New - asking advice please

[Brennan]

I have come back to RTW after a number of years & recall now what I liked & hated. Looking on on google got me here. I have read the FAQ sticky though the provide links go only to a search page so I assume they have changed?

I have all of RTW vanilla, BI & Alexander installed, plus patches 1.3, 1.5 & 1.6 installed.

I am fiddling with a few things of my own in vanilla - more on that later.

What & where should I download so I can keep vanilla running & allow me a good range of the improvements the mods appear to offer - for ALL the periods / options covered in RTW & its expansions?

Sorry but looking over the threads is both confusing & a bit daunting.

In hopefull expectation,

Brennan

[FlaviusVictor]

Download Total Realism....Vanilla is good but Realism is well worth the sacrifice of Vanilla because it offers better graphics, historical accuracy improvements and a overall much better and detailed game....

[Caesar Augustus]

Welcome to the boards!

As far as I know, all the RTR mods are designed for the RTW 1.6 engine, so you'll have to make some coding amendments (or uninstall Alexander), to be able to play them. However, this is not as daunting as it seems! There are a few stickied threads around which provide excellent instructions on how to run the mods on RTW.

To get a mod to work alongside standard RTW, you need to make sure that you download the modswitch version. The majority of the newer mods come as modswitch, those that are not will require you to install a fresh, unmodded RTW in a new directory and then apply the mod to that version.

RTR Platinum 1.9 is a good place to start in terms of playing mods. It's got a vast campaign map, all the way from Scotland to India and uses most of the faction slots available on the RTW engine.

ExRM is my current mod of choice to play on. It began as a submod of RTR Platinum, but has gone much further than it's humble beginnings. It increases the campaign difficulty by a significant margin. Money can be hard to come by, so you must build wisely, and fight your battles carefully, especially during the early game. Galatia and the Britons both feature in the current version. There is a link in my signature to the ExRM forum if you wish to check it out.

The RTR team has also begun the VII series. The Iberian Conflict (TIC), was the first project of the current team. It's a 20 year long, scripted campaign following Hamilcar Barca's conquest of the Iberian peninsula. Fate of Empires (FOE) is the second in the RTR VII series. The map stretches from Iberia to Epirus, and attempts to accurately portray the situation in the Western Mediterranean circa 280 BC. It's famed for the difficulty of the first battle in the Roman campaign, against Pyrrhus of Epirus. It completely revolutionises the economic system, and includes featurespreviously thought impossible to create on the RTW engine, such as mini regions (as included in Empire Total War). The RTR team is currently working on the final instalment in the series, definitively named RTR VII. This will expand the map of FOE all the way to the westen shores of Asia Minor, and will max out most aspects of the RTW engine. You can find out more about RTR on our wikipedia articles.