Hiya

I've built my campaign and I've used quite a lot of mods within the campaign from Steam Workshop.

The issue I'm running into is that when I load my campaign and invite my players, it will often take them an hour or more to load the mods that are in the campaign. And often it will freeze the game for them at 90% installation completion. A force shut down and reload of the game will often solve this.
I do have 30 mods, but for me, it takes about 5 minutes to load.

I am loading the campaign first and then inviting them in once I am on the Map & Scenes screen.

Our PC's and internet connections are comparable. So is there something else that is causing a lag? Is there a good way to invite them and load the campaign?

Thank you for your help.

You should make sure that your players have the exact same mods installed as you are using for your campaign.
If they don't have them they will download them from you and that can take a very long time indeed.

Yeah, I sent them a list of the Steam Workshop mods, and as far as I know, they did download them all in advance. (naturally, they could be lying, but this is unlikely).

Despite this preparation, they are still downloading and installing for more than 60mins, and often requiring the force shutdown at 90-96% as DOS2 freezes at that percentage.

Once they reload and I reinvite then it seems to work...some of the time...

Best advice I can offer is to make sure they are subscribed to all the mods and have them clear out their mod folders for fresh installs.

Yeah just subscribing doesn't really work. Not fast enough.
The problem is that the GM mods doesn't get moved to the 'C:\Users\'yourname'\Documents\Larian Studios\Divinity Original Sin 2\Mods

The solution is simple:

1. let the subscribe to your campaign
2. send them a 7zip file or winrar file that contains all the mods needed from your documents/mods folder.
3. Make them unpack it into their mods folder.
4. And LOOK! A campaign that loads within a minutes.

Brilliant thanks for the advice and step by step guide Vizze

You can also ask player to subscribe to the same mods (if its a steam workshop) - it should work as well

It really doesn't. Trust me on this one.

They take a while to download for most people and takes even longer to install properly (especially the maps and stuff for the GM games).

It will work, but no one wants to wait for hours for it to work.

I made a game with 15 different mods, totalling 800 mb and it would take ages to download for people.

As Vizze mentions, it doesn't always work. As I also mentioned in the initial post.

The two methods I've found so far are:

1: Vizze's solution of creating the 7zip file and sending this to my players.
2: Sending my players a list of the mod's, getting them to subscribe at least a day in advance and making sure that they've restarted steam and entered DOS2 at least once prior to the day when I pre-load with them.

Both options work, but do require some added effort on both sides.