Creating a custom main campaign?

[trenchwirez]

First of all, sorry for the newb question as I have no Total War modding experience, always too busy playing the games and all the great mods to try my own hand...

I am just thinking how cool it would be to create my own custom campaign in Rome II-- what I have in mind would initially have no modifications to the factions or units themselves, but it would have a new map with different geography and new settlements. Probably I would start off pretty basic with a smaller map and a far smaller number, say 5-7 factions.

So a few questions I would hope experienced people might address:

1) is this possible with Rome II? I've seen it done in RTW and M2 at least, usually with the great total conversion mods for those games, i.e. EB, Broken Crescent, LotR Third Age...

2) Given the tools available, how difficult and time-consuming would it be to do this?

3) what tools would you recommend using?

4) particular difficulties and things to keep in mind?

[AngryTitusPullo]

1) Not possible currently.

2) No available too. Editing yes but not compiing back to make playable version.

3) 3dsmax for map editing. Of course we need the correct plugins which do not exist as far as I'm aware.

4) Time consuming if the tool exist. We wait for 6 December to know more should there be any tools.

If you're interested you can try to mod Shogun 2 which have all the important tools to create new map. If you can finish it in a year then expect Rome II to take 3 years maybe.

[trenchwirez]

Thanks LestaT, good to have an idea of what's feasible. I'm interested in the relationship between the campaign and battle maps-- do you really have to design the terrain for each possible battle location or can you use preset geographic features? For instance in Rome II and Shogun 2 I notice a lot of the settlement battles especially take place on the same "grid" or city/terrain plan, just with different weather and color palettes, etc.