I'm having some serious issues with Mercenary modding in 2.8 Opt In... so I did NOTHING to my files (GRM-M) for 2.8... I started up a game... everything seems fine... hire a mercenary, no problem, they are all working as intended. Later on... I have a crash. I reload the game from a save...
And alllll the Mercs in the Bazaar go blind... no stats, no images, no ship models... I decide to start a new game... still missing. I open/close GC, restart computer/etc. still missing.
I uninstall and reinstall GC3... I reload the mod as is... the Mercs are back and working... I save, close the game, return, and reload... and ...

And in this state, if you HIRE a Merc... you will not be rewarded, though the blank image will then change to the disabled Merc icon in question correctly.
Here are my concerns and questions...
- How is it that this is a "intermittent" problem. That seems very very strange to me.
- Is anyone else having this problem?
- I suspect that this has something to do with the Mercenary shipclass definitions being moved to the global GC3 Shipclassdefs.xml from its own Merc xml. I have changed the mod file to directing from the old EXP1_MercenaryShipClassDefs.xml to the ShipClassDefs.xml... you know the top entry of a file:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" standalone="yes" ?>
<ShipClassList
xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
xsi:noNamespaceSchemaLocation="../../../../Game/Data/Schema/ShipClassDefs.xsd">
<!-- Created with the Crusade editor -->
<!-- EXP1_ShipClassDefs.xml -->
See that bit? I've changed that to just look at ShipClassDefs.... that may fix the issue, but not for a save and reload... something happens and they go blank again.
Its not seemingly anything to do with the MercenaryDefs file, the MercenaryTierDef files.... or the staticship blueprintfile as far as I can tell....
HALP