Rather than the usual mid-week update, this time we are going to take a longer term view of some of the large developments we have in the pipeline. I’ll start off by going through the medium term goals for each mod, and then the big updates to core that will apply to all three.
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Empires of Europe 1100
As you may have seen, we have started with our big push into western European armours. The approach here is to build up a large library of tunics for light units, padded gambesons for medium, and different types of mail for heavy units.
For both Gambesons and Mail there will be three basic variations:
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Haubergeon / Mail Shirt / Aketon
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Hauberk / Gambeson
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Long Hauberk / Long Gambeson
This is a rough guide as to how armour will be distributed:
Most cultures will share the same overall pool of armours, with variations coming from the colour of undergarments, accessories (cloaks), and the types of helmets used.
There will also be “Crusader” variants of these that come with the stitched cross already attached, and slightly higher armour values. We will also do something similar for Mujaheddin armours as well 😊
We’re also going to do a custom set of Swords and Spears, and this time starting with western units. I feel there are enough “good” vanilla assets when it comes to weapon pieces, so the approach here will be to create our own custom weapons from the vanilla pieces, but following the Oakeshott Typology:
Once we have this library of weapons and armours complete, we will then remove all of the vanilla items (or at least hide them from the marketplace) as we have done with 1700 and Americas.
The next big goal for scenes is to start building out some custom town assets for the east. Specifically I want to have inland, river, and sea-side variations of a single city that we can use across as many towns as possible. For example a single scene that we could use for the likes of Baghdad, Damascus, and Benghazi by simply adding or removing the water, and making some changes to flora. Hopefully we’ll have this started in the next few weeks.
The last big update for 1100 is custom quests and guaranteed rewards to go along with the Custom Spawns (Cathars, Crusaders, Mujaheddin, etc). We now have what we need to do this, and I think I could have it done as soon as the October release, assuming the TW competition and 1.5 updates don’t get in the way 😐
Empires of Europe 1700
The core focus for 1700 will continue to be on new armours and scenes. Eight of our 13 “core cultures” are already complete, which will then be followed by the 12 “minor cultures”:
I plan to get through a minimum 1-2x of these per month, and probably faster as many assets can be reused for different cultures.
On the weapon front we are going to take a similar approach to 1100. Some new swords and lances will be crafted from in game items, as well as some additional cutlass and halberds. The major additions will be new “eastern” firearms including Ottoman and Safavid Muskets and Jezail Rifles.
The new eastern town scenes created for 1100 will also be brought across, with minor updates to props (like ships and trade items) to make them a better fit for the time period. We’ll also continue to build out new scenes based on our templates, including simple forts and towns for Eastern Europe.
The two other major things in the works are continued refinement of artillery, and changes to battle AI – both of which should now be possible. For artillery the goal is to increase range whilst decreasing accuracy. I want cannons to start firing as soon as the battle starts, forcing both sides to move instead of sitting idle.
The infantry formations are more difficult to get right, but we now have an approach that should work. The goal here is similar to what Erik has achieved with infantry marching to much closer distances before they fire, firing in volleys, and with the front row crouching down.
Empires of Europe Americas
The main priority for Americas is of course to finish off the map…and the goal has always been to complete the entirety of North and South America. Once this is done it will open the door for a new era of submods, with the obvious one being the American Revolution 😁
Major tasks still to be completed:
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Map updates
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New armours (mostly town clothes, pirates, and natives)
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Troop overhauls (particularly for natives)
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New native scenes (towns and villages)
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Economy overhaul
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Settlement upgrade variations
The economy overhaul is about completing something I started, which is giving unique resources to different regions/cultures which in turn are related to unique workshops, and provide lucrative income streams for owners. This is already in place for Pirates with the “Stolen Goods” resource married up with the “Black Market” workshop type, but it needs to be fleshed out for everyone.
The settlement upgrade variations refer to the ability to have a completely different appearance for towns as they upgrade through levels 1, 2 and 3. This is particularly relevant for Americas as it allows a place like Yanaguana, which is a native town, to eventually upgrade into the western style “San Antonio”. This is a native feature and we can already do it, but the variations need to added to towns on the map.
Core Updates for all mods
These are the features being added to all three mods. The first is further improvements to Campaign and Battle AI. We’ve only just recently discovered the tools to be able to make changes in these areas, and whilst we have some custom AI in place it will continue to be improved and customised for each mod.
With that said, I’ve already found some players don’t like the new AI and are used to the vanilla behaviour. To address this, we’ve added in a new mod feature selection on the main menu where players cans witch specific features on or off:
As we continue to add more unique features they will also be added to this menu.
The next big thing to address is to Warsails…the compatibility patch has been a good short term solution, but now that the mod tools are released we will focus doing a full implementation featuring all of the vanilla Warsails features such as ports and raids:
The last few major updates are all related to quests, rewards, and end-game goals. Starting off with quests…our custom spawns (Cathars, Crusaders, Mujaheddin, etc) will soon have accompanying quests providing the player with prompts, guidance, and most importantly, guaranteed rewards for completion.
These quests will be automatically granted based on player culture, and will eventually tie into religion and holy wars.
All playthroughs will soon be wrapped around an optional short or long quest structure. Short campaigns will require the player to first become the ruler of their ancestral kingdom, and then defeat their major rival. So for example and English player must become king of England, before then conquering France.
Long campaigns will require you to become the “hegemon” or simply the most powerful faction, stronger than all other kingdoms combined. To facilitate this, we have implemented a new system of end-game alliances against the player.
Once you form your own kingdom, enemy factions of 10%+ greater strength will declare war on you in attempt to curb your growing influence. As the player becomes more and more powerful, enemy factions will form a coalition against you, attempting to align factions so that the coalition is always roughly 10% stronger than the player.
As the player defeats enemy nations, more and more factions will be added to the coalition, until the player is eventually at war with everyone. Once you become more powerful than all remaining factions combined, the player has “won the game” and will be presented with the victory/retirement option screen.
For me personally this is one the most important features we have ever added. Fixing the end game has been my number one goal for years, and I feel this system will go a long way to dealing with the inevitable period of exhaustion/boredom that players reach once you get on a roll.
If all goes well we might even have the first version of this available in this weekend’s 1100 update!
Team Updates and new mods
The last major things to announce are that we have a new team member Yu. Yu has been working with Reiko and Rex on the “1100 Expanded” submod, which is going to be a major rework of the map, cultures and factions.
This sudmod aims to flesh out some of the less dense areas in western Europe, as well as introduce some of the complexity for kingdoms like the HRE. It will also be expanding into new map areas such as East Africa, and potentially even Pakistan on the far eastern border:
The major hurdle we needed to overcome was agreement on how we deal with:
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the desire to add new cultures.
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existing limitations and performance issues.
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having a single map to maintain.
To solve for these we have agreed on the following:
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the core mods will contain all cultures, assets (armours, weapons and scenes), and a single Europe map.
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additional cultures will be optional, and can be enabled/disabled from the new menu.
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“Expanded” and Eriks will be able to branch off their own direction, leveraging everything from the core mods whilst building out their own kingdoms, troops, and custom quests.
In closing…
So there you have it. A huge amount of stuff in the works and this is really just a taste. But I’m really happy with the progress we’ve made this year and the direction that we have now agreed upon.
I will make a quick shout out to all of our Patreons who continue to contribute. It makes a huge difference, and the more people sign up the more we can do.
Join as an EoE Paid Patreon member
August was actually a pretty terrible month which I assume was due to the free release in July + the horribly unstable 1.4 update from TW…but I think things will improve with 1.5. I’ve actually been speaking with TW directly to assist with the shader related crashes on launch, and I believe it will be fixed for next release 🙂
Good hunting!
-Fatrod
P.S – so I forget one very important update with the above…Reiko has written a script allowing us to make any specific unit recruitable in any town. So for example Cumans and Pechenegs in Turkic towns and Constantinople. Hospitaller and Lazarus Knights in Jerusalem, etc. This will be in all new versions starting from 1100 this week!
