As I said, I haven't really used any mods (other than the Medieval II Retrofit mod, though how it differs from vanilla, I can't tell), so I'm not sure where to start.
Medieval II and Empire are the only ones I have installed at the moment, but I could easily reinstall Rome, Medieval or even Shogun (though I wasn't a big Shogun fan, ironic since I used to play Lord of Darkness and Nobunaga's Ambition on SNES)

As for Rome, I've simply found it to be the most difficult Total War game I've played. I've never had any success as any Roman faction; usually because whil I'm busy invading one neighbour, another suddenly backstabs me and the other Roman factions let them take my land.

I played as Carthage several times, and once managed to take Sicily, Sardinia, Naples, all of Africa west of Egypt and southern Spain... however, the Britons supplanted the Gauls in Spain and France, and of course, broke our alliance and invaded me, forcing me to pull troops out of Italy to support North Africa, causing me to lose all my Italian and Spanish holdings, and by the time I stabilized, I was sixty turns in and right back where I started.

After that, I started playing Barbarian Invasion and never looked back. I just find between the three Roman factions, the tough economy, limits on population, the campaign AI and the Greece issue, it was a bit too limiting.


tl;dr - I usually like the vanilla TW games, I don't know what mods are good, and evidently, I suck. I honestly just don't know where to start. Which mods did/do you enjoy?