Is it possible to have mods load up on old saves?
I'm asking because i got quite good game going on Uomoz's Corvus and would like to add Fleet Control to the mix, but don't feel like starting yet again from start (few too many restarts recently)
(if this has been asked and answered before, sorry that i missed it)
edit: the skills from FC add up to old save, however the planets do not.
This is relevant to my interests. The mod's generator will not run if you add it to an existing game, so stations, planets, spawn points etc won't be set up. Any vanilla content that's modified by the mod
might work, unless it references something that doesn't exist in the current save. In other words, a rebalance of the Tactical Laser would work, a rewrite of a vanilla spawn point that tries to tie into a mod-added economy won't.
As you've already noticed, stuff from CSVs like skills will be loaded (you might get errors if you try to put points in them), but ships won't automatically appear in stations (they might appear in vanilla fleets if the mod changes their composition). Added weapons will eventually start appearing since the vanilla convoys choose from every weapon loaded when they select cargo.
Factions are only created at the start of a new game, so you can't activate a mod's generator manually if it refers to a new faction. Station placement will also be off (if the mod tells a station to orbit at 270 degrees because that's opposite where another station spawns, it will still choose 270 degrees even if that other station is currently at 269 degrees itself).
Some mods can force themselves to activate in an old save via very hacky methods. The
Respec Mod I wrote does so. Again, this is limited to mods that don't add new factions, and the mod authors will have to implement it themselves.
tl;dr: it's complicated.