Empires of Europe Americas – 1.4.7.4

Today is the release of Empires of Europe Americas – 1.4.7.4

Major highlights include:

• 34x new armours

• 1x new weapon (Cane Knife)

• Expansion of map into New Brunswick and Nova Scotia

• 2x new towns and 3x new forts

• Additional hideouts in new areas

• Greatly expanded navmesh

• New water texture

• New Plantation Scene (Spanish town variation)

• New NPC interactions and animations in scenes (thanks to Ulfkarl and Snorri)

• New army creation AI, courtesy of Ulfkarl

Bug Fixes:

• New textures for Fine Cutlass

• Fix for broken “Knight” option during character creation

The two main focus areas for this release were the new plantation scene, and the expansion of the map into Nova Scotia. We did of course have a lot of new armour assets to bring across from 1700, but we also completed somewhere around 10-12 pieces in addition to those.

These are mostly new town clothes for Western men and women, and have been added to the equipment pools for Gentry and Townspeople. We’ve also made some minor enhancements to troop trees to take advantage of the new gear.

The map expansion, whilst geographically small, adds many new settlements and 100% completed navmesh in the surrounding area, meaning that pathfinding should be near perfect.

I chose this area because it meant that I could add multiple new settlements without having to add any new cultures or kingdoms. It also gives a buff to the Algonquin kingdom (now renamed the Wabanaki Confederacy) which only had two settlements prior to this.

With settlements from 3x separate kingdoms in such close proximity, these areas will see hostilities almost immediately when you start a new game!

The new plantation scene is also very exciting 😁 This is one of several variations I have planned, with this one being the “Spanish” variant. Initially this is deployed for the Charlestown and Williamsburg plantations (because it is a town), but that will be cleaned up in the near future.

The scene is small and all action, with low destructible walls and very little cover once the simple fortifications are destroyed. Anyone playing as Akan or Bantu now has some clear goals for where you want to attack first!

A reminder that the CustomBattle module is now integrated and available from the ESC menu (once you start a game). I captured these screenshots above by simply doing a custom siege battle against the Charlestown plantation.

Final callouts are the new army/war AI from Ulfkarl that we added to 1700 last week, and the new/fixed NPC interactions in towns.

So that’s it for this week. Another huge release and improvements across the board.

Next week is meant to be content and videos, but I’ve got no choice to start work on porting to 1.5 as its now in public beta. Fingers crossed it won’t be a huge job and eat into our regular dev cycle.

Good hunting!

-Fatrod