Empires of Europe 1700 – 1.5.5.1

Today is the release of EoE 1700 – 1.5.5.1.

Major highlights include:

• The new “Mediterranean” town scene from Nubs

• 22x new armours focussing on Swedish and Ottoman troops

• Completed overhaul of Ottoman tree

• New Swedish Troop Tree

• New bodyproperties for all western NPCs

• 6x new guns, 6x new swords, 2x new lances

• Improvements to Battle AI tactics

• Balance pass on all armours and weapons

As we saw in the mid-week preview the first week was spent on a couple of new armours, as well as a series of swords and firearms specifically for the Ottomans. These have been used to complete the overhaul of the Ottoman tree, with every unit updated to use the new assets.

These new firearms also feed into the Battle AI system, and determine which units use Volley Fire (F4) vs Fire at Will(F3). The way this has been set up with unit loadouts is that “Irregular Units” (always the left side of a troop tree) will use F3 by default, and “Regular Units” (always the right side of a tree) will use F4.

I didn’t like the way irregulars were behaving so I’ve tweaked this as follows…they will still move to their initial position (either flank or in reserve) at their own pace:

…But once they get to their desired position they will once again form up, and begin to fire at will:

The other change that feeds into this is a balance pass across all armour and weapon stats, bringing some standardisation to armour tiers. Irregulars have lighter armour than before, and Elite Regulars (Guard and above) have stronger armour. This allows Line infantry to survive the volleys a little better, whereas Light Infantry will get cut to pieces if they rush too far ahead or get caught out of position.

The reason you would use Light Infantry however, is because they can get to a position faster and with Fire At Will by default they also shoot a lot faster. So if you hold them back and deploy them at the right time, that can be very useful.

There’s been a few more tweaks such as Artillery units staying with (and manning) the artillery:

Artillery will also now start firing immediately, but accuracy is…questionable to say the least! Cavalry still are not perfect so I’ll tackle them next, along with Grenadiers 😁💣

The other exciting new update are the Swedish troops. This is a full troop tree, recruitable in Sweden, but with all troops sharing the existing Nordic culture.

Just to hammer home the point here…thanks to Reiko’s recruitment code we can now have multiple different troop trees, recruitble wherever we want, even if the troops have the same culture. So in this case Swedish and Nordic (Denmark-Norway) troops are all “Nordic”, but only recruitable in their resepctive areas:

You might also notice their (mostly) clean shaven faces and long hair…I’ve finally gotten around to updating the body properties, with most western nations already completed. You’ll see this reflected in townspeople, troops, and starting characters:

The last major update is of course the new town scene which looks fantastic. Now that we’ve got so many scenes I’ve re-distributed them somewhat, with pretty much all western capitals now being custom. The river capitals use either the Spanish or French variation of the “riverside town”. The “America Town” scene is predominatly used in Ireland, Scotland, and the Nordic countries. And the new scene for this release is used for several of the central Mediterranean towns such as Marseille, Genoa, Pisa, Naples, and Cagliari.

The full scene is huge, and we can almost certainly carve off some pieces to be their own scenes, such as the fort. I’m also tempted to play with the siege locations and see if we can create some variations that way as well.

So that’s it for this month. Looking forward we will finish of the western troop trees before finally tackling Poland, Russia and the Safavids. I’ve also been delving deeper into the battle AI I’ve already got some big changes planned for volley fire…including new morale and rally mechanics.

A reminder to make use of the Patreon channel on Discord, where there is often fixes, new builds, and previews: https://discord.com/channels/1092600980123684964/1513358411201249320

If you can see this then send me a DM.

Good hunting!

-Fatrod