Empires of Europe 1700 – 1.5.3.1 BETA

Today is the release of the EoE 1700 – 1.5.3.1 BETA.

Major highlights:

• Update to Bannerlord 1.5 Branch

• 32x new armours

• Overhaul of Danish Troop Tree

• Improvements to British and Ottoman Trees

• Updates to Regent Equipment sets

• New end game coalition quests

• New “Volley Fire” AI Battle Tactics

• New feature selection on the Main Menu

Bug Fixes:

• Shader Cache crash on launch

• Removed broken “Knight” option during character creation

• Wrong Culture for Augustus II and family

• Gun melee damage is reduced

• Fix for Polish cavalry and Highwayman upgrade crash

The major callout for this update is the new Battle AI and Volley Fire. This is the beginning of a comprehensive overhaul of battle AI, which will eventually consider all units in the game. The current version works as follows:

• Tactics for ranged units are split by Regular (bayonets) and Irregular (no bayonets).

• Regular units will use volley fire formations by default, and will be divided up into maximum 4x formations based on total army size.

• Regular troops will march into range before forming up with a combination of centre, flank, and reserve formations.

• Irregulars will rush ahead, attempt to flank, and will use Fire At Will by default.

• Cavalry will march behind the main body, waiting until the centre engages before attempting to flank the enemy.

Volley Fire is now its own fire mode and will be selected by default:

This can easily be changed back to Fire At Will if you desire, or you can disable the entire feature from the new option selection on the Main Menu:

This is still very new and I’m sure there will be issues, but its also progressing very quickly, and is going to completely change how combat works and feels 😀

Check out this short video to see it in action:

On the Asset front we had another big week with a total of 32x armour pieces added, and almost all of them brand new. The majority of new armours are for the new Danish tree which is completely overhauled:

I also went back and fixed up the British Grenadier, as well as added two new Line Infantry coats:

As well as finally getting to the Ottoman heavy cavalry:

I can’t wait to see someone do a Sipahi vs Winged Hussar battle 😉

The Ottomans only have two more troops that need to be updated and their tree will be complete. So we’ll aim for that next month.

The other big callout is the “endgame coalitions” that was added to 1100 last week. This is a campaign AI / quest system that kicks in once you get to the kingdom stage, and ensures that the player will always be at war with a kingdom slightly stronger than them (with a 40 day cooldown).

The way this works is that the system calculates total kingdom strength each day, and will pick an enemy ~10% stronger than you and have them declare war. If there is no single kingdom 10% stronger, it will combine two kingdoms (as an alliance) to ensure their combined strength is as close to 10% as possible…hence the “coalition”.

The goal is to ensure that the player cannot easily get on a roll and conquer the map with no resistance. The stronger you get, the more AI factions will ally against you making it harder.

For me personally, this might be the most important thing ever added to Bannerlord. The boring endgame was biggest problem and this should go a long way to fixing that.

The final thing to mention are updated equipment sets for Western Regents, you may have noticed kings and queens were all still wearing old gear so this has now been updated:

So that’s it for this update. Lots of new armours, troops, and some very important gameplay changes!

A quick reminder about the Patreon forum(s) on the Discord server:

These are exclusive to Paid Patreon Members and allow you both priority support, and the ability to request specific assets you would like to see. You will only have access to this automatically if your Discord and Patreon email is the same…so if you can’t see this in the channel list send me a DM and I will fix it up for you!

Good hunting!

-Fatrod