@Lonecat Nekophrodite - I know we have spoken over direct messages, but I thought I would share the outcome of my testing here, so that others may benefit from it should they wish.
The headline and the good news: I have been successful in defining a cultural variation of the Man-At-Arms unit and having those alternative assets appear and behave in-game as intended. Furthermore, the assets used in the cultural variant are
not base-game assets - they are custom assets, imported in via the mod I built.
I make no claim to the assets pictured below, nor do I suggest that the composition of the unit is accurate - but it does show that it is possible to use custom assets and introduce cultural variations, even after the latest patch:
The English Man-At-Arms unit (with poorly-aligned colourful shield) uses custom assets, defined into a European cultural variant. The City-State Man-At-Arms, to its right, is using the default variant as the CS has a non-European culture defined.
My test mod (attached) is doing nothing except ensuring the game has available to it the new assets (including the new textures, materials and geometries that go with them), alongside instructing the game to use them when rendering the Man-At-Arms unit for any civilization with the European culture (via the Units and Unit_Bins ArtDef files).
Whilst I know these assets originated in another mod, my goal was to make them work standalone, in my mod, to prove the capability. To do this, I had to ensure my mod was including the various Assets, Geometries, Materials and Textures by using an ImportFiles action. I created the Textures within the Asset Editor to ensure they were imported to my mod with the supplementary .tex files, then I dropped in the Materials (which only reference Textures, which we'd just recreated with the same names), then I dropped in the Geometries (.geo and .fgx files), before lastly dropping in the Assets.
When I say I 'dropped them in' - I simply mean I did not recreate these from scratch; but rather copied them into my project's folder structure and added them in via ModBuddy solution explorer. I think there was one .ast file I had to recreate. As a result, I had to recreate the Attachment Points. I also then tied some base-game Behaviours (from the Swordsman) to it, so it was animated.
Then it was time to compose the unit, via the Unit_Bins.artdef and Units.artdef. In order to reference the new, custom assets within UnitAttachmentBins, it was necessary to first create an XLP file (via Asset Editor). I used the Package Name
units/units along with the XLP Class
Unit. From there, I was able to then reference those assets in the UnitAttachmentBins and, finally, point to my new UnitAttachmentBins in my Units.artdef.
I then built the whole thing and the screenshot above shows the result.
The built mod can be found via:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1pMdhAADP-Ycp01Q2VXBmI6D0tMpccMd2/view?usp=sharing
