Mundus Magnus

Mundus Magnus is a rare sort of mod that is not out to completely convert every aspect of Rome Total War. If you still like to have flaming pigs running around scaring off elephants and Egyptian soldiers moving around in gold and black ivory like 2000 year old anachronisms, but want to let some fresh air in on your strategy map, this mod by ngr is for you. The map was originally to be the map used for Europa Barbarorum and Mundus Magnus map is still the base for the now heavily overhauled map that the EB team will use.

This mod almost exclusively focuses on the Provincial Campaign for single player. The map is expanded to the south, east, and north adding more of the British Isles, more of Asia, and more of the Norse lands to the north, more of Asia, the Indian subcontinent and Arabia to the east, and more of Africa and Arabia to the south. It adds plenty of new provinces, removes many, and changes almost all.

This has great implications on strategy with each faction and the difficulty of each faction’s position, especially since the mod goes on to change the starting provinces of many factions. The Greek Cities, for example, no longer possess Syracuse, Thrace no longer starts with Byzantion, the Seleucid Empire holds far more of the map than it did in the Imperial Campaign’s strategy map.

This also has economic implications. Four new resources have been added: ivory, salt, fish, and horses. The base farm levels of every province have been changed, and some provinces with bad base farm levels cannot reach higher levels of farming. Mercenary pools have been changed. Some buildings (like stone walls to certain barbarian factions) are now available and new bonuses were added to buildings, while some bonuses were reworked.

There have also been some changes to the factions and units. The Scythians are now the Sarmatians, the Egyptians are now the Ptolemaic Empire, and the Spanish are now the Iberians. New mercenary units are available, while the rebels have a handful of new soldiers to add to their diverse arsenal. The Iberians general textures have been corrected from the Britannic blue to the Iberian brown. Seleucid War Elephants are now represented as Indian Elephants instead of African Elephants for all the wildlife enthusiasts. For all of you who are not so up-to-date as I was, this essentially means that their bodies have been re-proportioned to look like the elephants in Asia instead of the elephants from Africa. Another change was to make Head Hurlers slightly different. Instead of the unit you were used to that would mow down armored soldiers in droves, they act more like legionaries in that they throw a barrage of heads that is devastating to enemy armor and morale before charging in to fight hand to hand. And the glitch where horse archers don not fire consistently while moving has been corrected. To top this all off, factions now have different and more correct banners. Of course these are only a few examples because there are many, many more tweaks and additions that I have not listed.

If you want to breathe new life into the strategy map all the while correcting a few things here and there, this mod is definitely for you. You will not find any tremendous changes that make you feel like you are playing a new game, but you will have a new Rome Total War challenge. You will be pushed to recreate the Roman Empire, Alexander’s Empire and you will be pushed to go even farther and conquer more than any of those empires ever did with the same Rome Total War goodness.