For the 0 people interested, I took the next step with the graphics for my mod.

Last night (or rather, early this morning), I modded a set of shields for "Princess Luna's Guard". However, fancy shields could not save them from the wrath of the Kluddargos. My Iceni run riot over them.

As an amateur modder, and one who has pretty much 0 experience of actually modding a games models (Beyond using the GECK for the Fallout games), this is new territory for me. Again, I give the obligatory point to takeR's excellent Greek Mythology Unit Pack. I'm using his models as the base (If I ever get to a point where I can look at the mod and release it, I do plan on doing it from scratch rather than using someone else's hard graft. This is merely practice.) and they are f***ing lush. Give him some love.

Anyway, onwards: Using generic DDS maps of armor, I decided to craft one cuirass for 'Celestia's Royal Guard'. Ten thousand times more badass than their Canterlot Royal Guard counterparts, and utilising weapons 20% more pointy, these Guards are one of the elite units I created. Unlike Luna's guard, I took the time to beef their stats slightly. To give a fair test (Rather than throw them against my horrendously OP Iceni custom units), I set them against one Legatus and two Veteran Legionary units of Rome. Against one Champion Hoplite and two Celestia's Royal Guard units. No experience for either units, on a plain battlefield with no terrain advantages/disadvantages.

Basic shot one. I only created one cuirass (Why create four, or the entire armour set, if something cocked up and didn't work? That'd be hours wasted.) but the other three are to come. The phalanges are lacking in detail and colour, and it is something to definitely work on. Thankfully, the mark is clear on the chest.

The specular looks like it may need a bit of tweaking. It looks relatively fine, but may need some better shading. At least the purple on the pauldrons comes through.

An aerial shot. Not to show off the models, but to show off their effectiveness: We were actually flanked by the enemy (At least CA did something with the AI) and had to send the General onto the Legatus, and sent the Royal Guard into the Legionaries. As you can see in the back, there's only 15 left. For the record, there's 118 of the Royal Guard still standing.

Random action shot. Blood textures still work on cuirass, so it's full steam ahead. This battle was a little more balanced: We only had around 80 left (Though, at the last minute, the Legatus flanked and charged my men which certainly caused a few deaths.) and it was a pretty entertaining battle.

Right now, i'm busy with editing some miscellaneous files. Quite comically, since I combined the mod using the Hellenic culture as a base, it has the side effect of affecting every Hellenic nation.

Basically, during my Grand Campaign, I had a notification pop up that Massalia (A small, Hellenic nation near the Alps and surrounded by Celts) had trespassed onto my land. Lo and behold, standing on my border, was an army named "Celestia's Chosen".

I let them go. Besides, it takes balls to stand on the border of the Iceni and essentially stare us out.

It's an interesting side effect. The only way around it, though, is to program an entirely new culture. The problems with that are:

i) My complete lack of modding experience with scripts. Creating it is actually easy enough, it's programming it to work.

ii) You need to create entirely new buildings for the culture. If not, the culture dies out (In Rome 2, culture is spread by relevant buildings such as shrines and affects public order for or against you) and its pointless. Coding that will be a nightmare.

I'm sure there are some people facepalming and laughing at me. One thing I find that separates the Brony fandom from a lot of other fandoms is the sheer talent and creativity of the fanbase. There are a lot of very talented modders (and artists, and writers, and..etc; etc;) and i'm letting the side down here, I feel. However, it's best to start somewhere, right? Sorry guys.

So, that's about it for this entry.In my next entry, I hope i've got the campaign map up enough so that I can share some shots of it (I'm mulling over whether or not to eradicate Greek culture in favour of just replacing it with the Equestrian culture. I really do hate the Greek States that much in-game. They're OP and other factions have bare bones rosters while they have an insane amount of unique units. If I do so, I could replace every Hellenic states name with some punny counterpart.), and i'm going to look into 3D models and see if I can dip my toe into those waters.

Until then, if you see a barbarian wielding a rhompaia, run the hell away.

In other news, I start my new job on Tuesday. Wish me luck.