G'day Slaine...
ksl's pretty much summed the situation up.
While the DL sticky is in need of an update, all the links you need (except for Hurtgen and Voss.) are in the first post. There are other links in the thread, but these are mainly modified GPO files.
Technically you shouldn't need to DL the mappack (2.3SP_fixed_files.rar) as all the fixes are in 2.4, but it does contain
Goodwood-16, which for some strange reason
didn't make it into 2.4...
Regarding backups, if you've got heaps of HDD space like me, the best thing to do is just copy the
fh2 folder in
...EA Games\Battlefield 2\mods (it's over 4GB). I just leave my backup in the same folder.
If you don't have much space, you can do the same thing with the
levels folder (it's <2GB), and just individually backup other files as you change them. Most of the files we change are in the levels folder so there won't be many others.
If you're
really pressed for space, the minimum level of backing up is making a backup of the
server.zip and
info folder (inside the map folder) for each map you make changes to. The bulk of AI fixes/changes are in the server.zip, sometimes a file is added/edited in the info folder.
@ksl: AFAIK the difficulty scale goes from 0.1 to 1.0.
I'm not sure if setting it higher than that makes any difference, I'd say it's probably just defaulting back to 1.0...I could be wrong though.