WoG could be divided into a number of (sub-)mods: one for commanders, one for stack exp, one (or more?) for creatures, one for core options…
Then we would have more fine-grained dependency management.
Plus one mod that gathers them all (as dependencies).
Main purpose of wog mod is to collect data files from wog - I think it should remain as it.
Moving these features into minimods may be a good idea. Possible problems:
Without mod manager disabling wog will be more difficult - user must disable not only wog but also all mods that depend on it. Othervice - crash on start due to missing dependencies.
Same goes to situation when wog is not installed at all - currently if some files from wog were not found wog mod that comes in vcmi package will be hidden from mod handler. Extending this check to hide these minimods as well is trivial but I don’t like hardcoding this too much.
Some kind of simple mod manager is a must-have. Players should not enable/disable mods by editing files. Mod manager would solve the problems you mention.
There is another good to have feature - possibility of checking what towns to place on map after selecting map/random map (HotA is trying to do this for version 2.0 also). And if town is not placed, it’s good to have an option to place only creatures from him.
Maybe these two selectors can be merged to one class and reused…
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