Actually...taking another look, remerging my default replacements, clearing my caches and reloading my game they are now loading in .dbc files. I think I may have had some conflicts as I removed some files when I remerged.

Just wanted to mention that I followed Anach's tutorial for creating .dbc archives and have also had extremely positive results.

My game, before doing what was suggested was slow and sluggish with horrendous load times. CAS/Build/Buy modes were almost unplayable. My game now loads quickly with no in-game lag and no negative side effects. All my cc is showing and working as it should.

I am a complete novice when it comes to using s3pe but by following the guide posted by Anach I found the process to be relatively painless. I now have a total of 9 categorized .dbc files which I merged 1,4009 .package files into . The only .package files I left untouched were hacks and careers and any default replacements as I noticed they didn't work when I merged them.

Thankyou to Anach for sharing his experiment as I now have my game back and am enjoying playing for the first time since I patched...actually I think it's even running better than it was pre-patch! :-)