Starting mod-nation MP games in text-only mode

[llamabeast]

Bit of a technical question here.

I've been working for a while on my automated PBEM system, which is called the LlamaServer. It's running fine, and has a few games going at the moment. It has the capacity to host far more though (at least 10s I should think, maybe more), and so I want to automate as much of the process of creating and running games as possible.

With a considerable amount of help from Gandalf, I was able to get it to automatically start games once all the pretender files have been received. It goes like this:
- Put all the pretender files in the game directory
- In text mode, tell it to start hosting a new game with that name. It'll then sit there waiting for people to connect and upload pretenders. Given a timeout of zero seconds, it'll immediately give up, then notice a load of pretenders are already in the correct directory, and use them.
- It'll then sit waiting for people to play their turns. Being as this is a PBEM game that isn't what we want, so just kill the process. But the game has now been successfully started.

This all works brilliantly. Thanks Gandalf!

The problem I've now run into is with mod nations. I'm a huge fan of some of the mod nations, particularly Sombre's Ulm Reborn and Vaettiheim SE. So I'd very much like players to be able to choose those nations in my games. The problem is that the above procedure doesn't work for mod nations - the pretender files just don't get noticed.

Doing tests in graphical mode, I've found the following:
- If you go straight to "Setup a dominions server", the mod nations aren't in the list.
- If you first click "Create a new game", then immediately hit Cancel, then do "Setup a dominions server", the mod nations will now be in the list.

So it seems that "Create a new game" makes dominions look at the mods and realise that there are extra nations to include.

So my question is, how can I mimic this in text-only mode? Is there any way of making dominions accept pretenders for mod nations without using the graphical interface?

If anyone has any thoughts they'll be greatly appreciated. Sorry for the long and technical post! It'll be really good if I can get this working.