Graphics mods for the Total War in Europe series

[Philippe]

My graphics mods for the Total War in Europe series are now available for downloading.

The mods repaint the maps, the counters, the unit boxes, and the national flags which appear in the unit boxes. They leave the unit portraits in the unit boxes alone, because for once HPS did a really good job: you can't improve on period photographs.


To get a sense of what these mods do, I've made sets of before and after screenshots that can be found here:



First Blitzkrieg:


http://forums.gamesquad.com/showthread.p...Blitzkrieg




War on the Southern Front:


http://forums.gamesquad.com/showthread.p...hern-Front




The mods can be downloaded from the Operational page of Task Force Echo Four, here:


http://tfe4.wordpress.com/graphics-and-s...ps-titles/

Unlike my other mods, these should be installed directly over fully patched plain vanilla versions of the game.


I'd like to extend a huge thank you to TheBigRedOne for giving my mods a new home.

[Philippe]

These two mods have both received updates that now leave you with four different ways of looking at mountain terrain.

There are large, clear screenshots of the different mountain options in the threads at GameSquad forum (addresses in the previous post).

[Philippe]

There's been another (and probably final) round of updates on these two mods.

I've also updated the comparison screenshots in the first post of each of the two GameSquad threads so that you can see what the latest version of the mod graphics look like as opposed to the plain vanilla HPS graphics.

The default version of the mod is now using a color-coordinated version of the oldest and most traditional wargame symbol for indicating elevated terrain.

I don't intend to do anything with the unit images because, as I've said before, I don't really believe that period photographs can be improved on.

I'm not totally enamoured of the 2D unit symbols, but am reluctant to change them because many of them are (almost) peculiar to the Total War in Europe Series.

I'll revisit the mod when the next game in the series comes out. I only hope that, if and when a game comes out that deals with the Western Front at the end of the war, the designers make it possible to distinguish between pre-January 1945 U.S. units and the earlier ones. I'm using uniform colors for the unit counters, and U.S units should be tannish in 1944 but greenish in 1945.

[Assault]

Excellent work! Thank you so much ☺

[Philippe]

Just when I thought I was done with this one, I made the mistake of actually trying to play it.

Next thing I knew I'd re-colored the interdiction marker and come up with a linguistically neutral railroad repair symbol (try abbreviating railroad repair in French or German and see how many letters you come up with).

Here's the new symbol in First Blitzkrieg and War on the Southern Front:









After converting it to zoomed-out mode as well I started wondering about the blank spaces at the top of the units and symbols bitmap.

Sure enough, some of the spots weren't inert, they just didn't have symbols in them.

So the latest version of my mod has fully functional zoomed out port suppression, entrainment, and embarcation markers.

Unfortunately the other blank spaces really were left inert. On the zoomed-in bitmap they're used for the railheads, which is a shame, because that's precisely the kind of thing that you'd look at a zoomed out map to find out about.

So, sadly, that will have to wait for the next patch (the one that corrects all of the spelling mistakes).

But in the meantime, everything else is available and fully functional in the latest version of my mods, which you can get at Task Force Echo Four:


http://tfe4.wordpress.com/graphics-and-s...ps-titles/