Thrones Reforged Beta 0.5.4 is out, and it's the biggest update yet!
Hey! I'm the solo developer behind Thrones Reforged, a full-scale overhaul mod for Total War: Thrones of Britannia. I've been heads down building this thing for almost a year now and I've never posted here, which in hindsight is probably overdue given the mod now has over 16,000 subscribers.
So what is this mod?
Thrones of Britannia is one of the most historically interesting settings Creative Assembly has ever tackled, and the base game barely scratches the surface of what it could be. Thrones Reforged is my attempt to fix that.
It's built on the foundation of the SHIELDWALL mod and takes everything that made that project great and pushes it much, much further. The result is a campaign that actually forces you to think like the Ruler of a Kingdom in that period: managing food across seasons, watching your population react to how you govern, dealing with Viking raids that don't follow a predictable script, and building a kingdom that feels genuinely fragile until you've earned it not to be.
This is not a "paint the map" mod. Every system is designed to create meaningful decisions and real consequences. If you expand too fast, your economy can't support your army. If you neglect your food stores going into winter, your population dies off and you can't raise an army in spring. If you ignore your coastline during a war, Viking warbands will pick your kingdom apart while you're distracted inland.
It's supposed to be brutally difficult.
What makes it different from vanilla or other mods?
Rather than write another wall of text here, I'll just say this: the mod has a fully documented wiki that covers every major system in detail (with many more to come). If you want to understand exactly what Thrones Reforged is and read up on the roadmap, that's the place to go.
https://thrones-reforged.gitbook.io/thrones-reforged-docs
It covers everything: the population system, food storage, the Burh system for English factions, Gaelic Legitimacy, the Viking raider mechanics, the follower item system, and more.
It also includes patch notes going back to version 0.1 and all previous dev blogs.
Beta 0.5.4
This is the update that pushed me to finally make this post because it represents a serious leap forward for the mod.
The headline feature is a culture-specific follower item system with 56 unique items spread across Anglo-Saxon, Brythonic, Gaelic, Norse, and Danish factions. Your characters now accumulate gear that actually reflects who they are and where they come from. A Norse jarl's runemaster grants completely different items than an Anglo-Saxon king's court scribe. It gives character progression a cultural identity it never had before.
The Viking raider system has been completely rebuilt from scratch. The old version ran on fixed timers, which made it trivially easy to predict and prepare for. The new system uses a dynamic opportunity score based on the actual state of your kingdom: your treasury, your food levels, whether you're at war, how exposed your coasts are. If you're vulnerable, viking invaders will show up more frequently. Up to five different factions can now land simultaneously. Wipe one out and you earn a deterrence window for a few turns, but the pressure always remains.
I also rebalanced morale across the board to make battles actually feel like Dark Ages engagements. Vanilla Thrones of Britannia has units routing almost immediately, which makes every battle feel disposable. Fights now have weight. Units hold longer, flanking and fatigue matter, and there's a genuine back and forth before someone breaks.
The food storage system now correctly projects your winter deficit going into the cold months, so the granary management that's central to the campaign actually behaves the way it's supposed to. Population growth and decline have also been tightened, your serfs, nobles, monks and foreigners all respond to your tax policy, your food levels, and your buildings in ways that compound over time.
If Thrones of Britannia ever felt like a game that didn't live up to its setting, this mod is built specifically for that feeling. Steam Workshop link is down below.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3397195419
All tutorials, patch notes, and dev blogs live at the documentation site linked above. That's the best first stop if you want to know what you're getting into before you download.
Happy to answer any questions here.