Phew! By systematically adding mods one at a time, I narrowed it down to the ns2stats mod. That broke everything. I removed that, and now all is well. Yay!
I set it to my normal \config path which houses all of my other configurations. It doesn't seem to have any effect on the "verify your game cache" error. I tried deleting all mods, and the server works just fine with just ns2, so It has to be an err…
Renting a server currently. For some reason I keep getting "verify game cache". Where should -config_path point on a rented server? I don't seem to have a \ns2\combat folder or anything.