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Kill Animation Overhaul (No Battle Changes)

This mod is a requested abbreviated form of my "Kill Animation Battle Overhaul" mod, which you can see and download here: https://steamhost.cn/steamcommunity_com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=682220674

PATCH 18 (Empire Divided) UPDATE NOTES: With the introduction of Empire Divided and its accompanying patch (Patch 18), CA fundamentally altered battle animations, removing many of them and breaking most kill animation mods. While I'm working on finding a total fix to this, in the meantime in order to keep this mod more or less functioning, I've incorporated [HCP] Warrior of Light's "Matched Combat Restored" mod into this mod, which essentially uses an older set of the game's animations. While this means there are many more kill animations present in this mod than in the current vanilla state of Rome 2, unfortunately gore effects are now limited. You will still see blood stains and spurts, however you won't see actual decapitations or dismemberments.

While I've incorporated HCP Warrior of Light's mod into mine and thus you don't need to download his mod to use mine (I've done this for people waiting on an update or who won't see this message), I reccommend subscribing to HCP's mod anyway or at least favoriting it and/or endorsing it, as without it this mod would likely still be largely broken. You can find it here: https://steamhost.cn/steamcommunity_com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1225610503

IMPORTANT NOTE: If you are running Patch 17 or an even earlier version of Rome 2, use the version of this mod linked here, which will give you both animations AND gore effects (again, you need to be running Patch 17 or earlier to get both): https://steamhost.cn/steamcommunity_com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1228999910
You should also use that version if you running Patch 18 and are not willing to lose gore effects. Be aware that doing this will give you much less animation variety than this version will, but it should preserve gore effects.

HOW TO GET GORE AND ANIMATIONS: If you want both GORE and ANIMATIONS and are willing to jump through some hoops to get them, download this mod: https://steamhost.cn/steamcommunity_com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1228999910 and follow the instructions at the bottom of the mod description.

OVERVIEW:
The goal of this mod is to overhaul battle animations to create a more visceral, cinematic experience, and make battles look more like a movie and less "gamey". While there are already several animations enhancing mods out there, I felt that they lacked variation in animation, still had rare animations be too rare, and/or also didn't attempt to correct the imbalances caused by changing animations drastically. So I attempted to create my own. The goal of this mod is to create battles with epic animations that are dynamic and fun to watch.

Now, in the original version of this mod, I employed several other tweaks to battles to attempt to reduce the balance concerns that drastically changing animations can bring about, as well as making several changes and tweaks to battles centered around appreciating the great animations, including increasing spacing so you can see what's going on better, as well as slightly increasing battle length so you have more time to watch.

This mod does none of that. This mod does exactly two things, and two things only:

***Animations overhauled. Rare and brutal kill animations vastly increased in frequency, while boring and silly "heart attack" deaths (where a soldier goes flying to the ground from a wimpy slap) have been drastically reduced.

***Matched, 1v1 combat has been increased in frequency to make battles look more cinematic, however units may still gang up on a single soldier if they surround him.


You should see soldiers getting impaled in the air, heads and arms getting chopped off, men fighting hand to hand, getting wrestled to the ground, headbutting each other, getting kicked to the ground or kicked to death, etc. etc. and soldiers only very rarely flying to the ground over dainty pokes (though, again, this might still occur rarely, though largely only when soldiers are surrounded by enemies and getting ganged up on).

BALANCE ISSUES:
As this mod *only* changes the animations and increases matched combat, and employs none of the balancing changes and other tweaks my other mod includes, expect some balancing issues. For instance, it's possible battle speed might be changed (sometimes faster, sometimes slower in certain instances), and the disparity between elite and poor quality units is likely increased due to the increase in 1v1 combat. Also, due to the many 1v1 animations, expect units breaking formation or being in huge moshpits of 1v1 duels in large, multi-unit engagements. Hopefully you won't run into these issues, or if you do then hopefully they won't interfere with the game too much, but if you do encounter them and are bugged by them consider checking out the original overhaul mod which attempts to address some of these (link at top of description).


COMPATABILITY:
This mod should be compatible with basically all mods the don't alter or change animations. It's compatible with all other mods, except for a select few battle mods that alter matched combat and secondary attack chances, but it will only conflict with those entries (meaning whichever mod gets load priority will have it's values for these two variables), everything else in both mods should be compatible. So, in short, this mod is essentialy compatible with every single mod, except those which edit animations. It's compatible with Radious. It will conflict with DEI (as DEI edits animations), however if you give this mod load priority over DEI, you should (I think) see more kill animations, however I don't know how this mod will affect DEI battle balance, speed, and outcome, as I'm not very familiar with DEI.

CREDIT to mods which I used components of for this mod:

[HCP] Warrior of Light's Matched Combat Restored: https://steamhost.cn/steamcommunity_com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1225610503
Petro's More Bloody Animations: https://steamhost.cn/steamcommunity_com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=339901182
Epic Combat: (*Unfortunately removed from Steam Workshop*)