Install location on Windows 7

[Axeking]

Hi,

I set the game to install on E:\Matrix\TOAW4, yet a whole lot of stuff (540 MB) gets put in

C:\Users\<user>\Documents\My Games\The Operational Art of War IV

Why? I specifically selected a different drive to install to to keep stuff off my C drive.

How do I get it to NOT use my C drive for anything?

[JPJ]

Hi Axeking, welcome to TOAW IV.

TOAW does that because it is supposed to install the user editable content (as different from the program files) in the user's Documents/My Games/The Operational Art of War IV directory. See the manual, Installation section, page 5. A benefit is that having all this in one place here makes it easier for users to modify scenarios and install user-defined graphics.

I don't know how much it was originally but ca. 540 MB or so looks correct.

If it is important for you that user data is not installed on C then perhaps a solution is to change the location of your Windows Documents folder to another disk/partition than C (for example as explained here for Windows 10). But I have not tested that with TOAW (and I don't know whether it might cause another problem on your specific system etc.), so I'm not saying that this works, only that this is something that may work for your case. Perhaps other users who actually did that can confirm it and/or help you further.

[Shadrach]

I don't either like saving lots of stuff on my C: drive, since it's a quite small drive, and some Games can quickly save several GBs of data in the "Documents\My Games" directory. What I've done is link the folder to another drive using the mklink command from an administrator prompt.

There's also a GUI tool to simplify this process: https://sourceforge.net/projects/symlink-creator/

It's probably not as secure as using the Windows function to move the location of the folder, but then you don't need to move the entire "Documents" folder, which you might not want since it might contain sensitive stuff. If you are the only user of your PC then it shouldn't be a worry anyway.

[Axeking]

Thanks for the tip - giving a symbolic link a try.