If you try changing the way they use their spears (switching from overhand to underhand), you're bound to have problems.

In Vanilla Rome: Total War, there wasn't really an overhand animation. The closest thing was the one used by javilineers.

I tried to fix my hoplitai so that they used an overhand animation, so based on some of the ideas from the other forums, I did the following:


type greek_hoplite
skeleton fs_javelinman, fs_swordsman

Changning the skeleton from "fs_slow_spearman" to "fs_javelinman" made the units switch to using overhand animations, coupled with some other weird adjustments (I can't remember them off the top of my head), I had a hoplite unit with regular-length spears and could switch to a secondary weapon. But then I looked closely and all the spears were backward!

My guess is that the EB team used the similar skeleton to give the units the overhand animation, but built the models accordingly so that the spears WOULDN'T be in the opposite direction during play. That is my best guess on why the spears are reversed since you are in a sense, trying to revert back to the Vanilla animation that the EB team deemed unfit.