Ah, Total War: Rome 2 mods. While the strategy game struggled at launch to forge its own path, it has in the years since its release found its footing, and its place in the pantheon of Total War games. It wasn’t until the recent release of Total War: Rome Remastered that really made us appreciate what made it stand out from its popular predecessor.
It still lacks the epic civil war of the original Rome: Total War, the climactic endgame of Shogun II, nor the looming narrative weight of Total War: Attila, and the grand campaign of Rome II has always been a little flat around the edges. That being said, it still commands a respectable player count, even after all these years and despite the newer games that have released since. Even Total War: Three Kingdoms didn’t manage to last as long as Rome II did in terms of post-release support.
But for those rough patches that still linger, the Total War modding community is here to help. Boasting some of the most exciting player-created content of the series, the mods listed below help push Rome II from a good, but lacklustre sequel to a genuinely great strategy title worthy of its revered lineage.
These are the best Total War: Rome 2 mods:
With the impending release of Total War: Rome Remastered, we thought it might be topical to highlight a mod that lets you capture some of that nostalgia in Rome 2. The Roman Houses mod splits up the Rome faction into four smaller factions, just like in the original Rome: Total War.
Team Radious are very good at their overhaul mods. Another success theirs being the Total War: Attila overhaul, and much of the same praise could just as easily apply to the team’s Rome II mod as well. If you had to install just one mod from this list for Rome II, this would be a very safe bet (although, technically, it’s a collection of about six mods).
As always, Team Radious will not go unchallenged. A close second on the list of most subscribed mods and a worthy rival for best overhaul mod, Divide et Impera adds a ton of new factions and features. The roster of playable factions is significantly increased to include way more tribes, Greek city-states, new factions and Diadochi kingdoms.
As the name implies, this mod aims to improve the vanilla traits, talents, and character systems from the slightly bland original version into something a bit more robust and substantial. It adds new traits and a dynamic skill system for generals and provincial governors, as well as completely refurbished and more faction-specific Cursus Honorum rankings and Army Traditions.
The triumphant rising orchestras, the chants, the faux-ancient warlike drum beats, and the vaguely near-eastern twangs: this is the soundtrack of antiquity, or at least, what the brains of many in the cohort that grew up with the original Total War: Rome were trained to associate with the period through prolonged exposure to that original soundtrack. Even today, the score can resurface memories of lost afternoons adjusting formations and expanding borders. If you are the kind of person who enjoys that consistent evocation of nostalgia then this is a mod well worth installing.
Even someone usually indifferent to purely cosmetic mods can respect the subtle immersion offered by Steam user Benjin‘s AAA: Generals mod. With this installed, the appearance of Roman generals will change alongside their position on an axis of the three A’s (aging, advancing, acclimatizing).
The drawback distance for the vanilla camera is, quite honestly, insulting. Coming back into Rome II after playing some later Total War titles, it can feel especially egregious. The sort-of-over-god’s-shoulder view is fine, but it’s much, much too close to the ground, and makes it difficult to see even the most rudimentary of empires as a collective whole.
At release, Rome II was quite graphically impressive, especially at the higher settings. Now, at a hefty six years old, however, it is beginning to show its age. Especially after playing some of Creative Assembly’s more recent entries, dipping back into Rome II can be a bit graphically jarring. Textures and models that were once perfectly adequate now leave a lot to be desired.
The Tetrarchy is one of the most interesting yet overlooked periods in Roman history. Coming after the Emperor Diocletian dragged the Roman world kicking and screaming through the tail end of the Crisis years, the Tetrarchy was an attempt to reforge the Empire in a way that would bring lasting stability and end forever the ouroboros-like circle of rising and falling barracks emperors that had plagued the Roman world for a half-century before. Diocletian’s reorganization of the Empire into four zones with a more streamlined succession system failed pretty stunningly, but at least it gave posterity an interesting historical playground to cut through in this mod, which takes place after the death of Diocletian when the heirs of the first Tetrarchs, unsatisfied with ruling a mere quarter of the Roman world, descended into civil war and infighting.
The world the burgeoning Roman Republic emerged into was fundamentally defined by the regional reordering which had occurred less than a century before when the king of Macedon, a plucky and ambitious youth known to history as Alexander the Great, flipped the world on its head and invaded and conquered that great bane of ancient Greece, the big-bad of Herodotus’ Histories, the Achaemenid Persian empire. At the time Rome II begins, from the Adriatic to the Indus, Hellenic warlords, the heirs of Alexander’s conquests, rule the world. It’s hard to overstate how profoundly this geopolitical shift changed the region, and how far downwards its echoes reverberate.
