Best Mods For Total War: Pharaoh

Highlights

• Better Campaign Camera mod enhances the Total War: Pharaoh experience with dynamic views of the campaign and battle maps, offering better overviews and strategic views of battles.
• Improved Unit Spacing mod creates more realistic formations for units, marching them in a slightly haphazard manner while maintaining formation to simulate real armies going into battle.
• Colored Building Icons mod helps players easily identify buildings in the same chain, saving time and allowing them to focus on other aspects of their campaign.

Revisiting the ancient sands of Egypt, Total War: Pharaoh has caused a stir within the Total War community. Players take on the role of aspiring claimants desiring the throne of an already fractured and waning institution. To become the Pharaoh is to tread a treacherous and perilous path.

Whilst the vanilla campaign offers a solid gameplay experience in a vibrant and dynamic setting, several modders have already raised the bar and improved various aspects of the original game. From tiny adjustments designed to elevate certain quality-of-life enhancements to complete overhauls that re-imagine the campaign, players will find that these mods will improve their overall Total War experience.

6 Better Campaign Camera

Starting small, Better Campaign Camera has it in its name. The mod offers the ability to have a more dynamic view of the campaign and battle maps. Sadly, the vanilla campaign camera only allows you to zoom in and out from a limited angle, significantly restricting your ability to experience the maps.

This mod, however, enables you to have a wide-field view, offering better overviews of the campaign map, and showcasing the beauty of it. Meanwhile, on the battlefield, the mod gives players options to strategically view battles taking place, zooming in on charges or getting that much-needed top-down view to see every engagement taking place.

5 Improved Unit Spacing

Whilst battles rage on the endless desert dunes and within immaculate, majestic cities can look impressive, vanilla campaign players might have noticed that units marching toward the front lines look strange. The vanilla gameplay experience has many units (both cheap and expensive ones) marching in clean formations that can come off as unrealistic and awkward.

Improved unit spacing changes the look by having unitsmarch more organically and slightly haphazardly whilst keeping formation. This is to simulate what an actual army may look like going into battle versus having perfectly synchronized armed clones that look identical all the way through.

4 Colored Building Icons

Veterans of the Total War series will recognize how much more intricate the series has become over the years. Establishing and selecting the right building chains in various provinces required patience and skill in planning a successful long-term campaign and Total War: Pharaoh is no different.

Colored building icons simply helps players identify buildings that arepart of the same chain, making it easier to distinguish which is which. Echoing previous entries from the franchise such as Total War: Three Kingdoms, agricultural buildings are green whilst military buildings are red. Overall, the mod just makes tiny adjustments that help save time allowing you to focus more elsewhere.

3 Major Factions Renamed

This mod aims to streamline the name of every faction by identifying it with its home region/province. Players of the vanilla campaign will note that some factions are named after their respective leaders such as Ramesses whilst other minor factions are simply named after their home regions. For some, this can appear strange and slightly break immersion as factions follow different naming rules.

This mod fixes that issue by replacing the major factions’ names and renaming them after places where starting factions begin, making the game more historically immersive. The modder even has plans to expand this mod by allowing those who have claimed the title of Pharaoh of Egypt to have their faction renamed as Egypt.

2 More Standard Bearers

More Standard Bearers is pretty self-explanatory. The mod increases the number of standard bearers for all melee units, giving each unit six standard bearers in the front. Historically, standard bearers played an important role in the unit, giving the unit a personal identity, and a source of pride, and could even be used to strike fear into enemies if the unit had acquired a certain level of infamy and reputation.

Therefore, with some large units deployed in the Egyptian theater of war, those units should have multiple standards charging into the fray. Additional details within the mod include having Egyptian standards different from those that belong to the Hittite factions.

1 Agony

Like its predecessor featured in Total War: Troy, the Agony mod is an overhaul mod that re-imagines the vanilla campaign in a new way. Firstly, the mod introduces some graphical changes, muting several faction colors whilst introducing adjustments to battle maps and building icons, not to mention the campaign map itself.

Moreover, battles now have increased sizes as well as some major adjustments to weapon and unit stats. The AI is also significantly improved, especially in the realm of diplomatic decision-making. AI factions will now more often single out attractive and vulnerable targets to conquer as well as work together with other factions to take down major threats within their respective regions.

However, the biggest overhaul aspect would have to be the introduction of the population/ migration mechanic. A three-tier population mechanic broken down into different sections (peasants, commoners, and nobles) that now dramatically affects province growth and the type of military recruitment available to players.

This affects workforce effects and bonuses and populations will begin to migrate elsewhere if happiness is low, affecting player economy incomes and recruitment. This overhaul aspect alone introduces an additional layer of strategy and complexity that is perfect for those looking for an extra challenge to their campaigns.