Rob's Rome Total War REMASTERED Mod collection

[Clockwork]

Hi all,

I'm planning on modding the base game of RTW Remastered very specifically not very much but with changes I really want. If anyone wants to know how I do these things I'm happy to explain.

First off when modding remastered - EDU is there in the data folder but also feral_export_descr_unit and that's the one you want to edit. Conversely, just use export_descr_building as there is no feral_... whatever.

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DONE
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Edited the Pontus pikes to be the same as other pikes.

Replaced pike units with hoplites for Thrace.


Illyrians mercenaries recruitable by Thrace and Macedon.


Balearic Slingers recruitable by Spain.


Elephants recruitable by Numidia



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IDEAS
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I also think their roster is lacking something so I might replace their Greek cav with barbarian cav or I could add in Illyrians to their main roster but they don't exactly need any more flanking infantry so it's less of a gameplay change.

Macedon roster give them hastati but rename them to hypaspists. Or I could rename heavy peltasts to hypaspists.


I currently believe chosen swords are a little too powerful but that's way down on my list as I'm still in two minds about this.


These are about the levels of change I'm going to be making. I'll have a few of these for BI as well probably.

Saxons are getting some unit for sure, ideas very, very welcome for that. At the moment they have one bad spear unit with raider feels, a light horse, a heavy horse, a sword and shield unit and a two handed axe unit. And the lightest bow imaginable.
The intention is to turn them into a true shieldwall faction so I'd like a big heavy shielded spear unit, it'll renamed Goth Spearmen most likely and have them take the formation from saxon keel and lose the schiltron.

EDIT: I want to add a low tier seax infantry as well.

Also apparently they used a javelin called an angon which was thrown at a foe with the intention to stick in shields and cause the enemy to halt. The word has been reclaimed by Brummies also wanting people to stay put, but usually without the javelin throwing.

I have no desire for historical accuracy per se but I don't want it to be ridiculous either.

[Clockwork]

To make Pontus Pikes the same as everyone elses:

Go to the data folder of RR (Rome Remastered). Easiest to right click on the steam entry and then properties and then local files and then click browse.


Navigate to Total War ROME REMASTERED\Contents\Resources\Data\data





Scroll down to this section of that folder and and open feral_export_descr_unit.txt.


To find the unit you're looking for, quickest way is to use ctrl + f to open the find dialogue box. Type in pikemen and then hit enter.





Now this is the unit you want to edit. Mine might have slightly different stats because I undid the changes I made already from memory for that screenshot.


With that unit there being the one you want to edit, now we look for the stats we want to use, so use the find dialogue box to locate the greek pikemen.





The main difference we're looking at are the soldier, stat_pri_armour, formation and stat_cost lines. Either cop and paste those lines or write in the new values on top of the existing ones. I personally wouldn't copy and paste the whole sheet as Pontus Pikemen have better resistance to heat and weakness to cold which I feel is a fair enough difference.


That's it. That's the whole thing.

[Clockwork]

Cool, none of my screenshots came through.


How to replace Pikes with Hoplites for Thrace.


This is a different kind of change, building slightly on the themes of last change.


First of all, we need to make the Hoplite a unit available to Thrace.


Find the hoplite in feral_export_descr_unit -


edit the line:

ownership greek_cities, thrace, slaves


Add in an extra line:

ethnicity thrace, Thrace


Then we can remove the pikes from Thracian roster by removing the same lines from greek_pikemen ; Phalanx Pikemen


After that, the Thracians need a building to recruit the hoplites from and to remove the ability to recruit pikemen.


Open up another text file called export_descr_buildings.txt


Use find to locate the barracks line of buildings.


The muster_field doesn't recruit pikes or hoplites so no need to change that.


The militia_barracks makes greek hoplites but no pikemen. Now we could add in thrace to the factions allowed to recruit hoplites here but if you look there's also a unit for thrace called warband falx thracian and I think that one unit unlocked is enough for this low level barracks so I'm going to leave hoplites just to the greeks for now.


The city_barracks continues to make greek hoplites and also this time it makes greek pikemen. Thracians usually would get pikemen here but we intend to stop that so first of all, next to:
recruit "greek pikemen"  0  requires factions { seleucid, macedon, thrace, } delete 'thrace,' making sure to leave the formatting intact with the space after the trailing comma.
Then next to:
recruit "greek hoplite"  0  requires factions { greek_cities, } add in 'thrace, '  this will make hoplites recruitable and pikemen unavailable in the level 3 barracks. However since the level 4 and 5 barracks are unchanged, the hoplites won't be available to recruit from them as of the moment.


Change that - under army_barracks and royal_barracks make the same changes as described above. Whilst Thrace cannot build a level 5 barracks, they can get one through conquering a territory with one.


Now we have the unit and they're recruitable, test to see them in a custom battle.

You should see that they have a peasant unit card and description model with a black background. What you want to do now is copy the unit card from
Total War ROME REMASTERED\Contents\Resources\Data\data\ui\unit_info\greek_cities called greek_hoplite_info.tga and paste it into the thrace folder.
Then go to Total War ROME REMASTERED\Contents\Resources\Data\data\ui\units\greek_cities and copy the file #greek_hoplite.tga and paste that into the thrace folder.

You can if you lie edit those in a photo editor like photopea or photoshop or equivalent. It's easy enough to recolour and then make sure you save it down with a transparent background. It's not necessary though.

That's all there is to it.

[Clockwork]

Making Balearic Slingers available to Spain and Illyrians available to Thrace and Macedon.

In the feral_export_descr_unit.txt file you can see that the units have ownership spain and ownership macedon, thrace respectively. This means they are recruitable by those factions and we know that because they show up in custom games as mercenaries.


Open export_descr_buildings.txt and add in recruit "merc balearic slingers" 0 requires factions { spain, } and recruit "merc illyrian" 0 requires factions { macedon, thrace, } to the missile line of buildings. For me Catapult Range and Siege Workshop was where I wanted them both to be recruited from. Make sure to add them to the higher level missile buildings as you'll want to be able to recruit them from captured 5th level cities.

[Jubal]

Cool, none of my screenshots came through.

How were you trying to add them/can I help?

[Clockwork]

Maybe, it'd be awesome if you could mate! I was using win+shift+s to screenshot and then paste into the box. They appeared fine while I was typing so thought nothing of it, then when I made the post they were all gone, any ideas?

[Glaurung]

Checking the BBCode, the places where the images should be have turned into very long URLs composed mostly of random characters. I'm not sure whether they're trying to encode the content of the image or just provide an extremely obfuscated URL. Either way, I suspect (1) we probably can't get the images back, and (2) the BBCode img tag wasn't intended to be used like this. I could be wrong, but I think that generally if you want to include images in a forum post you need to host them elsewhere and then add links to them as you're writing the post.

[Tusky]

I could be wrong, but I think that generally if you want to include images in a forum post you need to host them elsewhere and then add links to them as you're writing the post.

You are right. I found the thread that explains the process in a bit of detail:
https://exilian.co.uk/forum/index.php?topic=5352.0

[Clockwork]

Right. Start from scratch again then I guess :/
Thanks all

[Clockwork]

Juuuuuuuuuuub or any other RTW model maker/editor how would I go about changing saxon levy spears and javelins for swords, I'm finding it really difficult to google what I want because I don't know the language to use to find it. Google comes up with a load of debates as to why swords suck and spears are great and a couple of rome 2 mods.

Basically I'm looking to change the saxon levy model to use swords instead of javelins primary and spears secondary but I don't know where to start.

[Jubal]

Hm, this is a thing that might have changed more in the new game. So in the original, you usually had to use 3ds max to open the model files, though I think people later found ways of doing it in blender. Every unit could be given a primary and secondary weapon (secondary generally being for e.g. the close quarters stabby attack).

There were at least in the old version a couple of exceptions, most notably that you could give short or long pikes to literally any phalanx unit just by giving them the relevant flag in EDU. And getting rid of weapons was often simple because you could just alpha-channel them out on the texture.

I guess the question is whether the model files are in the same format as they used to be... I'll share this on the RTW modding discord and see if there's any help to be had there.

[Clockwork]

Thanks that's amazing!


If you're curious to look I could send you the files? Don't feel like you have to solve any of my problems though! Just if you're curious

[Son of the King]

The Remastered models look like the same format as the original models, but I can't test if the importer/exporter works because apparently my 3ds max license has finally expired

[Clockwork]

Ah okay cool!


I'm still poking and tweaking