Why is playing multiplayer with mods so garbage?

[G-Skin]

Every time me and my buddy try to play with mods it gives us different version numbers.

[Holy Fool Sehrael]

Because it just sucks. Originally bought the game to play with my brother. Then I installed ONE mod and suddenly even with the same mods OR a fresh install, it wouldn't let me play with him. Since then it's been mods + activating achievements via cheat engine for me, out of spite and because vanilla sucks as well :D

[Theutus]

Try using IronyModManager, you can import and export mod lists, and you can compress your mods into one.

https://github.com/bcssov/IronyModManager/releases

[RaVe]

we had the same problem and it was fixed once we both ensured our playlist mod load order was the same, after which our version numbers (the code within brackets after the games version number) was made to be the same.

[teravisor]

You both need to have same:
1. Obviously same mods, at least their part that modifies checksum.
2. Same way of installing mods. If one of you put mod into /mod/ folder and another through steam workshop, even if files are same it won't work.
3. Same load order.

Basically if two of you do literally anything a bit different, checksum will be different resulting in game thinking it's different version. Guess they simply merge all code and get its CRC or something like that.

EDIT: Ah, I completely forgot to answer question "Why".

Because each player's PC calculates what happened on its own and then does some lightweight checks if PCs of all players calculated things in same way. When they didn't, you see out of sync error and things start to bug out. Somehow paradox games don't know how to resync themselves, but know how to check if they're in sync... Which makes little sense.
So in order to reduce out of sync they make sure everything is same to the letter, especially underlying code, mechanics and all that affects them.

Order is important because some code might, for example, remove something.
Imagine code that does following:
1. Mod1: Pop dies
2. Mod2: Pop consumes something (doesn't happen because already dead)
Or
1. Mod2: Pop consumes something (happens because it's still alive)
2. Mod1: Pop dies
Result is clearly different. Which will instantly cause out of sync error.

[Jimmy Rustler]

Originally posted by RaVenite:

we had the same problem and it was fixed once we both ensured our playlist mod load order was the same, after which our version numbers (the code within brackets after the games version number) was made to be the same.

This is what has worked for our friend group.

[crgzero]

My daughter and I play together often and everything needs to be exactly identical, mods you know need to be the same, but so does load order and game version number. Everything must be identical.

[Luzilyo]

yeah, it's pretty annoying for multiplayer that they do it this way. many other games i know have it so that if you try to play with someone who has mods, the client automatically downloads and activates all mods that the host is currently using. that way, only the host needs to select the mods and load order and the client will get it automatically. that would definitely make things much easier. but paradox doesn't want this appearently. at least i haven't seen such a feature in any of their games yet.

[SirMars]

Originally posted by Theutus:

Try using IronyModManager, you can import and export mod lists, and you can compress your mods into one.

https://github.com/bcssov/IronyModManager/releases

Does this work better then the garbage launcher we have now??? Please dm me