Can't start the damn mod, it launches vanilla Med 2

[R.P. Gryphus]

Solved.

[sullivanclan1]

What do you mean by that?

[Gigantus]

Guess he found my guide?

[Colonial1.1]

Guess he found my guide?

Four people in my circle (myself included) have tried to make this particular mod work with your guide. All four of us experienced something or other which made the mod impossible to play. Could the installer itself be corrupted?

[Gigantus]

You can rule out my installer, the only thing that would happen in case of messing up the automated installer for my gadget is the 'can't find kingdoms.exe' message: because that's what my installer does, it creates a kingdoms.exe (copy of medieval2.exe) file if none exists. Which is the case for the steam based edition of M2TW.

As to the DlV installer: my guess would be that DlV somehow got installed into the wrong directory. Running the startup BAT via the desktop shortcut will then initiate the game but the instructions in the mod's CFG file lead to a non existing mod folder and the game defaults to the original.

Please let me know if you changed the path during installation. Often the installer ends in the game's main directory as the required sub directories (mods\[mod name]) get created by the installer. this can be confusing and may result in the user adding the required sub directories in the installer's path. Which in turn ends up in the symptoms you experience.

You could help here by right clicking your DlV desktop shortcut and choosing 'open file location'. If that didn't get you to the M2TW\mods\deus_lo_vult directory (deus_lo_vult might not be the exact folder name) then you got your answer. Copy the path from your explorer's address bar here, please. If end up in the mentioned directory then proceed to open the BAT file by right clicking it and choosing 'edit' and then copying the content here.
Open the CFG file in the same directory (with Notepad) and copy the top part that includes the [features] section.

Another possibility for steam users could be that they used the ancient method of a custom launch option in the game's properties: right click the game in Steam's library and choose properties, delete any content in the 'launch options' field - it has the same effect as installing into a wrong directory if the targeted mod doesn't exist or there is an error in the command.
If you have applied my linked guide then that's totally unnecessary.