Hello there!
Ever since Rome II released back in 2013, I always knew that the game and especially the artwork (UI, 3D assets, overall presentation etc) could have been way better. I always used mods to try and improve the visual experience to get myself more immersed into the game. In 2015, I finally decided - because there were some mods I desired which didn't exist - that I was going to take the plunge and learn how to mod the Total War games. I started off small by working on a few UI replacement mods such as
Promotional Loading Images (not on TWC at the moment - I wasn't on TWC at the time of its release). The most ambitious UI replacement mod I did was
Attila-Style Building Icons; hundreds of unique building artwork done in the style of Total War: ATTILA's created using a combination of ingame screenshots and digital painting in Photoshop. It was also the first mod I made a thread for on TWC to track progress. Upon its initial release, featuring only the Romans, it was also recognised and nominated as a contender for CA's "
Best Graphical Mod - 2015" award. After I finished the mod at the time (mostly - there were only a handful of building branches I hadn't done for specific factions), I then thought - since I was at university doing my Games Art & Design course, where I was getting more and more proficient at 3D art and other technical art skills - that I should get into making
more ambitious mods.
My first attempt at doing something completely new / experimental for Rome II modding was the
Movie Events + Intro Videos mod, which started out as a submod for
Divide et Impera. While I discovered that it was possible to get movies into the game, I also discovered that new audio was absolutely not possible to implement and / or be triggered by a new file, which was a shame - I had to get creative and use soundboards, which not many people liked having to use.
I decided that the next project would have to be 100% possible to do while also allowing me to flex my newly acquired 3D skills. I couldn't really find much, until CA returned to the game after around 3 years of inactivity with
Patch 18 (Empire Divided). This patch, while appearing rather shallow at face-value and mostly just implementing the new campaign DLC, actually fixed and altered a few things that not many people would have appreciated. One of the biggest I realised was that the age / rank / season appearance swapping, which was in Attila (and I believe Shogun 2 as well), had been fixed. This potentially allowed for a new type of campaign agent visual appearance mod which I really wanted to become a reality, to bring back that feeling of connection to your important characters that was present in older titles such as Rome and Medieval II, rather stay as a dream. So, for about three months I worked on it through the spare time I had, while also working on a couple of new assets (e.g. heads) and a whole load of model edits / re-textures to get them as perfect as I could possible get them to be.
That mod became
AAA Generals, solely focusing on the Roman campaign characters initially, and has been probably the biggest recent mod I've ever released - over 17,000 subscribers / 1,000 likes on the Steam Workshop item alone in just 3 months and still increasing by around 100 - 200 subscribers / 5 - 10 likes every day (occasionally 400 - 500 / 10 - 15 likes if promoted by somebody externally or a major event affecting the player numbers of the game occurs). I didn't think the mod would receive that amount of attention and was shocked that something I had made had received such a large and positive response in a short amount of time. I knew I had hit something which was original, even though the core concept of it wasn't (i.e. a leader unit re-skin mod). So, I decided that it should become a series of mods - I still have
Hellenic (incl. Spartan, Athenian, Macedonian, Egyptian, Baktrian etc),
Barbarian (incl. Briton, Gallic, German, Iberian etc),
Eastern and
other (incl. Latins, Etruscans etc) cultures to cover since I had only done the
Romans. I renamed that released mod to
AAA Generals: Rome, worked on it for an extra month to give it more polish based on user feedback and then got down to working on the next one.
Around the time I had settled to work on Egyptians, but an announcement popped up - another campaign DLC was being released soon, called
Rise of the Republic. I postponed the Egyptians and got to work on that mod using the unreleased assets and db tables from a closed beta key given to me by someone (cannot tell who). It came out in early-mid August, called
AAA Generals: Rise of the Republic. While not 100% finished (i.e. just featuring the Romans, again), I thought it was good for people to use temporarily so that I could add and expand to it over time. I'm still working on it here and there - the next culture groups to be added for the campaign that mod focuses on will be the Etruscans and Greeks. I also released a quick mod bringing back the male variations of the "Spy" campaign agent class as well in the
Male Spies for Romans / Greeks when I discovered there were hidden voice + other files related to them not being utilised for some reason.
Now 2 months after the release of
AAA Generals: Rome, I was getting a lot of requests for
Greeks. However, I had set a personal goal to do the
Egyptians first, so I got to working on them before the Greeks. This time I really wanted to add in some entirely new assets for them to make use of and to add more original stuff to my
3D Art portfolio and for practice. Doing this sort of thing would significantly increase the file size of the mod, and back then I would have rather added the Egyptians as part of a massive AAA Generals:
Hellenic mod. However, the Steam Workshop only allowed a certain file size limit (around 300MB - 400MB) and I'd prefer to release mods on the Steam Workshop until the mod is 100% finished, so I decided to work on lots of smaller releases leading up to one big finished mod to eventually release on TWC. By some miracle CA decided, a few weeks ago, to
un-limit the file sizes on Rome II's Steam Workshop. I now no longer need to work on lots of smaller little mods per faction anymore, but only a few big releases covering the main culture types (with an eventual big, combined version). So, I'm no longer working on
AAA Generals: Egypt, but
AAA Generals: Greeks - I've recently released a WIP thread on TWC showing a few bits of the finished work so far on the Egyptians a few days ago and am currently working on a whole lot more to make this mod truly feel unique and try to meet the standards that CA would expect of their 3D Artists as much as I can.
In the future I plan to go back and update a few of my older mods, such as
Attila-Style Building Icons (do new ones for
Empire Divided +
Desert Kingdoms +
Rise of the Republic and do a separate version for
Divide et Impera) and
Movie Events + Intro Videos (for that one, I'm trying to figure out an easier method to trigger audio rather than manual soundboards - once I've figured out how to get it working automatically, I will come back to the mod and also work on my own cutscenes), finish the AAA series for Rome II (any TW games with the age / rank / season functionality can be given the AAA treatment for their characters, so that includes Attila, Thrones of Britannia and (I think) Shogun 2 or the Warhammer series) and continue to work on more experimental / original mods or ones which involve creating entirely new assets to improve the visual diversity of the original game (e.g. Celticus' visual overhaul mods; I'm in constant contact with him and making some new models for him to texture).
Anyway, that's my story on how I got into TWC + TW modding (
Rome II era)!
Thanks for reading,
Ben
[Artifex] Benjin (Patron: z3n)
Pillaging and Plundering since 2006
Originally Posted by Elfdude
