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Cleaner Armour Textures

Have you ever zoomed in on all of your heavily armoured units and wondered "why are they all covered in this low-resolution, battered-look when they haven't even been in battle yet?" I have wondered this on many occasions throughout other Total War games, but none more so than in Total War Saga: TROY, whose assets are now in Total War: PHARAOH for the Sea Peoples and the few Achaean + Anatolian factions currently.

For some reason, some artist(s) at CA still think that it's interesting to throw up over their amazingly detailed "hand-sculpted-in-ZBrush-and-then-baked-to-lopoly" 3D armour assets with this kind of low-res texture, probably in an effort to add more sense of "story" to each character variant or make them look less like clones from one another by randomising the scratching positions. However, all it does - in my opinion - is serve to hide all of the amazing, subtle details that they've put into the armour beneath, which can look pretty good despite the textures being heavily downscaled for the sake of optimisation. I've gone ahead and fixed this for myself by removing the heavily-battered look entirely from all the armoured units so that they can actually show off their true details.

All this mod basically does is replace what are called the "decaldirtmap" textures from the game with something a lot softer which tries to show off the true artwork hidden behind those textures. This in turn gives a slightly more cleaner look to show off the 3D armour asset's actual texture details. That's all, nothing special.

This is fitting for for the game, as warriors throughout history have always been encouraged to maintain their armour, otherwise the armour will deteriorate faster. I imagine that they would have been laughed at for looking the way they do without this mod before a battle / seen as incredibly negligent. If CA had linked these textures to gradually appear based on a unit's armour degradation level, that would have been great.

Yes, it is save-game compatible, all it does is replace a few textures with softer ones which is very safe and won't mess with anything that's actually important.