firetrap1 wrote:I still prefer AP for the simple fact that you can re-download, at will, AP products without having to do a 2 hour long 'vertify cache' then re-install all your mods again.
The .ap file format (this is going to get confusing, AP products---.ap files

) should, in theory, prevent modifications being wiped out after a verify--admittedly there's a fair bit of confusion about how all this works and whether it actually
is working as intended at the moment but, early days as they say. It's not hard, time consuming nor expensive to archive any installers to CD/DVD/removable media/web based storage for easy re-installation, neither is producing backups of the full game or parts of it. The argument that you might be stuck if you lost your install for whatever reason (you're more likely to lose it because of a hardware failiure than anything RSC/Steam can do) just doesn't hold up now.
More importantly, having to do a verify should be the exception not the rule; if you find you're having to do it often you have a serious underlying problem that will probably have more to do with your setup or methodology than a problem in the software itself.