I recommend to you visiting the The Engineers Guild - most of the stickied threads feature one of the many MTW mods. The one I am currently playing - Wes' Medmod offers a late era campaign with a load of factions which are more difersified and fun to play. Some things are still the same though, playing the Holy Roman Empire I have been attacked by the Burgundians, the swedes, the danes, the polish, the Hungarians, all three italian factions and the Byzantines. So its quite challenging and well there are other mods as well...

Like the BKB "Supermod" by the Blind King of Bohemia which I am definetly going to play next since it promises a big overhauwl of the 3 eras including numbers of new units, factions and provinces...

But there is still more like The XL Mod by VikingHorde which is at the top of my list, too...

And there are other, quite different mods, or rather conversions of the game like Napoleonic TW by the Lordz which carries over to the renesaince and there are still more...


Anyways I was quite in the same situation as you are, but between finishing vanilla MTW and starting out with any mods took me...years. So I took a good look at the modding comminuty here and I must say: I am delighted and rightfully dumped RTW for the time being! RTW has decent mods too, but it still doesnt have the classy Mad'n'evil-TW feel and the AI is too weak - especially in battle - for my liking.