I thought 1257 also a had a very limited item selection and troops looked very similar for most factions. I wanted to make myself a nice Sicilian knight with some cool Sicilian items but there weren't any. I haven't played it that much though.
There are generic troop trees for each culture group (which is historically accurate and of course a big help in a mod of this scope) but the amount of different textures is staggering. For greater unit variety in battles I must recommend historical 13th century wars between different cultures outside of the European heartlands, such as Scandinavian and Teutonic crusades in the Baltic, crusades on the Spanish peninsula and in the Holy Land, Mongol conquest of Russia etc. (and also Norwegian aggression in Scotland and Danish-German border disputes).
Please excuse me a bit more propaganda
AD1257 features:
-All of Europe, Asia Minor and the Middle East, featuring 42 factions
-Hundreds of new historical, region based troops.
-More than a thousand new items, armors, weapons, all historically accurate for XIII century.
-Buildable castles.
-Manor system, with the ability to build custom settlements (built buildings appear in the scene!)
-Realistic combat system, with taunts, formations, improved horse archer skirmishing scripts and other features.
-Custom battle scenes, realistically depicting each region of Europe.
-Weather system, including desert storms, blizzards, rain storms
-Play as one of your soldiers after your death, with our made auxiliary player feature (can be turned off in the mod options).
-Cruading system: Join a crusade or start one yourself!
-Join a crusader order as sergeant or a knight!
-New lance recruitment system, aiming to emulate medieval feudal recruitment system.
-Companion system improved and remade
-Sea battles and sea travel
-Many new scenes for castles, towns and villages. A good number of them - are historically based reconstructions of real places!
-Many other minor and major features!
Add to that hundreds of lords, ladies, castles, cities and villages, their names and titles, alliances and disputes all historically accurate for 1257 (wherever sources have been available) often to the extent of using contemporary spelling and wording directly from the old manuscripts themselves (Scandinavian factions as a case in point).
