March of the Eagles: Enhanced mod

Preface

One day I stumbled upon some Youtube clips of an old British TV show called "Sharpe", about a British general and his squadron fighting in Spain during the peninsular wars, the same setting for the base game March of the Eagles. I slowly became fascinated. On all my previous modding projects for MOTE, I never stuck with the initial setting as I had little care for the era. However, I started thinking of how I could use skills learned from coding the nascent Conflict of the Eagles mod for MOTE and bring over systems to the Napoleonic Era. The setting was old enough so that I could have a lot of flexibility in my work, I didn't need complete historical accuracy.

March of the Eagles: Enhanced evolved from a small side-project and now is the main must-download mod for anyone playing March of the Eagles. It was created in the span of a week and was kept up-to-date for a while after.

However, new modding endeavors into March of the Eagles have proved that MOTE: Enhanced was fundamentally flawed as it was built. It shows brilliant promise, but instead of being a completely engaging and polished finished product, it is- as isorrowproduction showed- mostly a buggy mess.

The systems used in MOTE: Enhanced to simulate civil wars, revolutions, colonisation, and everything else were hastily drawn-up beta versions from Conflict of the Eagles, and were never truly tested in completely dynamic play. It turns out that the AI can't work well with them, and it also turns out that systems need to be much more rigid, there needs to be much more checks and balances written into the code. If not, strange things can and will happen, most disappointingly the game will crash often, and that's what happened here.

Specifically, the method used to force event cache reloads was poorly understood and again- never tested in dynamic play. It is now understood that setting a single event to repeat continuously at days = 1 will, without fail, eventually overload the base game scripting and crash the game. It's only a matter of time. It's also the same method that caused many of you to have crashes immediately starting a game. Others had intermittent crashes. Very little probably made it 3 consecutive in-game years without crashing. This is not OK!

Furthermore, it was discovered that an event being triggerable for a country will take up memory for that country's triggerability. That is to say that if if there are too many events that need to be checked for by a single country, events will slowly stop being triggered or will be delayed. When this happens, the game will also crash. These two reasons combined is why MOTE Enhanced v1.3 is so buggy.

March of the Eagles: Enhanced v2.0

Basically, there will be a March of the Eagles 2.0.

In my Libyan Civil War mod, I went back recently and understood that I had created a buggy mess. The map and setting were brilliant, the possibilities were great, but I had shoehorned myself in with a very imperfect and unfun system. So I tore down everything and started from scratch, even the map. Now there's a completely new LCW mod and it's 10x funner than what came before.

The same will happen with MOTE: Enhanced. It's my duty to the mod as it's become the main mod for MOTE.

A new and expanded mod is already in the works for Conflict of the Eagles. It will have parts of North America and a little bit more of Africa and Asia. New systems for event cache clearing and events generally will reduce crashes and buginess by a LOT. This has already been proven in the Libyan Civil War mod, where using new methods have stopped those constant crashes.

The new map will be ported to MOTE Enhanced, the provinces will be changed slightly to make sure they make sense for the 1800s. I will use some of the existing assets but mostly everything will be done from scratch. All the events, in particular, will be redone from scratch. A lot of stuff from the new Conflict of the Eagles is going to be used in the game, mostly stuff like:

* A three-pronged tag system (Democratic, Communist, and Fascist) vs a two-pronged (Republic and Monarchy) tag system. The starting date may need to be pushed up to 1840 to accommodate for this

* Napoleonic wars may have to go and wait to be ported in during a future update. The focus may be on a mid-19th century bookmark so that country claims are more solid

* Countries can only directly expand within a pre-determined maximum expanse, any expansion beyond these provinces may need to be done only via satellite states and proxy wars (UNSURE, may not put this system in)

* Civil wars will have a lot more BITE. This will be done by making sure the revolter tags can't just be put down by occupying their temporary capital, it will just move to another one of their controlled provinces. Furthermore, war exhaustion will be used correctly to make sure that the regime is severely weakened and the revolters are boosted during the early days.

* Methods of civil war creation will be slower and not as cut and dry.

* A lot of new methods will be in place to reduce crazy border-gore and wacky situations. Stuff like a country's capital needs to be in a province of its own culture (to prevent strange situations)

I hope to really start working on this as soon as some other projects start clearing up, and will keep you all posted on the situation at hand. Thank you for continuously supporting this mod.

Best,