[RELEASE] Rome 2 - Ancient Empires: Divide et Impera - Updated 2/13/16

[ABH2]

Last Update: November 27th, 2015 - 6:30AM

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Introduction and New Features

The Ancient Empires mod is pleased to bring you our first officia release for Rome 2. Ancient Empires: Divide et Impera is a submod for DeI that brings with it a host of new features and options. It is meant to be run with DeI as an official submod. We would like to thank the DeI team once again for partnering with us and giving us the opportunity to build our Rome 2 work around their wonderful mod. We have done that to the best of our abilities. These new features should be fully compatible with DeI's new scripts and features. The new features you can expect:

• The Imperator Augustus map for the Grand Campaign. This brings with it 14 new regions with Syracuse and Jerusalem being walled faction capitals.
• A host of new factions for the Grand Campaign and Imperator Augustus map to include the Aetolian League, the Volcae Tectosages, the Mauryan Empire (changed slightly from DeI's equivalent), the Massylii, and several other playable factions to go along with all of those currently released by the DeI team. The IA campaign has a number of new factions added to more accurately reflect the time period.
• Fully functioning civil wars for the new factions and DeI's new playables (hopefully).
• A completely reworked 1HP combat system.
• Streamlined and simplified stats for all units. They now work on a smaller scale.
• Closer deployment zones.
• New emergent faction mechanic. This essentially means each region in the GC and IA campaigns has its own set of functioning rebels. Each region can be liberated. Rebels should be more dangerous and capable of engaging in diplomacy. This means 187 new factions can be brought into the campaign to create a more dynamic and natural experience.
• New region base effects across the board.
• New food scale to go with each region having its own base food to work with DeI's new supply system (for 1.1). You will no longer reach max growth with just 20+ food surplus.
• 80+ new religions that now represent something closer to political influence. PLEASE CLICK THIS LINK FOR FURTHER EXPLANATION.
• A slowed down campaign experience - cultural conversion will be much slower paced.
• New AI buffs.
• Increased movement range for all forces. This makes for more aggressive AI, though it is the opposite approach taken by many mods trying to slow down the campaign.
• New seasonal effects including the cancellation of recruitment during winter.
• Strategic edict governance mod, to include sell slaves.

Bugs and Issues

This is a beta. I expect their to be quite a few pugs and it currently lacks some polish. For instance, a few faction descriptions and faction selection maps need redoing. If you see a bug or have a suggestion, please report it in this thread or on the Steam download page. Please, be as detailed as possible on crashes and, if possible, even include your save game file.

Known Bugs and Issues:

• Imperator Augustus campaign still has some vanilla units.
• Short on starting armies in Grand Campaign.

Future Development

Right now, our full mod has not been ported over into DeI. That process will take time and keeping up with DeI's release schedule can cause issues. In some cases, we just have to make some decisions on whether we want or need to bring it in. In future relesaes, we still hope to do the following:

• Bring in some of our new units intermixed with DeI's and their new components.
• Add in custom Aetolian League roster.
• Readjust starting armies for Grand Campaign. Beef up a few spots, try to add in armies for certain factions, and fix a few garrisons.

Credits and Acknowledgements

A host of modders have given us permission to use their work and/or contributed to the mod as a whole. Unfortunately, we have not have been able to include all of their work just yet (units have been left out here, for instance). The people listed below are the ones whose work has made it into this release. We can't thank them enough.

Once again, the Divide et Impera team for their generosity. Various members of DeI assisted us in making our work compatible with theirs. It is great to work with a modding team that has such a great attitude and willingness to cooperate with the community.

The core members of our team who worked on this - I can't thank them enough. Petellius, Philip/Sheridan, and UMCenturion. Petellius and Philip have stuck with the development of our Rome 2 project since nearly the beginning demonstrating great loyalty and commitment while producing top notch work for the battle overhaul. They waited patiently for their work to be released to the public while I toiled away on the campaign aspects. This project would have been long dead without them. Both could have joined other projects, but they believed in this one and stuck with it.

Noif
Noif is a prolific modder who has done quite a bit of new faction icons for both Rome 2 and Attila. He granted us permission to make use of his work in our mod, and they were essential to completing our emergent faction concept. He did this at a time when our mod was still small and relatively unknown, and we can't thank him enough for the permission. His work has been featured in our emergent faction preview, and you have probably seen glimpses of it in the Youtube videos and such.

Melcor
Melcor is the creator of the Romani UI mod and worked on the Haegemonia overhaul mod. He will be working on 2D artwork for the mod to include UI features and textures. We are very glad to have him on board.

Daruwind
Daruwind is a modder who focuses primarily on DB editing. In the past he has released mods that tweaked naval mechanics and created more in-depth victory conditions. However, his primary focus is a complete overhaul of the game's resource system based on the Meaningful Resources mod. He will release his own standalone project that will add a number of changes to buildings separate from our work, but his work will be integrated into Antiqua Imperium and is vital to the project. He is a very knowledgeable modder who is also great to bounce ideas off of. We are very happy to have him on board and helping us.

Ghsi001
Ghsi is the creator of his own overhaul, The Great Revolt of 69 AD, and has been assisting us with research and creating more variety in names to include the creation of new culture groups (such as for the Mauryans, splitting up Celtic/Iberian etc.) and will hopefully assist with some DB tasks in the future.

Occhi di Davide
These two granted us permission to include their awesome better water mod. This is a small mod that improves the visuals quite a bit. We may remove this if people have issues with it. I personally don't play without it, and like to showcase it, but it's readily compatible with all mods.

Phalangitis
For granting us permission to make use of his sell your slave edict mod.

The Europa Barbourum II team for granting us permission to use their work. Some of their faction icons will be seen in here.

[ABH2]

Raw Data (For Modders)

Making Startpos Mods

This is for experienced modders only. The data and (basic) instructions below will allow people to use our raw data files to construct their own startpos's and submods (or own mods) with our startpos, if they would like to do so. If someone wanted to edit out our new religions, for instance, they could do that with the data below. For now, he tutorial will be short because this is a task best left to experienced modders who know their way around the startpos. I don't know how many or if anyone will make use of it, but it's up to them. Someone could, if they are capable, make a version of our startpos for other overhaul mods for Radius or some other overhaul. That's completely their prerogative.

DeI Startpos Compilation Pack
This pack file is all you will need in your data folder to compile a new startpos. Have no other mods in that folder when you run BOB! This means remove DeI, remove ours, and any other mod you may be running. This pack isn't meant for playing a campaign, but merely utilitarian.

Assembly Kit Raw Data - Grand Campaign and rest of DB
These files are to be pasted in the assembly_kit/raw_data directory. Replace the old files. This will set up your Assembly Kit the next time you load it up with all of the changes I made. This will include barebones creation of all of DeI's units, buildings (to include garrisons), religions, various effects related to buildings etc. Basically, most of the content from our mod, but EVERYTHING that is needed to generate a startpos is in this raw data. All of the new factions, crucially. This is for the Grand Campaign on the Imperator Augustus map only. Since we use the same map for both campaigns, we have to change out our raw data files to edit one or the other.

Assembly Kit Raw Data - Imperator Augustus Campaign
This simply contains the startpos_ raw data files for the Imperator Augustus Map. Copy and paste this over the startpos raw data files you use for the Grand Campaign above. To edit one or the other, you simply need to change out these startpos files. So, obviously, back up your changes.

Post-Compilation Editing - Download link for the decompiled startpos data done for you (includes brief tuturial on the editing of the startpos data)
Click here for the tutorial on Startpos decompilation/compilation
This part requires third-party mod tools that are little used by most modders, but not overly complex. The tutorial is very clear on how to use them. To be clear, there are two features or changes to our startpos that get implemented outside of BOB:

• Adding in the starting value of religions to the regions (don't know why, but I cannot get BOB to compile them - probably because we have so many. This needs to be done for both the Grand Campaign and Imperator Augustus maps if you want to keep our religions in both campaigns.
• Victory conditions for all the factions. This needs to be done only for the Grand Campaign.

Recommended Mods

Authentic Ancient World Music Packs

Steam Version
Part I | Part II | Part III | Part IV

Non-Steam Link: Coming Soon!

From the Editor

Dear Friends What should I say? We had the permission to bring the sound of four awesome games and modifications from the legendary Total War eras to Total War: Rome II. What did we do? We did it. You are asking yourself if this is all? Not enough, we are already working on Authentic Ancient World specific tracks. I would like to thank Audiokinetic and CA for enabling us to modify audio files and to Mackles for his awesome audio tutorial and support. The entire music pack contains exactly 200 tracks which are divided and equally distributed into the four in-game culture groups barbarian, eastern, greek and roman. The majority of the tracks come from Roma Surrectum II and are supplemented with the most awesome pieces from Rome: Total War, Europa Barbarorum and Rome: Total Realism VII. Very special thanks go to all the awesome composers who granted us the permission to make use of their legendary tunes. Cheers Alec

Credits

All those awesome composers have made this massive project possible: Europa Barbarorum Ancient Music Ireland (www.ancientmusicireland.com) Morgan Casey (www.morgancasey.com) Musica Romana (www.musica-romana.de) Nick Wylie (www.soundcloud.com/nickwylie/) The Persian Cataphract Roma Surrectum II apple Arn Elendil of Númenor Garv Marios Aristopoulos (www.marios-aristopoulos.com) Roma: Total Realism VII A. Rodriguez Alex McGery hollowfaith Rome: Total War Angela van Dyck Jeff van Dyck (www.jeffvandyck.com) Saki Kaskas (www.soundcloud.com/saki-kaskas/) I think we can't thank those awesome people enough for granting us permission to use their work for Authentic Ancient World and Total War: Rome II.

Youtube Playlists

Roma Surrectum II - Sound Track (YouTube Playlist) Roma Surrectum II - Best Soundtracks Playlist (YouTube Playlist) Rome Total War Soundtracks (YouTube Playlist) Europa Barbarorum - Soundtrack (YouTube Playlist) Rome Total Realism - Best Soundtrack Playlist (YouTube Playlist)

[Caddius]

*slow clap*

It's time to start a new Rome II campaign, apparently.

[ABH2]

Hopefully it's enjoyable, kinks and all. I'm more hoping my rough campaign is up to par with the battle system.

I'm uploading a fix right now on Steam, the whole Google Drive version will be replaced, as well. It will be necessary to re-start any campaign. It should only be a few moments until it's updated, though.

[the lightning legion]

man that sound track brings back memories

[ABH2]

It's a great music mod, in my view. The Authentic Ancient World mod didn't amount to much, but it did produce a great music mod with only a slight bug. It's what I hope to be able to do for Attila.

[Tyso3]

Currently music mods are on hold for attila. From my inside CA source, it appears CA did not wish to renew licenses for modders this time around for atilla for multiple reasons (including the immense costs), So the chance of it happening is doubtful, but not impossible (ive had a mod ready for production since Atilla came out lol).

Wwise is a very powerful audio program and in theory, you could modify the music or audio of any game using the 'capture' mode in wwise, but ive never got the grasp of it.

[Denco]

Congratulations on the release. Can't wait to test it when I find some free time

[Little Legionaire]

Gratz mates!

[The Wandering Storyteller]

ABH very impressed , love this mod, and is this some sort of early concept to give us an idea of what the Attila campaign may look like in future?

But how do you play this mod? I play Parthia and immideatly any building I wanna construct it has -2 food.

[Petellius]

Yes this is a very early version of what well present in Attila.

Also all campaign problems will slowly be buffed out as this its something of a beta

[ABH2]

But how do you play this mod? I play Parthia and immideatly any building I wanna construct it has -2 food.

By planning. The balance is an issue at this point, but there's a lot more food throughout the campaign do to the region effects.

[Petellius]

Here everybody, have a taste of the mod through these beautiful screenshots (also use some for steam ABH, if you don't like them I'll do some more as these were only quick ones).

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

[generalgui]

Congratulation for this first release !

I have one question... is it possible to you to send us the location table like dresden did here http://www.twcenter.net/forums/showt...1-02%29/page13 please?

Because we don't want to download the english location for Rome 2, it's easier to add your location inside a mini mod for each langage...(even if it's still in english + german or english + french ect, but it's better than a big blank ...)

Thank you !

[Petellius]

Sure. I don't see why ABH would refuse

[ABH2]

I have one question... is it possible to you to send us the location table like dresden did here http://www.twcenter.net/forums/showt...1-02%29/page13 please?

If I understand you right, you just want a pack file with the .loc files, right?

I can and will do that. Though, I'm going to update them here in a day or so with one change, so I think its better to hold off until I do so.

[generalgui]

If I understand you right, you just want a pack file with the .loc files, right?

I can and will do that. Though, I'm going to update them here in a day or so with one change, so I think its better to hold off until I do so.

Yes it is. Thank you

[Linke]

I played last night and liked it a lot as Armenia, but rename Tigranocerta to Van or Tuushpa and I think the traits are broken.
Also movement is just a bit to high even though I like large movement, but reduce it maybe by 1/3?

[SharpEyed]

Gratz on your 1st release guys!

And I think images look good enough for now Petellius, good job

[vpapako]

Congrats guys this is amazing. I tried it and here is some first feedback. I played the first campaign battle I got the chance to as the Romans against Syracuse and Carthage in Sicily. The thing that troubled me was morale. No unit ever broke. All units stood and fought to the last man, even if surrounded, even with cavalry charging at their back, which inflicted very little kills (the cavalry charge). Next I played a custom battle of Rome vs Macedon. The thing I noticed was that several of Macedon's units were in fact Bactrian. This is what I got so far, I will check it again when I get the chance, it does look great though.