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They work in that case for me.

 Crash on battle load.

I could have sworn I'd seen them in a custom battle before, though.

Yeah the trait thing is weird. Its a clean install of Rome Total War Gold Edition on Steam, and its not like you're changed the values, but generals really, really quickly get a laundry list of traits. The amount of unrest is odd as well, but that could just be my memory of vanilla being skewed; I don't remember provinces being stuck with 80% stacks of unrest without having a city full of foreign spies, but if its something that can't be influenced, then its just my memory thats off.

And yes, I'm able to build to T5 temples, at least with the Dragon Island guys, where I noticed it. Its not a problem.

Okay, I ran through the early stages of several campaigns. Here's just a miscellaneous run through of things I encountered.

- "Unrest" is a pretty big problem for a lot of factions to deal with. I don't recall it being a major problem with vanilla RTW so I assume its something thats been modified in. Its not really fun to deal with with any group, but certain factions lack big bonuses to add happiness to settlements or cheap units to sit in cities. A lot of the "barbarian" factions have this problem. This is harder to tell without playing a full playthough, since I also noticed buildings for Barbarian factions were not showing up past the third tier (Dragon Islander's temples are an example). Factions should really have some means of getting at least +75 order in a settlement, even if its a pricy/slow means to do so. Wood Elves in particular look nigh unplayable in the long term. Factions with split starts also have major difficulties with disorder due to "distance to capital" issues.

- Shields are pretty inconsistent. Most units with shields have a shield value of '1', which is basically nothing. Dragon Islander's Long Shields have 5 which is the highest I've seen. Several units do not have shield graphics but have shield armor value, such as Djinni and Knight Errants. Many others have shields but have 0 shield value such as Eastern Spears and Hobgoblins. Shield values in general seem to be either low or nonexistant, which makes missile troops very powerful. I've had AI units dissolve while trying to mount a charge into a group of archers. Wood Elf glade riders are also very powerful as well.

- Speaking of the dragon long shields, they seem to have a very high ammo count for their very damaging projectiles. I would imagine since they're pretty heavily based on legionaries, they should only get two. In any case, they basically annihilate any infantry that isnt a berserker unit.

- There are a few units that are very, very powerful, but honestly they're such a blast I don't care. Guys like the the djinn, bright wizards, giants, and those Chaos Dwarf mechanical bulls should have high cost and upkeep though to counter the whole "we can destroy an entire army solo" power factor. They're hilariously fun to watch in action, in any case.

- A few more creative units don't seem to work well with the engine. Araby flying rugs cause problems when they die where enemy units keep trying to fight with them. Landmines in general seem sort of wonky and just don't really fit in, and Walking Woods... well, they're funny when they're running away, in any case.

- As others have noted, there is virtually no income from trade.

- Some of the AI factions are very passive. Skaven, Undead, Dark Elves, Orc, Beastmen, Lizardmen, and Kiev do not expand much at all. Chaos expands quite a bit, but they take a long time to take over the rebel settlements and come into conflict with other factions. I don't know what triggers AI expansiveness, but I think the lack of income from trade and high disorder caused from distance from capitals might have something to do with it.

- Undead probably should start with economic buildings. Their expense of their generals means that they start off with a very tiny income and them and wood elves are the only two factions where the AI attacked my initial provinces. Their start is very difficult. I'm not surprised the AI can't do much with them.

- Generals gain an excessive amount of traits.

- AI Tomb Kings run roughshod over AI Araby very quickly every time I play.

I'll add more to this post later as I continue playing. I know there's stuff I forgot to write down. I'm having a lot of fun with this, I hope you continue to work on it.

e: Also sorry if some of the stuff I'm writing are things you can't modify at all. I know there's a lot of things hardcoded like the CAI and other mechanics, but I don't know how much you're able to influence or mitigate, so I'm just writing whatever I encounter that seems off.

I played some Dark Elves!

Corsairs have the same stats as the Dark Elf Spears, down to the "effective against cavalry" boon. Corsairs don't have "fast run speed". If corsairs were some kind of light skirmishers or something it'd balance out the Dark Elf early roster better. I assume. Unless there's something I'm missing.

Speaking of corsairs... its a bit obvious and I also guess it's impossible to deal with in the engine, but the Dark Elves are actually in a pretty awful position to try sea based attacks. Their unique boats are fast but thanks to engine quirks, they cant move armies any faster than a regular boat, so its a bit difficult to move your armies where you want them to be due to all the empty space. Its a very, very isolated start.  A very low pressure early game. You could probably get most of your victory provinces just taking over the north before fighting the High Elves.

As it is, the early Dark Elf game is... kind of anemic. Lots of moving infantry armies around in vast empty jungles to pick fights with rebel villages. If the beastmen/undead in the region were a bit more aggressive it'd make things pretty dicey, but they're content to sit back and not do much. High Elves are expansionist, though.

Cavalry are expensive enough that I haven't really sprung for them, so I haven't got the full Dark Elf army experience. Dark Elf armies don't have any glaring problems; compared to tomb kings their units are smaller and more expensive and don't offer much in return, but on their own, they're well rounded and I didn't see anything that leapt out aside from the corsair/spearelf similarities. Crossbowelves are pretty effective so far but are not overpowered. Witch Elves don't actually make any noise when using the Screeching ability. New World Natives carry large shields and have no armor, but have something like 4 armor and 0 shield.

Will add more as I continue to play.

e: Actually expanding north is very painful. Bloodletters are very strong units. Berserk in general is a very powerful trait, especially on large units with a lot of armor. Had an army fight outnumbered against them and be annihlated, then had a larger force with Cold Ones and light cavalry support, and I still very nearly managed to lose, only scraping by due to gradually wearing them down with constant crossbow fire and cavalry charges. I don't think I lost a single field battle as Skaven, but with Dark Elves, I've lost around four.

Looking at custom battles, there's a few factions without a super powerful unit. Dark Elves have a well balanced force, but its not much compared to things like Bright Wizards, mechanical Taruses, Jezail spam, or other units capable of destroying armies fairly easially. Also, there's a few more "hacked together" units that, while fun concepts, don't work well in practice. Flying Carpets get a nasty bug where enemy units still try to fight with them when they're dead, landmines should probably only be capable of "shooting" once since as it is they're real terrors. Walking Woods just... well, they look really funny in action and when routing, at least.

Also the naval AI for the rebels cheats a bit. They will path from anywhere in the ocean to attack a boat sitting in some forgotten cove; I have a nice screenshot of about 6 rebel navies in my waters, having come there from all across the world to pick a fight with my one naval unit.

And that's likely the end of my Skaven campaign due to a persistent crash bug. No idea whats causing it.

Save is here: https://mega.co.nz/#!1Yw1UKgS!aox_FkG5WVnCYWLw3UwQ0WQGVZIzBcx6lpmx0dloUjY

Complete the turn in whatever way, game crash is during the turn change.

e: More specifically, during the Hordes of Chaos' turn. I watched the AI movement with toggle_fow off and it didn't really give any clues.
Also noting that faction income seems to be pretty low. It seems off when the skaven find themselves outnumbered more often than not due to income limitations.

e2: Reloaded an earlier save, was able to play past date. Seems to be a problem with RTW instead of this mod.

e3: I'm having tremendous problems with Unrest, which frequently sits 50-80% in all my provinces. I'm not sure what exactly is causing this, but this combined with the 80% distance penelty means that expansion in Lustria as skaven is a huge pain.

e4: Characters are getting a crazy amount of traits. Its very excessive. All of the ones I've seen have enough that you have to scroll down to see all of them.

e5: Completed Skaven campaign. Tried out the majority of their units as well. They're a weak faction right now due to the amount of unrest and the high upkeep of their troops; you have to station large bodies of skavenslaves in cities to keep them calm, which costs a very large amount of money. Lord help you if you capture anything bigger than a large town; the culture penalty will make things absolutely wretched. Building the "farm" chain with them is a major trap right now since the last thing you want to do is encourage growth since it just leads to very large and angry settlements. Skyre buildings are pretty awful as well since they give big bonuses to growth without much in the way of order; I could only maintain a select few and those settlements produced the bulk of my fighting force with jezails. Clanrats are pretty awful which is fitting, but their unit sizes are actually not that large. Other special building units are cool as well.

Dealing with order problems is a real unfun headache. If it was meant as a means to add difficulty, I'd rather just have the AI get free money to build doomstacks with than have to sit around for twenty turns trying to deal with boring and frustrating city management issues. I'd even spring for buildings that reduce population growth or have some sort of trade off that would make it so I don't have to deal with a sea of blue and red faces glaring up at me at the start of every turn.

On the factions I fought and AI behavior: AI never started a war with me. They were pretty easy to ally with. Did not see any braindead army compositions. I liked the faux Italian's names, but unfortunatly their roster is really, really vulnerable to jezails. I destroyed them fairly easially because of that. Their cavalry is pretty strong; I found the skaven actually can't deal with heavy cavalry that well (at least without Stormvermin); my solution was to engage them with fodder and flank them with guns, which tended to kill everyone involved, which was okay with me.

High Elves gave me problems with their Silver Helms cavalry, since they had high morale and only half of them tended to die by the time they reached my guns. Took over their island, which was very slow going since I couldn't move my armies from cities without sparking revolt, despite said cities having been exterminated down to 400 (very irritated) people.

Tomb Kings are flat out nuts. I only fought them a bit before winning, so I started a campaign as them. Mother of Mithra, they are good. Huge! units of skeletons which are basically immune to morale effects. Said skeletons are no slouches and are in fact superior to several standard infantry statwise. Units are very cheap and spammable. Stability wasn't an issue for the short amount of time I played, but I'd imagine it'd get worse as time went on since they only get 10% order bonus more than skaven and get to deal with a whole lot more buildings that lead to city growth aka never ending pain. Notable though that the two Tomb buildings can be built alongside many faction's "temples". Taking tomb cities as skaven was pretty awesome due to that. I had all my taxes on low and built any building I could, and even with maintaining two stacks I found myself with 5k or more at the end of turns I could waste on mercs. Enemies tended to break on contact due to combination of the scariness of the undead units / flaming arrows / chariots. All battles hilariously one sided. I could probably finish this campaign in less than two hours at this point and I only started an hour ago.

I started playing a Skaven campaign.

I'm going to echo what others said: the upkeep for units is pretty wonky right now. Skavenslaves are only really good for population reduction, the 160 upkeep is pretty damn brutal. The skaven starting position is pretty painful as well due to distance penalties. I wound up just only keeping the Lustrian province and letting the other two non-capital cities revolt since the cost-benefit didnt work out in their favor. In lieu of using early skaven units, I just used merc forces. I'd imagine later game skaven armies would be mainly stormvermin rather than bothering with any of the lower tier units just due to upkeep price.

The starting skaven leader is an absolute monster, and his unit is by far the best unit in their starting roster. Its ironicially really difficult to use horde strats. as skaven just due to their crappy early economy and expensive unit maintenance, so the early battles with rebels, I was outnumbered and only won due to how great his unit was.

Also skaven generals that come with the level 3 settlement only cost 50 gold, which means you could probably make an army out of generals. Itd let you avoid having to build up any of the skaven recruitment buildings but it would be incredibly silly. Probably be annoying since you'd lose your entire unit if the warlord died and skaven generals get that -1 hp trait.

Skaven jezails are broken. Their high damage combined with their armor pen. and high accuracy results in them murdering anything and everything by themselves. Took a rebel province and two of them killed 732 rebels and the rest of my army killed... 28. And at only 100 upkeep, they're no pain to keep around. They made my entire force redundant. Maybe if they shot a lot slower?

Skaven don't get too many +happiness buildings and quite a few population boosters, so I'd imagine later in the game that revolts would be a constant problem, especially in the far flung provinces. Having that combined with cheap skavenslaves would actually work out okay, since it'd encourage players to recruit masses of units for the purpose of having them die horribly.

The flavor text is nice, and the units look good. No problems with the map so far, or any sort of glaring issues on the campaign side. I'd wonder if it'd be a better move to change some of the more far flung factions into seperate factions, just due to how big of a pain the huge distance to capital penalty is. Probably already at the limit, though.

e: You cannot recruit stormvermin! Well you can, but they all count as generals! At only 50 gold. Clanrat spears cost 150! Same upkeep too. Swords cost 100 but only have 120 upkeep. This probably should be looked at.

Had a battle against Araby. They brought 2200 men. I brought 500 rats, with 320 of them being jeezails. They lost. I'm not even that good at exploiting Total War AI: jezails are just brutal. The only thing that can touch them is cavalry, and even then, they have pretty high stats for fighting in melee.

Also speaking of stats, everything with a shield I've seen has only 1 shield defense. Not sure if that is intended. It probably contributes a lot to what makes jezails nasty: usually units get 2x bonus to their sheild defense, which doesn't amount to much. Meanwhile, armor only counts half for them due to their AP ability, and they do a very large amount of missle fire damage. Did I mention jezails are broken yet? :V

Giant rats bark! Its adorable. They're also very, very good for their cost.

Hi, I've been following the development of this mod for quite some time. Registered today since I'd like to ask to playtest. I don't have much qualifications other than I've played too much total war and I am pretty decent at writing reports when things break.

I was planning on first trying out a short campaign or two, and then spend an inordinate amount of time trying to break as much as I can, gameplay wise.