Installation Guide for EB with Alexander

Corrected 8th September 2009. Note - this is not an official Alexander-EB installation guide, just my own, but i've used it on Vista and it works.

Hi - after working out how to install this (thanks to Varcan and others and all the people who made Alex-EB) I wrote out a step-by-step an installation guide to help other people install it more easily. Here it is. (This runs EB on the Alexander engine with the mini-mods pack but not the EA mod - so AI will be much better but remember to start campaigns with 'Very hard' campaign difficulty' to make the AI more aggressive).

(Steps 13) to 17) aren't installation but advice on how to get the best AI and options and avoid some CTDs after battles.)

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1) Install Rome Total war (it’s best not to install this in programme files but if you have don’t worry)

2) Download and Install patch 1.3 and patch 1.5 (If you have Rome Total War white label its already 1.5 and doesn’t need patched)

3) (optional backup - you don't have to do this one) Copy and paste the entire contents of your Rome Total War folder to a new folder that is NOT in Program files. Just put it in C:/. Call it BackupRTW1.5. This is just in case anything goes wrong.

4) Now make a new folder that is NOT in Program files ( Just put it in C:/)and call it EBwALX.
Copy and paste the entire contents of your Rome Total War folder into it.

5) Install EB 1.1 into C:\EBwALX

6) Install Patch EB 1.2 into C:\EBwALX (The installer for 1.2 has a default line saying ‘[install to your RTW folder then delete this]’ – ignore it and delete all that bit and replace it with C:\EBwALX)

7) Download the EB1.2 fixes from the links on this thread - https://forums.totalwar.org/vb/showthread.php?t=109936 You will need to unzip these three fixes into C:\EBwALX\EB\Data (i.e choose extract files and extract files to that folder when unzipping them) If you did this correctly you will be prompted with endless overwrite prompts...choose to overwrite all.

8) Now install Rome Total War Alexander to your main Rome Total war folder NOT either of the two you made above )

9) Download EB minimods pack from this link http://files.filefront.com/RTW+pack3.../fileinfo.html
Extract the files from it and then install to C:/EBwALX

10) Now you download the zip file from here http://www.zshare.net/download/51697518abdc7e31/ which contains the files needed to run EB on Alexander.exe (RTW-ALX.exe).
(for more info see this thread - https://forums.totalwar.org/vb/showthread.php?t=94861

Extract it to your computer desktop (not to any EB or RTW folder) - you'll need winrar or winzip or 7zip to do this - if you dont have them google them and download and install them first.

Read this bit carefully.

When you've extracted the files open the folder named 'eb', then open the ‘data’ folder inside it. Then open C:\EBwALX\EB\Data. Identify the folders in your EB/Data folder which have the same names as the ones in the eb/data folder. Then one folder at a time open an eb/data sub-folder, select all that sub-folder’s contents, copy, then paste into the equivalent EB/data sub-folder (the one with the same name) and choose ‘copy and replace’ and tick the box to do the same with however many others.

For the files that aren’t inside any folder (i.e are just inside the eb/data folder], copy them, but NOT any of the folders – i.e don’t use select all – and paste them into the EB/data folder]

11) Copy the purple Alexander engine file with (purple icon) from your main Rome Total war folder (its called ‘RomeTW-ALX.exe’) into your RTWEBwAlex folder .

12) Right click on it and choose ‘create shortcut to create a desktop shortcut for your RTW-ALX-exe. Right click on it, then click properties. Change the target line to

"C:\RTW EBwALX\RomeTW-ALX.exe" -mod:eb -show_err -nm –noalexander

Change the “start in” line to

"C:\RTW EBwALX"

(including the ""s).
Now rename the shortcut whatever you like – e.g EBwithAlexander.

12b) (optional - improved AI formations and player formations) The EB mini-mods pack doesnt seem to work for AI battle formations or to let you use manipular tactic formation and similar.
I managed to find an AI formations mini-mods for EB. There are two one by Darth, which you install first, then one by Marcus Camillus which you install second. Install both to the C:/EBwALX. The first makes different AI factions use different formations, improving their battlefield AI. The second lets you use manipular tactic etc formations as a player. If you dont install Darth first and Marcus' one second Marcus' won't work.
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AFTER INSTALLATION

13) When you get to the main screen go to options and ‘show advanced options’ and you can change the size of units if you want.

14) When starting a campaign set campaign difficulty to ‘Very Hard’ (makes AI much more aggressive so more interesting ) and set battle difficulty to medium (anything else raises morale of AI units by between 4 and 7 so they pretty much cant be routed)

15) Don’t dismiss advice in EB – when it comes up click ‘show me how’ button to activate the background script.

16)Each time you load a game make sure you click on a city to get advisor up then click show me how to activate background script.

17) Always save the game at the end of each turn and also before moving an army to attack an enemy army. Crashes at the end of battles happen sometimes as in normal RTW. In EB the game doesn’t work right if the background script isn’t loaded – so if the game has autosaved before a battle and you reload to it then you wont be able to run the background script so it may crash after the battle.
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Bug - for some reason my generals on the campaign map look like Alexander on the campaign map even though i'm Carthaginians and on the battle map they look like Carthaginians except for having Macedonian shield devices in purple and yellow and a lion banner - but this might be because i used varcan's files or something else, which i've now replaced with those posted by Maksimus of the Alexander-EB team