Correct me if I'm wrong, aren't those two portraits you ended up with civilians, not generals? That in itself is a bit odd. I'm also curious what effect addition of names might be having on the rest of the factions. I am at least getting general's portraits of the correct culture, there is just no method to the madness. I did also try adding a different leader_pic_<faction>.tga in my provincial campaign, and it works in the selection screen, but the normal leader's portrait remains in the strat map(Flavius for Julii, etc.).

I will look into data/text/names.txt and do a few controlled tests to see what effect any changes are having. A few things are (seemingly) certain:

1) The assignment of portraits to new characters defined in descr_strat.txt is not random.

So far it seems that general #5 & #6(most factions have 4 to start with) are bound, for some reason, to the same portraits. I have not changed or added to any of the names files or gone above 6 generals per faction yet, but perhaps the portraits being assigned will change when I get home and am able to try one or both.

2) What name you assign doesn't seem to affect portrait, so long as it is a valid name for the faction from the three 'names' .txt files, otherwise the campaign will not run(crashes back to campaign selection).

I have tried several different existing names for specific characters in vain, no change to the portraits. Changing Alexander's(Seleucid) name to Antiochos, for example, still yields the same portrait with a different name. When his age was changed, he was still using the same portrait, just the old version of it with gray hair.

I was able to slightly control the portraits one way so far:

By renaming the .tgas around so that the one currently being used is replaced with the one I want, renaming ui_0.pak to saved_ui_0.pak, and renaming ui_1.pak to ui_0.pak, then I moved the extracted folders containting the portraits into /data/. That worked, but is not exactly as easy as it sounds. I needed an excel spreadsheet just to keep track of what was going on, and so many of the portraits look similar that it's hard to tell if you've got the right ones when you do start renaming them.

I'm surprised how little anyone has gotten into portrait modding. I would think it as important an aspect of a modded campaign as what units are available to what factions, available mercs, etc. I'm assuming the few mods that are in release have not touched on changing portraits yet.