not familiar with my civs can understand what a UU or UT does/costs, as they will not have them memorised like I have. I have been looking at resources like https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=504740385 but am not quite sure of where i should store the modded .txt file, and how ingame I should setup my mod list and game to draw from that modded file.

Thanks in advance!