Using the Europe map in TA?

[damocles88]

I really like this mod - the new units/factions, the new style, everything is wonderful except for one thing - the world map. It's boring. I really hate playing on the map because the cities are so far apart and the landscape is so plain. I know it's based off of the books/fan-fiction, but from a gameplay perspective, the map layout is terrible. It also causes problems - such as the missions to send an emissary in 5 turns, when it takes 6 turns to get all the way there!

I would really like to get the europe map from vanilla medievalII working in TA. I know it's ridiculous from a style/lore perspective, but from a gameplay perspective, the amount of time CA put into making the europe map fun to play would pay huge dividends for my enjoyment of TA.

I've been poking around the files, but I've never really modded a total war game before. It seems the bulk of the data that needs changing is in the imperial_campaign folder. The descr_strat.txt file contains most of the info regarding starting positions, faction names, units, etc. So I'm thinking I could copy most of the imperial_campaign folder from the vanilla game into the TA mod folder, then edit the text files to replace the various european factions with those from TA.

Could someone tell me if this is the right way to do this, or am I barking up the wrong tree?

[axnsan]

you need to copy all the map files (world/maps/base) from vannila to the same folder in tatw. then you need to go in descr_region and change the region color codes there to match the map - but the europe map has more regions, so you would either need to add more regions in descr_regions, or merge some regions in bigger ones (recommended)
then you need to go in world/maps/campaign/imperial_campaign and change all the starting positions in descr_strat (boring work), and that's pretty much it

if you want to change city names you should also go in text/imperial_campaign_regions_and_city_names (or whatever the file is called) and change the text AFTER the {} brackets

[damocles88]

Excellent, thanks axnsan. It sounds like a lot of work, but at least it seems pretty straightforward.