Empires of Europe 1100 – 1.5.4.1

Today is the release of Empires of Europe 1100 – 1.5.4.1.

*Update 28/10/26 – The mod download is now updated to 1.5.6.1. This fixes compatability with Bannerlord 1.5.6.1 – this IS SAVE COMPATIBLE.

This is the first release on our new schedule, meaning that we spent two weeks on development instead of one….and it shows!

Release Highlights:

• New Quests and Rewards for Custom Spawn Events

• New Religion and Fixed Diplomacy Mechanics

• New Faith and Holy War Mechanics

• 10x new armours

• 10x western spears

• 12 western axes

• Overhauls of Spanish and English Troop Trees

• New banners for 10x kingdoms

• New banners and equipment for bandits

• New equipment for Western gentry and peasants

Starting off with the usual stuff, we’ve continued to flesh out the western assets with a number of new tunic variations being added.

I particularly like the linen fabric on the white and yellow versions. These will double as both gentry town clothes, and armours for some of the light western units.

We also took some time to go back and fix the colours/textures on some of the short tunics added last month. The original is on the left and the improved version on the right:

This is the difference between my standard of work and my wife’s (Crazy Lopez), as she has much more patience for getting colours and weight painting correct 😂

We also continued the build out of custom weapons, this time adding western spears and axes. The spears are split by head type, length, as well as lugged and non-lugged (using a banner instead):

There are short spears for low tier units, long spears for middle tiers, and lances for cavalry (which are also couchable). All spears can also be used one handed or two handed, and use spear brace.

The axes are split between one handed and two handed, as well as by head type which are either narrow, broad, or beared:

These all follow the Petersen Typology, and are therefore mostly of Nordic origin.

All of these assets have been used to overhaul the Spanish and British troop trees, with the Spanish now being a personal favourite!

They have a very interesting mix of extremely light units for the low tiers, followed by very heavily armoured knights at the high tier:

The British are more evenly spread with their mid tier units having padded gambesons and aketons:

There has also been a number of updates to banners for the baltic kingdoms (thanks to LSCD and Reiko) as well as new banners for all Bandit clans, and some new equipment sets for looters.

We’ve also added many of the new armours to the pool of town clothes for western units.

That’s the basic stuff…now we get on to big updates! 😁🤯

The first big improvement is quests and guaranteed rewards for custom spawn events. When any of the spawn events happen (Cathars, Crusaders, Romans, etc) relevant players will be given an optional quest to destroy them, along with rewards on completion.

If you’ve been playing since the 1.2 days you will know how this used to work, but the new system is a massive improvement as it guides the player on what is happening, and we’re able to split the item rewards between multiple events. For example if you want the full set of “Crusader Armour”, you will need to defeat all three Mujaheddin armies that spawn.

This also means that the Ancient Battle Plans (enabling field Ballistas) are now once again a guaranteed reward for defeating the Roman mercenaries.

The custom spawns and quest/rewards functionality are entirely XML driven, which means it will be easy for modders to build out their own events. By chaining together kill quests along with specific rewards, you could even build out treasure-hunt style mini-campaigns. I’m planning to create a video guide about this in the coming weeks 😁

In order to facilitate some of the above (and fix the stability), we’ve also introduced a basic religion mechanic which is mostly used for diplomacy. This allows us to fix diplomacy for certain factions, ensuring that we don’t end up with a-historical relationships. For example, the Papal States will permanently be at war with muslim factions and pagans.

Religion can be defined at either culture, kingdom, or clan level depending on who it is being applied to, and you can see a clan’s culture under the info section in the Encyclopedia.

The second part to religion, is holy wars…

We’ve added a “currency” called Faith which is something the player can accumulate by doing certain tasks for their allocated Holy Leader. Tasks include:

• Donating money to the “cause”

• Visiting holy sites (pilgrimages)

• And defeating enemy parties belonging to your opposing religion

There is a set number of faith that can be earned from each of the above, but the player needs to complete all of them to earn the required 100 faith. Once you have that, you can visit your Holy Leader and “spend it” on a Holy War.

Right now there are two sides (and two Holy Leaders) to this, The Pope for Catholic Christians and The Abbasid Caliph for Muslim factions. To make this function the Papal States is no longer a kingdom but instead a minor clan that owns Rome. Likewise the Abbasids are no longer a Seljuk Vassal, but instead a minor clan that owns Baghdad. This is so that there is no risk of either clan being destroyed, and making a holy war impossible.

Once the target site is active, the player will be given a quest to capture the town within 100 days. It won’t be smooth sailing however, as the two strongest rival factions of your religion will also raise their own armies, and try to capture it first!

This is very much a work in progress but the basic mechanics are there and functioning. Eventually I will tie this into the planned “long and short” campaign goals, with a successful holy war being required to unlock greater things…

So thats it this month. Obviously a huge release and I think it fully vindicates the decision to move to two-week build sprints, as we’ve been able to acheive so much more than usual!

If I can find time next week I’m planning to put together some guides on the mechanics, as well as how modders can make use of the custom spawns and quest tools.

Also a reminder to make use of the Patreon forum on Discord. With the longer development cycle I’ll probably add more test versions and fixes in there as it is the fastest way to share them. If you can’t see the Patreon section on Discrod then send me a DM and I’ll fix it up.

Good hunting!

-Fatrod

*Update 28/10/26 – The mod download is now updated to 1.5.6.1. This fixes compatability with Bannerlord 1.5.6.1 – this IS SAVE COMPATIBLE.