Do you think it would be best not to use the extra names submod to not break anything?
Apparently, it is. Report the issue to Ostrich-Hungry on mod.io, I guess? Although it's not as clear-cut, since it'll conflict with
some version, either the WIP one or the current release.
As to the "yes", when I installed xcom from steam years ago on my desktop I think I installed it in a seperate area outside of program files, is this necessary here?
Program Files can sometimes be screwy, since it's a protected directory. Don't know if it's truly necessary, though.
BTW Is there any "manual" sort of place to see what are recommended settings/hotkeys/other such things like utilizing special features added such as searches and other shortcuts added in the game
Forced and recommended settings: open up 'vars_XCOMFILES.rul' in a text editor and look for 'fixedUserOptions' (enforced with an iron fist) and 'recommendedUserOptions' (turned on upon activation of the mod, can be freely toggled later).
Hotkeys have pedia articles. A more comprehensive list of 'secrets' can be found
here.
Most other stuff is either self-explanatory or can be found by fiddling with advanced options.
By the way, my screen resolution is 1366x768, but when I put that in the game everything is quite stretched and blown up. Do people have any recommendations on video settings?
Is this what the scaling option is for?
Use windowed or borderless mode.
Scaling is there to provide 'zoom', indeed. Multipliers are straight up what it says on the tin, multipliers to the original 320x200 resolution. Personally, I use 480x300 for Geoscape (slightly zoomed out, allows you to see some extra UI and the base UI isn't as "in your face") and 3x for Battlescape (about as zoomed in as you can be - to see the details - while still seeing a reasonable amount of the map; I guess 2x might be better if you want more of the latter). Well, since your resolution is smaller than mine, perhaps 2x is indeed the way to go.
When I click a button as described in the screenshot, the game just closes, I only started getting this error after I turned off "Lazy Loading" setting, but now I can't get back in to turn it back on or turn the other mods off!
Delete your options.cfg, or edit it and change either lazy loading or active mods.