I am trying to bypass the idiot launcher for Age of Wonders 4, because, of course the game works perfectly fine but the launcher crashes. (I have harsh words for the morons at publishers who tell everyone they need the game to have a launcher.) I would like to fix steam so that I can just use my "Age of Wonders 4" game icon to play the game, rather than a separate one.

Anyway, I tried following the advice [here](https://libreddit.totaldarkness.net/r/Steam/comments/jpgfzh/can_i_make_steam_open_a_different_exe_file/) to force steam to run the executable `AOW4.exe` instead of the stupid launcher. However, steam does not seem to want to do this... I have tried a bunch of subtly different alternatives including the full page from `Z:` (which is where it would be in the windows prefix) but no matter what I do steam either seems to do nothing or use the launcher. What am I doing wrong?

On a related note, why does the command take the form `FULL_PATH %command%`? I would have expected it to be `%command% FULL_PATH` (i.e. so that `%command%` is some steam command and the full path is an argument). Is there a complete description anywhere of the logic for the steam launch string?