Hi, I'm an amateur modder and I've been recently modding the Rise of Kings mod for M2TW patch 1.2. As it seems that that mod is dead, I was wondering if anyone here is interested in the things I was able to do. I am a big fan of the first Medieval and would've liked to see the same kind of atmosphere on the campaign map in Medieval 2. Hence, I too have been trying to make Medieval 2 as close as possible to Medieval 1. Some things I've already finished are:

1) The map. The original Rise of Kings map is a much larger map than the vanilla map, and I was able to spread out all the cities so that everything is balanced. And I maxed out the number of provinces so that an army won't spend too much time marching around doing nothing (ie, instead of adding more movement points, I kept it pretty much the same. The difference is that there are so many cities that are not too far from each other that you can move from city to city in no more than two turns, especially in Europe).

2) Also, I saved screenshots of the original medieval 1 map and was able to give each faction the original colors from medieval 1 (ie, just one solid color, no secondary color outlining borders on the campaign map). The only colors I diverged on were The Italians, which I kept the Venetian red but made it darker, the portuguese (because they werent in medieval 1), the russians and the byzantines (i kept it the same)

3) I organized the factions around particular "cultures". Basically, I kept it like medieval 1, with The English, The French, The Germans, The Italians, etc. Since the political kingdoms were just a mess, and since dynastic families are just as bad, I decided to keep it to nationalities, even though they are anachronistic, because it kept things simple, and anyway it's like medieval 1.

4) I changed the time period to be from 1147 (start of the second crusade) to 1517 (the start of the reformation), with 2 turns per year. I gave the French the crusader states, and I have most of christian europe at war with the three muslim factions

5) I am in the process of making merchants more influential. Basically, my idea is to make merchants the main source of income for a country. Anyways, wealth is based on how much resources you control, not necessarily how many cities you have (ie cities need to be near rivers, iron deposits, etc in order to grow into cities). Thus, say if merchants make 70% of your nation's income, then the gameplay suddenly shifts to maintaining your merchant monopolies over resources (ie medieval capitalist cutthroat competition). Thus, you can be alright with a huge army and plenty of cities, but if say venetian merchants keep putting your merchants out of business, your economy is going to drop fast.

6) Lastly, I created a separate Germans faction distinct from the HRE and I united northern italy. This is hopefully to reflect the degree of independence and to some extent outright rebellion of the German Princes and the Italian city-states, such as in the Guelph-Ghibelline conflicts of the time period that I chose. Also, if I gave Germany to the HRE, then it would simply have too many provinces.

What I would like: anyone who can add in factions totally, with faction specific units. I can work on the 2d stuff like the menu and the campaign map banners, but I cannot work on unit skins, battle banners, unit cards, etc.

If anyone is interested I'll be checking this later. If not I guess I'll just keep modding.