[Citizen] RafSwi7 (Patron: Abdülmecid I)

**Abdülmecid I** · September 30, 2023, 05:28 AM

Patron Greetings fellow members of the Curia,

I bring forward to you RafSwi7, whom I consider one of the most distinguished contributors of the site. I firstly met RafSwi7 outside TWC and was immediately impressed with his active and positive participation in the community and his insight over business practices and game mechanics. Once he became again active in the site, he has never ceased to enrich and improve the content available in our forum. Below RafSwi7 describes his modding achievements, as well as his efforts in his capacity as a member of the Content staff, but what personally impressed me the most is his generosity. RafSwi7 has taken the initiative to freely give Steam codes to the site to be used as competition rewards. Therefore, for all his contributions in modding Troy in handling the Screenshot contests, and especially for his solidarity and generosity with the community, I believe that RafSwi7 is definitely entitled to the rank of Citizen.

Candidate Hi, this is RafSwi7.

You can probably see that I joined the community in 2011 but I haven't been really active until late 2020, when I started competing in our weekly screenshots competitions thanks to Abdülmecid I's invitation on Reddit. Few months later I was approached by Alexander78 asking me if I wanted to join board's content staff. I have agreed and since then with Alex and Turkafinwë I have been managing weekly competitions and "Picture of the Year" awards. Some time later both Alex and Turk have become Content Emeritus leaving me as a sole manager of the picture & video competitions. As mentioned above I have been active participant of these competitions and years later I have managed to top the competition leaderboards and managed to win 2022 POTY competitions.

While I wasn't active until relatively recently I was aware of TWC and has been one of its many anonymous visitors since at least 2007. I have always loved strategy games and history but in my early gaming years I have played mostly other historical series like Age of Empires, Empire Earth or Civilization games. For some reason Total War has eluded me for a while. I think that the first time I have stumbled upon it was on some YouTube video where Spartans (from Greek Cities factions) have faced hordes of "pink pyjamas Parthian warriors" (a classic!). I tried the first Rome... and it blew me away. The gameplay felt so fresh, so realistic (morale, formations, hybrid campaign/battle gameplay) when compared to other historical games (the graphics have been so great for a strategy game).

Some time later I have stumbled on this skin pack by KLAssurbanipal and then my adventures with mods have begun. Through years my favourite mods have been: Extended Greek Mod, Hegemonia City States, Aristeia: The Epic Cycle, The Lord of the Rings - Total War and Roma Surrectum.

Until the arrival of Rome II I have been playing mostly the first Rome with Medieval 2 as Empire hasn't managed to pull me in. Despite its problems I have spend a lot of time with the second Rome, which in my opinion has managed to became really great game on its own. Rome and later Attila have prompted me to revisit some older games like Napoleon and Shogun 2 with its DLCs and expansions. After that I more or less have played every Total War title from Warhammer games and Three Kingdoms to Saga titles like Thrones of Britannia and Troy. The latter Saga title - Troy - have been a very special for me as I always been the big admirer of the Trojan War myth and Homer's Iliad. You know that the game had "rough" history with its launch on Epic Store or the controversial "Behind the Myth" approach. I felt that I need to "step up" to help the game reach its "potential" of being the ultimate Trojan War video game adaptation.

So, this is how my modding "career" has begun. I had a very little experience with it as some of my Rome 2 mods have been small and quite simple. With Troy I have also started with some simple mods (like for example resizing all heroes) but later focused on "Terry" the battle map editor, where I had my first contact with creating custom maps. In the end I have created a dozen of new maps and I think some of them came out pretty nicely.

Content support for Troy has ended at some point (after receiving some nice DLCs) and the new idea has grown in my mind. I felt that I want the game somehow to continue to receive new content, so the factions there will be more varied and unique. The idea felt way too ambitious as I had no experience with such big mods, so at first I was thinking about making something smaller. The first idea was to give different cultures some new unit variants so for example a "shielded spearmen" from the Dorian culture would look different than the same unit from the Ionian culture. Eventually I have thought it would be "lame" if I have just made the mod where players could not experience these cultures.

The second idea was to add new factions to custom battles with new heroes and units. The mod was to add 4 new factions to custom battles with 1 new hero and 3 new units per faction. This however has evolved so the very first release ended up with 5 new factions (with 2 new heroes and 12 new units per faction). The mod has grown quickly to 7 new factions and the question of campaign has been brought up. I had no experience with campaign editing but slowly and after many errors I have managed to include all new factions and their units, heroes and buildings in the campaign part of the game. Factions have been still missing a lot of stuff but I decided to continue improving it.

With each update new elements and factions have been added to the mod and now (year later after the first release) the Extended Factions Mod (the name is a tribute to the Extended Greek Mod from Rome) has 20 new playable factions, 250 new units, around 40 new heroes and over 300 new missions, dilemmas and incidents (and other features). The mod is still ongoing and I am already working on 2 new factions. Most of the work on the mod has been done by me (models, ui elements, data editing, scripting and text work), while two other members who later joined the mod had made their contribution in text writing (Partofla) and unit balance testing (Eruner). With the mod I hope to surpass Aristeia mod from the first Rome by giving players the ultimate Trojan War experience.