Slaughter in the Sands- A Battle Overhaul (Dynasties Edition)
While not as bad a game as many would say, Total War Pharaoh’s battles unfortunately suffer from the majority of the issues found in the games since and including Rome 2. An otherwise decent campaign has been massively diminished by the lacklustre, shallow battles with no magic or spectacle like in Warhammer to compensate.
I have decided to work on an overhaul mod in an attempt to fix as much as possible. This is a very early version and there may be some balance issues or general oddities. There are also some features and fixes I’d like to implement that I either, for now, haven’t got round to or worked out how to do yet.
The most pressing issue of modern total war by far is the asinine HP system that CA are so obstinately continuing to keep in the games. The ‘main attraction’ of this mod, I suppose you could say, is a near complete removal of HP. All HP has been set to 10 and all base melee damage has been set to 10 as well with 0-10 armour piercing damage. Missiles all have 10 damage with varying AP. This does make missiles insanely overpowered so I have lowered their accuracy across the board with lower tier units having worse accuracy than their higher tier counterparts. The accuracy bonus from experience has also been lowered for balancing purposes.
I am aware of the ‘lethal blow’ mechanic that can be set to 100% in the settings. I’ve decided to keep the system of the old mod because you do occasionally get some ‘glancing blows’ due to the irregularity of non-AP damage. Please experiment with the lethal blow settings- I don’t know which works best yet.
This isn’t perfect but it’s certainly better than vanilla. Feedback here would be especially appreciated.
Morale has been tweaked quite a bit and is the area of this mod that will need the most refining. Flanking and rear charges have a much more significant effect on morale as would be realistic. Killing the general has a much larger effect on morale as does routing friends. This means that chain routs are much more common.
- Combat animations are now almost always matched
- Fire now does a lot more damage making it the deadly weapon we were promised.
- No more difficulty modifiers in battles. They don’t make the battle more challenging but instead just more annoying.
- 20 range has been taken from all javelins.
Please leave your feedback in the comments as it really helps me know what to work on. I hope you enjoy!
