Empires of Europe 1100 – 1.5.3.1 BETA

Today is the release of Empires of Europe 1100 – 1.5.3.1 BETA

Major highlights include:

• Update to Bannerlord 1.5 Branch

• 37x new armours

• 12x new melee weapons

• Overhaul of French, German, and Crusader Trees

• New Kingdom Banners

• Unit recruitment by settlement

• New end game coalition quests

• UI toggle for custom features

Bug Fixes:

• Shader Cache crash on launch

• Removed broken “Knight” option during character creation

• Missing tournament templates

This is a very exciting update, and by far the largest we’ve ever done 😁

First thing to call out is the move to the 1.5 branch, which has fixed the dreaded shader cache “this application has faced a problem” crash on launch. Apart from some minor code updates this has been one of the smoothest branch updates so far.

The two main things for this release however, are the new western armours and weapons, and the end game coalition functionality.

I’ve taken an RPG style approach to the armours, splitting them into light, medium, and heavy categories:

• light: Tunics

• medium: Padded Vest/Gambeson

• heavy: Mail

Within both medium and heavy are another three tiers, which roughly translate into:

• Haubergeon and Padded Vest (mainly covers chest)

• Hauberk and Aketon (covers chest and arms)

• Long Hauberk and Padded Gambeson (covers chest, arms, and legs)

Then within each of these categories are variations of colours and underlying garments. We will continue to add more coloured variations and use these (along with helmets) to distinguish between cultures.

Speaking of helmets, we’ve added 8x so far with at least another 6x planned. I’ve finally got the metallic textures right for these and they look much better than our earlier efforts. For next release we’ll go back and fix up a lot of the Turkic, Arab, and Imazighen ones with the new approach.

We’ve also begun our build out of western weapons, starting with swords. As I explained in the roadmap update, there’s plenty of good pieces in vanilla…so this was more a question of putting them together in new ways, to make more accurate 12th century weapons. Following the Oakeshott Typology I have split these into roughly 6x different categories:

I also spent some time getting the stats correct, ensuring that a weapon of the next tier is always an improvement on the previous one. The goal is to create our own versions of swords, axes, spears and maces. Once those and our additional armours are complete, we will hide all of the vanilla equipment from the game the same way we have done with 1700.

Using all these new swords and armours we have re-overhauled the French and Crusader trees, and have now also done the Germans. As we add more colour and helmet variations we will continue to overhaul additional cultures with each release.

Whilst we’re on the topic of troops, a very exciting update from Reiko which allows us to now make any type of troop recruitable from any settlement. So that means we can have specific mercenaries available within certain towns, such as Genoese in Genoa, the Black Guard within Morocco, and Crusaders in Jerusalem.

To go along with this I’ve also built out a mini “Knights of Saint Lazarus” tree. There is only a single unit which is a dismounted knight, but with 3x different equipment variations. The Monk, the Axeman, and the Swordsman. These are all Tier 6, level 31 skillset, heavy infantry…and will easily be the best infantry units in the game. They will only be recruitable from Jerusalem, and with a 30% spawn rate. So hope for the best when you’re passing by 😁

The final major callout is the new “end game coalition” quests. This is a feature I have wanted to create for a long time, and for me will fix the “boring endgame” once the player becomes unstoppable. This functionality only kicks in once you get to the Kingdom stage, and works as follows:

• One or more rival kingdoms will continuously declare war on the player, with a 30 day cooldown for recovery.

• The player will always be at war against a 10%+ stronger opponent (excluding cooldowns).

• If no single kingdom is 10% stronger than the player on their own, a “coalition” of two or more enemy kingdoms will be created, and they will declare war on you together.

• Your objective is to survive until they declare peace, or you destroy them.

If the player’s kingdom continues to grow, eventually all remaining kingdoms would need to ally against the player. If you survive that final offensive and become stronger than all kingdoms combined, the “victory screen” will pop asking you if you want to retire or continue.

So definitely no more boring endgame! This feature is still in beta but appears to be working well so far.

The final, final thing to mention is that there is now a new configuration option on the main menu. Any of our custom code features will be added to this, allowing the player to enable or disable these features at your leisure.

So that’s it for this update. Easily the most content and features we have ever delivered in a single release, and for me personally some of the most important gameplay updates any Bannerlord mod has seen with the end game coalitions. Let me know your thoughts in the comments and on Discord.

Good hunting!

-Fatrod

Notes:

• Requires Bannerlord 1.5.2 BETA

• Not compatible with 1.4 saves, or Eriks Troops 1.4