Hehe my experience aswell, M2TW has a lot of near flashy stuff and it's actually quite fun but the campaign is so unbareably boring It's not real fun in the long run and tbh the textures are quite lacking aswell considering the possibilites of the models themselves.
There is one (major)mod that's set in antiquity but neither the EB team nor most of the community endorse it.
There however are PLENTY of AWESOME mods for M2TW out there tho, In this forum I think Broken Cresent is the most popular one, Third age Total war is widely accepted as one of the best M2TW mods(and among the most popular mods overall). Then there are some mods with Complex trait systems etc, Like Deus lo Vult or Schwer und Speer which I personally do not quite like but are quite popular around here aswell.
Furthermore my personal favorites:
Rusichi Total war Rise of Medieval Russia and the mongols
For King or Country English civil war
and last and probably least
The Italian wars a VERY small mod but it feels very cozy and is generally more "sound" than Vanilla.
there are even some ambitious projects still in work that are well worth a glance.
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