File format
Where everything lives, and what the two big community mods actually change.
.mpq
Lords of Magic keeps its scripts, images and sprites in MPQ archives — the same container format Blizzard used in that era, and the reason off-the-shelf tools can open them at all. Every archive in the three installs studied has been listed and compared without modifying anything.
Measured
It adds three scripts and makes token-level edits in thirteen more. Its picture archive is byte-for-byte identical to the retail one, so nothing visual changed.
It also restores real filenames for 363 archive entries that are anonymous in the retail listing — a cataloguing improvement rather than a gameplay one, and a genuinely useful one for anyone reading the scripts.
Measured
The larger balance project replaces whole subsystems with parallel files and adds or replaces hundreds of images. Retail and 3.02 can be diffed script by script; this one has to be studied a subsystem at a time, because names, layout, code and art all moved together.
Measured
One archive contains two entries whose names differ only in letter case. Extracting it onto a case-insensitive filesystem silently produces one fewer file than the archive contains, because one overwrites the other. The inventory keeps both entries in its manifest and says which one lost.
Named as open rather than guessed at.