Empire II 4.2: The Nine Years' War is out!
Now also available on MacOS and Linux
Hello everyone!
Today, the team is delighted to present to you the major 4.2 update of the mod.
The developers have completed an incredibly complex job, and not a single aspect of the mod was left without major bug fixes, rebalancing and overhauls. The complete changelog since version 4.0 is too long to present here in any sufficient manner. Anyone willing to read it, can find it provided in the archives or in our Discord channel.
1690 Campaign
The default campaign now starts in the year 1690 AD. Europe is torn apart once again by the Nine Years’ War, where Louis XIV of France, in a bold decision, began an invasion of the Rhineland territories. The invasion catalysed a chain of dramatic events which provoked a conflict involving every major European power of the time. All while the Ottomans - an informal ally of Louis - began their own grand offensive on Austrian soil, uniting against themselves The Holy League of states, unifying the military efforts of the Holy Roman Empire, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the Republic of Venice and the ambitious Russian Empire. Now, it is up to you to decide the outcome of events, which have set the stage for the further developments of the dawning Age of Enlightenment.
The rosters, especially early and mid-early, underwent a major rework and clean-up to provide the best playing experience for the new starting era of gradual switch from pike and shot, relying on massed arquebus and cannon fire from the checker-board formations, to linear warfare with modern flintlock muskets, bayonets and standardised artillery.
In the startpos, Britain now starts allied to Savoy, and Austria is immediately at war with the Ottomans. All major startpos issues have been addressed, leading to a much-awaited increase in stability. The 1690 startpos is in an early phase of development, having little changes from vanilla, and is going to be improved further, building on the ongoing research of startpos modding led by Flavis of Pirates Über Alles, Ludde96 of PUA and Empire II and Erzya of Foothold in India.
Take note: the old 1700 startpos is presented as an option for those who wish to have a more vanilla-like campaign experience.
Improved unit rosters and battle mechanics
The rosters of all factions present in the game received a whole lot of balancing of stats, abilities and morale. Most important were the efforts undertaken towards trimming clutter - the work was greatly directed towards making sure the recruitment page would feel less overpacked, excessive and sometimes outright illogical. The mod in this field has taken great steps towards representing the strengths and fighting styles of each faction in a unique manner, while preserving a reasonable amount of historical detail. Ert and Massena777 did most of the heavy lifting on refactoring and rebalancing as well as cleaning up areas of recruitment, removing duplicates and in general bringing the huge variety of ETW II's units into a more uniform and usable state.
Expanding on unit stats and battle mechanics, these two also received a significant analysis and overhaul: the units are less prone to premature panic and would give more of a fight before running from overwhelming fire. The wide disbalance between some of the units has been toned down to make for a more equal fight. Era progression now plays an even more important role, with later muskets and rifles having increased range, accuracy and firepower in comparison to the early arquebuses and matchlocks. The factor of field artillery too will become more and more deadly over the length of a campaign, reflecting the real evolutions made in military technology and organisation, with certain units playing an increasingly more pivotal role on the battlefield.
BERTZ - The new campaign AI
The Grand Campaign now features BERTZ: The Bran-Ert-Erzya Campaign AI. Picking up from the works of Bran, the team was able to create a more dynamic, less predictable and boring AI, which brings a so-needed freshness and sense of action to every new campaign. The factions are more willing to make peace and start wars than they used to be in the previous versions of Empire II. Alliances are more likely to re-align, with the decision to help an ally in war becoming a more complex multi-factor choice that considers the current political situation, individual factions' profiles and balance of power, rather than simple faction strengths. Faction profiles also matter when making diplomatic decisions - maritime factions don’t mind fighting far away from home, while native Americans are hard-pressed to wage longer wars. The enemy fleets are more likely to launch naval invasions, especially on the short distances in the European-MENA theatre. Cultural unrest has also been toned down, and the AI’s invasion behaviour increased to make the major powers more aggressive and willing to expand.
Vétuste, our tester, describes one of his playthroughs as follows:
Playing as Great Britain.
In the year 1717, after beating the pirates into submission, and securing my North American territories, I looked to India, to gain a foothold and thus a naval network next to the East Indies trading theatre. Having taken Carnatica from a group of rebels, and establishing sovereignty over a portion of Southern India and Sri Lanka, I was attacked by a Mysore seeking to expel me from the subcontinent and secure the riches of the Tamil legacy for their own. Interestingly, the United Provinces refused to help me fight this invading Mysore and our alliance was broken. In the face of this betrayal, and on good terms already with the Catholic powers in Europe, a new alliance was formed (British, French and Spanish) against the new Dutch hegemony taking over the southern Half of the American theatre (the Dutch even controlled everything up to New Mexico).
Did I have to ally with the French and Spanish to beat the Dutch? Probably not; but the Dutch did take over basically all of South America, so I had a good excuse to just practice some good old-fashioned British containment procedures :^)
Take note: BERTZ is a completely open-source effort and is free to download and use by anyone in any way, with the only requirement being crediting Bran Mac Born, Ert, Erzya and Empire II testers.
MacOS and Linux compatibility and rollout model change
The mod is finally available for MacOS and Linux. The archive should be downloaded separately from ModDB files page. Most of the features in the Linux/MacOS versions of the mod are fully functional, except for VDM, which is designed to work with Windows.
Multiplayer campaign is not yet tested for MacOS/Linux and will probably only function when both players are using the same game version, with MacOS, Linux and Windows versions of the game - all considered different. For more information and further updates on multiplayer compatibility, please visit Ludde's Discord on Empire Total War multiplayer campaigns.
Moreover, from now on, the mod's rolling updates are going to be uploaded to the ModDB page rather than to one drive, to allow all subscribed users receive notifications about the new rolling updates and to reduce the effort to search for them outside ModDB.
What's next?
Much has been done - and much is going to be done further! The team is set to keep improving the campaigns and unit rosters, as well as balancing the core Paradox-style mechanics, such as Empire 2's eras system and related tech tree, and more will be done with regards to cultures and balancing any discrepancies with these ambitious new mechanics. The 1690 campaign will likely receive further diplomacy tweaks, region ownership changes and cosmetic fixes to give a more immersive and authentic feeling of stepping through one of the most important centuries of world history.
So stay tuned and, as always, have an enjoyable game!
Kudos to Vétuste for editing the article and to Ert, preacher and Tonnes for providing screenshots.
Known issues:
- The new regions in early campaign had to be scrapped: the startpos with added regions was inherently unstable, and there was no capacity to fix it. In distant future, a re-implementation of a stable version is possible.
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Does your mod require any DLC in order to work?
Hello! I believe, it does require all the DLCs. They are not many. I think, Empire Total War is sold with all the DLCs included nowadays.
Excellent work. Regarding the final note, it was nice with the new territories but in previous versions I got some crashes during end turn wonkyness around those new territories. In my inexpert eye, it just seemes like the game just doesn't like having those new territories.
If so, not the end of the world to do without the new regions. Especially with this new 1690 feature which I think adds a lot more qualitative changes than new regions.
Either way, excellent job, thanks for sharing.
Thank you for the kind words, 7ty7!
The version of the map with new territories, which ETW II used previously, indeed led to crashes. However, there are updated versions of that big map, present, for instance, in PUA.
The person, who created the original big map, recently returned to the modding scene, so there is a small possibility he may share his knowledge with the community. If that happens, I expect more mods to adopt the big map.
Can't load it with steam and macbook pro 16 inch M1. Crashes the game. Tried 3 times following the instructions in the readme word file.
I'm confused. Are VDM and BERTZ included in Empire 2 from the get-go, or you need to install them manually?
While there were many duplicate units - I do miss having the early 18th century units. There used to be a lot more on the French roster. Is there a mod that can return some of the units?