Equites Catafractarii for Attila
Hello! This is a port of my atrocious Catafractarii mod with the ability to not take up 4gb of your hard-drive by itself, have a nice day!
Alternate title, ‘Less Atrocious Catafractarii that isn’t replaced for any reason.’
Attila has some of the most bizarre, absolutely atrocious unit balancing I’ve ever seen in a total war game. And I’ve played Total War Warhammer.
Yet for the Catafractarii, and heavy cavalry Rome has in general — CA really butchered it bad in this game. Why would I have to research units that Rome had access to already?
A. Rome potentially used Cataphracts as far back as 117 AD
B. Rome absolutely had Catafractarii during the Crisis of the Third Century for example.
C. The literal game set before this has an expansion that predates the Grand Campaign’s starting date by well over a century, and lets you select Catafractarii as a bodyguard unit for your Generals.
Not only that, but a unit that was made up of Elite, Prestigious Veterans and Nobles, with heavy armour — is depicted with terrible morale, bad armour and noncompetitive charge bonus. Not only that, but the Scholae Gentiles, a quote ‘light cavalry’ introduced in this game, permanently replaces these guys in the Western roster upon researching it. Now aside from just bad game design, this is really stupid because the unit itself has nothing to do with Catafractarii, and shouldn’t be even associated in a tech tree piece called ‘Western Heavy Cavalry Tactics’ if the game doesn’t in fact refer to them as such. This would be like swapping out Equites Catafractarii from Empire Divided for Elite Equites from Rise of the Republic, because at least Socii Equites Extraordinarii have armoured horses.
This mod adds the Equites Catafractarii as its own, standalone VERY heavy cavalry unit for the declining Roman Empires. That’s right, East AND West Rome get access to this unit, so this is no Rome I scenario where the equivalent for the West is a musculata wielding Germanic Bodyguard. With higher charge bonus, significantly higher morale and less awful melee stats — this unit should perform far better. This mod also raises the armour of cataphract ‘armour’ to 85 as it was in Rome II, and allows the supremely durable heavy cavalry of Antiquity to be exactly that.
Unit is recruited from the cavalry mustering building at tier 2 and 3 for both West and East Rome, and can be selected as a Commander unit in Custom Battles. I couldn’t at the time figure out how to swap out the horses for their Empire Divided skin, so they instead have Clibinarii horses. That said, the model is taken straight out of Rome II Empire Divided. I don’t think this’ll cause an issue because plenty of mods take assets from Rome II, such as the Legionary Cohort mod, that I highly recommend playing this with.
Take the fight BACK to these barbarians! Bring Jupiter’s wrath onto the savages, and ensure that Rome truly is the Eternal City!
Update: I’m not sure how to update mods, so I’ve periodically taken this down and reuploaded it a few times. Apologies for anyone browsing this page. I’ve swapped out the gladiuses for Spathas for Historical authenticity — particularly these really nice ones from Empire Divided that my other mod uses, the Imperial Guard. Any patience for my rank and file retardation is appreciated.
Update: (22/08/2025) I have finally figured out how to give them appropriate horse models, removed ’causes fear’ and gave them colour support for W/E Romes.
Update: (29/08/2025) I’ve nerfed this unit a fair bit, they have their own value for armour and so no longer conflict (or I suppose balance out) other units using the cataphract armour type. The nerfs are that their HP was lowered from 260 to 240, their upkeep raised and their recruitment cost doubled. I’ve kept the rest of their stats as is, but they’re now also tier 3 units and require an appropriately levelled cavalry barracks for recruitment.
