Empires of Europe Americas – Release Preview

So we’re halfway through the Americas update for October. The focus this time is primarily on map expansion as we start to fill in the gaps between North and South, as well as move into South America proper.

What we’re looking at here is 6x new settlements which tick a lot of boxes:

• Santo Domingo to finish off the Dominican Republic

• San Juan to give Puerto Rico a town

• Panama Town to open up the isthmus and connect north and south

• Bogota as the captial of New Granada, and our first push into the green south

• Cartagena as the port and sea access for New Granada

• Merida as the capital of Yucatan

In line with this we’ve also added some new Spanish lords, and started building out the proper governorships for New Spain:

Apart from their historical significance there is important gameplay reasons for selecting these settlements…and that relates to the first scripted events for Americas. The goal is to create an annual “gold fleet” that will sail from either Panama or Cartagena, stopping by various spanish settlements (such as Havana) before moving into the Atlantic. These will create optional quests for the player to scratch their pirate itch, as well as earn some gold in the process 😁

The events themselves are not fully functional yet but we are laying the groundwork. I intend to make this a full production line with the gold first being mined in Columbia and Peru, before moving to a port town to go on a ship, and then finally the ships leaving and making their various stops. Should be great fun!

Along with the settlements there have been a number of improvements to the overall terrain and paint layers. This started off with me accidentally deleting all the desert on the map which lost me half a day’s dev time…but as is always the way with these things…its heaps better the second time you do it.

The trick was in learning to blend and “layer” the paint layers instead of trying to squeese all the features into one. This creates a lot more options and looks a lot better as well. Take a look at this example for the desert plains:

This has been applied to all of the central and western areas, which are all looking a lot better as a result.

I’ve only just started on armours but the main goal is at least 3-4x new armours sets for our upcoming Apache and Comanche factions. Using some tricks I learned from Snorri we’re now able to add our cloth physics more subtly:

And here is how it looks in motion:

I’ve also gone back and fixed some old armour textures that really bothered me…specifically the Pirate Mate Tunic:

And the Pirate Jerkin:

These are still WIP and will probably have some further improvements before the release is finished.

The last thing to mention is the new town scene that came to 1700 last week. The original scene has a lot of very white buildings making it a good fit for European towns:

But its quite easy for us to retexture these buildings…making it a much better fit for 18th century Montreal or Philadelphia:

The other simple change we can make is adding or removing horizen prefabs in order to change the location from somthing like an ocean front settlement:

…to being used for a riverside settlement:

So we’ll have at least one new variation of this scene as part of this release. Depending on how the week goes I really want to get a new native town done as well…but we’ll see what happens.

There is of course a bunch of armours and weapons to bring across from 1700, and I really want to get a new cutlass done as well 😁Fingers crossed it is a smooth week but we have a lot going on!

This release will be next weekend, most likely on Saturday 31st October. If you don’t want to miss out make sure you are part of the Chieftan tier or higher: https://www.patreon.com/c/empiresofeurope/membership

Good hunting!

-Fatrod