After initial startup game loads good, but after win/lose/quit then restart game it crashes.

Anyone able to reproduce this?

Not even with Cranium's mpbattle, tho I tested it in sandbox mode.

However I noticed something which suggests me that the issue is with Cranium's ini. (Note, I am using UMP, which modifies mpbattle from the beginning.)

Cranium's mpbattle redefines the entire MultiplayerDialogSettings, which of course doesn't get read in the first game, since mpinis get read during map loading. After the game, the skirmish screen follows the mpbattle settings, which gets followed until if you set another gamemode, play a round, and go back to the dialog screen. I am pretty sure the crash comes from a conflict between rulesmd and mpbattlemd regarding MPDialog settings.

EDIT: Under redefines, I mean, money and unitcount settings are also get messed up. But check that ini, you'll understand what I mean.

I also can't reproduce this crash, neither with my (modified), nor Cranium's mpbattlemd.ini in the game folder. Unlike Graion, I played a bit against the AI.

@Graion: that makes perfect sense, if your old money/unit count settings are outside the allowed min/max range, the game will crash while trying to restore them. Bug in the original game, would be nice to fix it sometime.

So what exactly is the mp ini's used for? and why dont they get read initially instead of after the first played game?

They are read during the loading process, before the map itself gets read.

And it's done that way because reading them when you select the mode in the map setup screen would require re-reading rules from scratch when you select a different mode, and that would cause annoying delays.

So how do I go about using the mpbattlemd.ini with modified [MultiplayerDialogSettings] without it crashing, It seems to be a part of the game already, and it already has a [MultiplayerDialogSettings] section in it. So it should be able to be modified right?

You shouldn't mess with the sliders. Take out MinMoney, MaxMoney, MinUnit, MaxUnit and stuff.