Prologue Mod?

As RTW was my first Total War Game, I played the prologue at the start to learn the basics. Afterwards, I played the Imperial campaign, but found that long campaigns were a bit to long for me. I've played several short campaigns, but like the long ones, they still get a bit stretched near the end- you know what I mean, with the huge stacks just duking it out randomly. You reel in 20k a turn easily, only to spend 23k on troops and buildings in all of your cities, and on army upkeep.
What I really like about the campaigns is the start, where everyone's on equal ground, theres a few rebel settlements in between you and the other nations. No one can just jump into the enemy and dominate half of their towns in 3 turns. This is what has drawn me to the tutorial- would it be possible to mod the tutorial so that the tutorial itself isn't there, only the game itself? Or is the entirety of it hard coded? I tried messing with the descr_strat and campaign script files, but I'm no modder and the game crashed as soon as I started.
The point of my rambling is this: does anyone have a mod that allows you to play the tutorial, a mod that makes the campaign much smaller, or if one does not exist and it isn't too hard to do, could someone instruct me in how to mod the files, or even make the mod?

Well, if you only want that little campaign without any of the script triggers: Open up Data\world\maps\campaign\sons_of_mars\descr_strat.txt. Then go all the way to the bottom of the file and comment out the last two lines:

Code:

---

script
Prologue_Campaign_Script.txt

---

To:

Code:

---

;;;script
;;;Prologue_Campaign_Script.txt

---

Commenting out the lines should disable all the triggers and you will start a normal campaign with the Julii faction. I'm not sure how well this will work, since all you have is two or three units.. For that reason, I suggest you also do the following:

Find the romans_julii faction on the list:

Code:

---

faction        romans_julii, balanced smith

---

Change the amount of denarii from 1000 to 10000

Then change Gaius Julius's army to this: (Warning: You have to be careful what you add to here! The units must be either mercenary units, or belong to the romans_julii faction! In this case, all these units have the correct ownership, so don't worry.)

Code:

---

army
unit                roman generals guard cavalry early        exp 3 armour 1 weapon_lvl 1
unit                roman hastati                                exp 1 armour 1 weapon_lvl 1
unit                roman hastati                                exp 1 armour 1 weapon_lvl 1
unit                roman princeps                        exp 1 armour 1 weapon_lvl 1
unit                roman princeps                        exp 1 armour 1 weapon_lvl 1
unit                roman triarii                                exp 3 armour 1 weapon_lvl 1
unit                roman archer                                exp 3 armour 1 weapon_lvl 1

---

This will give you a tiny legion of units, to make sure you can conquer yourself a settlement. You can try adding different units, but be sure to check export_descr_unit.txt in the data folder first, to make sure the unit you are adding belongs to romans_julii. Modding RomeTW is surprisingly easy. The important thing to remember is to make backups!

Have fun ;)

Edit: I decided to try it out and it seems that the prologue part requires large parts of the campaign script. This means, in order to play the campaign like you desire, you have to turn it into a provincial campaign. You'll have to look up tutorials on that, since describing it here is a little bit too long, but it would pretty much just be copying the sons_of_mars campaign folder, renaming it to sons_of_mars_prov and then making all the descriptions for the sons_of_mars_prov.