Any recommendations for mods, which try to get the essential elements of battle strategy more true, without imposing too much of a learning curve, on the strategy map?

First off, I'll say from my research I thought EB-1.0 was going to be the mod. for me, historical realism and good reviews. But I found that the "crayon like" strategy map colour changes with a very distracting cloud effect on the seas, and generally less clear (compared to vanilla) seemingly pointless graphic changes for settlement scrolls etc. troublesome (perhaps this is a Vista issue). Then somehow all the non-English unit names, plus a rather dark battlefield in the historical one (which I won, the 209BC river crossing with Mac. style army Phalangists + Companion cavalry) turned me off as well. The final straw was when I got a long note about various calendar changes for different cultures, rather than the standard BC/AD (BCE/CE) system. That combined with the long load times, as scripts run... I quit my game, and ended up entirely removing it, and doing a clean install of RTW-1.5 Vanilla rather than persevering. Shame, because it seems like great work, it just didn't work for me.

My machine is a recent AMD X2 with 4GiB RAM, with Vista and an NVidia 8300 GS 128MB graphics card which can steal additional dual channel system RAM. Seems to be fast enough for fairly high graphics settings for the large historical battles etc. I'm not sure about "Epic" battles as described by SPQR though.

Now I realise that my real main interest is the Battlefield Generalship. The CivII like Strategy component of RTW doesn't bother me, nor does the look of units, nor particularly the prescence of implausible "SMART Weapons" like wardogs. I'm not bothered if the forces aren't contempary either.

No Mod is going to be able to model supply train issues, into the RTW engine, so the campaign strategy is always going to be half-baked.

But I do like the 4 seasons, rather than this stupid Snow for 6 months effect.


My biggest gripes with Vanilla RTW are actually :

Light Infantry (like Velites, Spear Warband) barely moving quicker than Heavy Amoured Infantry when "At the Double", the Run command seems a misnomer. I've also noticed on mountain climbs, they seem to fatigue, and require more recovery than Principes, when it definitely should be the other way round as they're much less encumbered.

Heavy Cavalry as fast as Light, and able to dash about and charge and charge, implausibly rather than blowing. Also they seem suspiciously invulnerable at times. I can understand developers not wanting to depict contraversial Horsey injury animations, but I don't expect it to be sensible to let them stand (or fight) whilst under javelin fire. As it was Javelins and Iron Age skirmishers, that put the mighty Bronze Age Chariot out of business, which required 2 smaller horses, and they weren't told to aim at the drivers or archers, were they... I can't see why non-Cataphract cavalry should withstand it so well, as even if the horse could dodge it would disorder the unit.

As I've mostly played with Battles on Hard, sometimes Very Hard; despite trying to apply the "Economy of Force" principal where not inconvenient, I'm used to a rather rapid climactic clash, once the initial skirmishing and cavalry maneuvers are over, and the main forces engage. So something which extended the engagement time would be good, so long enemy/friendly units are still clearly distinguishable.