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Egypt Uses Hellenic Units

Brings the Egyptian faction out of the Bronze Age and into (well, a few steps closer to) the Hellenistic era.

This (rather barebones) mod gives a much-needed historical face-lift to the Egyptian unit roster as well as a few graphical improvements to the appearance of units on the campaign map.

Unlike more ambitious projects, the primary aim of this mod is to make Egypt more historically accurate whilst remaining as faithful as possible to vanilla Rome. You won't find any custom units/models here!

This is my first time modding a pre-Attila Total War so please forgive the lack of a more complete overhaul to the Egyptian faction. Listed at the bottom of the description are a bunch of intended changes I am currently unable add due to my own inexperience. If you're a more seasoned modder who knows how to resolve any of them, please let me know and I'll seek to add it to the mod as soon as possible. Thanks!

Battles/Units

• Egyptian unit roster now mostly Hellenic but some Egyptian units still remain. Mostly the more historically accurate ones such as spearmen and light cavalry (full roster can be seen in preview above).
  
• Removed access to chariots entirely, including for general's bodyguard which is now Hellenic cavalry. Didn't think they were historically accurate for the Ptolemies but I'm open to be convinced otherwise.
  
• Enabled access to African war elephants. The Ptolemies seemed to have used them[en.wikipedia.org] but, as stated above, I'm open to be convinced otherwise.
  
• Units stats remain unaltered.

Campaign

• Faction colour changed from yellow to more traditional 'Ptolemaic' blue used in later Total War titles, complete with recoloured unit cards.
  
• Unit models changed to their Greek counterparts, using Thracian colours.
  
• Alexandria now starts as a minor city and uses Greek graphics (will switch to Eastern graphics when the city is upgraded).
  
• Egypt now has access to max level stables (Royal Cavalry Stables) so they are able to recruit Companion Cavalry.

Misc.

• Family members, generals, captains, admirals and agents will now use Greek names.
  
• Family members, generals and agents will now use Greek portraits.
  
• Horus building chain renamed to Serapis[en.wikipedia.org], the Graeco-Egyptian patron god of the Ptolemaic dynasty.
  
• Serapis replaces Osiris as the chief deity for the Egyptians in most event/flavour texts.
  
• Imhotep building chain renamed to Sekhmet, the more historically accurate Egyptian deity of healing.
  
• Most references to ancient Egyptian religious and funerary practices in event texts have been removed.
  
• All removed Egyptian units remain in the game files, this is so Egyptian rebels still have access to them (simulating the native Egyptians rising up against their Hellenic overlords).
  
• The intro for the Hellenic factions now plays for Egypt before campaign start.

As stated above, this is my first time modding such an old Total War title so there will be a few problems/oversights that I'm currently unable to fix. If anybody with more experience can see a solution for any of the problems listed below, please let me know in the comments and I'll try to fix them as soon as possible. Current issues include:

• Faction symbols & flags - Egypt still uses the same icons and banners. I made a set of recoloured flags and icons but I can't figure out how to get them to work. Icons work fine on the campaign menus but any attempt to add a shared_new_1.tga file (even an unaltered one) to the mod causes other faction symbols and various other icons to bug out. Also, I can't work out how to add new battle map banners without the game crashing in the pre-battle loading screen.
  
  
• Battle map unit colours - Due to the similar faction colour scheme, Thracian unit models are used where possible but there are still several outliers (Egyptian units still use yellow etc.). I wanted to recolour all of the added units to give them the new Egyptian colours but I cannot work out how to open the relevant .dds files. I've tried using GIMP and Photoshop (both with DDS plugins) but they consider the files either corrupt or the extensions invalid/unreadable. I can't find any solutions online and I've started to wonder if all mods that edit the unit graphics are actually part of one big conspiracy against me.
  
  
• Faction voices - Units and agents on the campaign map still use Middle Eastern voices. While now using Greek units and models, all attempts at changing the unit voices to the Greek ones have failed. Editing the sound files by assigning the Egyptian culture to the Greek voices seems to do nothing and I can't figure out how to fix it.
  
  
• Faction culture - NOTE: This one is sort of intentional. The faction culture is still 'Egyptian' and they continue to use the Middle Eastern building graphics. I initially tried changing the faction culture by simply swapping egyptian with greek in the descr_sm_factions.txt file but it causes the game to crash on startup. Saying that though, I've actually come to prefer leaving the faction culture alone since (to my knowledge) Hellenisation didn't really occur outside of Alexandria and a few other urban centres, so the current state of affairs seems more plausible than the entirety of Egypt looking Greek.

I haven't done any testing in regards to balancing but, I assume, the lack of chariots will markedly reduce the supremacy of the Egyptians in auto-resolve and may even significantly reduce the rate of their expansion. It may now even give the Seleucids a fighting chance! I also haven't played a full campaign yet so there may be unforeseen bugs/crashes/balance issues in prolonged playthroughs.

Currently, I hope to resolve all the above issues and add them to the mod at some point.

Something I'm divided on is whether to rename Egypt to 'The Ptolemaic Kingdom' (i.e. in the same theme as fellow successor state 'The Seleucid Empire'). If it's something people would want, just let me know.