Campaign Setup

• Campaign Setup UI has been reworked into a map-based screen. As part of this rework:
• The map is colour-coded to show faction-owned regions at the start of the campaign, and those required to win a campaign.
• Required regions are now grouped by theatre.
• Georgians and Georgians rejoice!
• Playable factions now have strings summarising their strengths and weaknesses.

Custom Battles

• An ‘All Units’ option has been added to land, sea and siege battle setup.
• An option to let the defender use field fortifications has also been added to land & siege battle setup.
• All custom battle maps support up to 4 factions on each side, including the possibility of asymmetric matchups.
• In the original PC release, there is an extra 4v4 ‘Arctic Ocean’ map in multiplayer Sea battles that is not available in single-player battles. As part of the above change, this map is now available for all battles.
• Added ability to view detailed unit info in custom battle army setup.
• Fixed a bug where Poland-Lithuania’s default army was over budget.

Options

• Added option to swap all in-game fonts for a dyslexia-friendly one.
• Save files are now sorted by faction & by campaign number in the save & load menus, making it easier for players to have multiple campaigns on the go.
• Save files are better compressed and have been made more efficient (by improving byte allocation and no longer saving redundant parts of the AI data), resulting in a smaller size per file.

General Campaign Improvements

• Multiple new help systems have been added to the game including:
• First-Time-Help messages.
• A reference Help Menu accessible via the advisor portrait.
• Hyperlinks to Help Menu articles within tooltips.
• Reworked advisor message logic.
• A per-turn Advisor Report in the notifications screen, detailing areas requiring the player’s attention.
• Players can now choose to liberate a region as their protectorate instead of capturing it. The mechanics for this mirror Total War: Napoleon.
• Note that the option to loot & capture a region has not been added, and the Pirate faction cannot be liberated.
• A new mechanic has been added to let players peacefully change their government type without having to force a revolution in their capital. More information is available in-game by tapping the Advisor portrait to open the Help menu, and selecting Campaign > Peaceful Government Reform.
• This topic was also explored further in our Building an Empire series.
• Fixed an issue where moving armies were impossible to intercept if their destination was an enemy settlement.
• Fixed an unintended behaviour where a moving army that triggers an intercept decision stops moving, even if the intercept is declined.
• Regions held by your protectorates now count as being held by your faction for the purpose of satisfying victory conditions.
• Players who complete a Short Campaign now have the option to upgrade that campaign to a Long Campaign.
• Fixed an AI bug where foreign armies would struggle to board land units into ports, exiting and reentering them multiple times each turn.
• Added more trigger points for autosaves and safety saves.
• Fixed a few rare crashes.

Replenishment & Auxiliaries

Replenishment - Land

• An automatic system for replenishing casualties has been implemented and is the default for new campaigns. EMPIRE’s original manual system is still available, and can be selected during campaign setup.
• Automatic land replenishment logic is a modified version of the logic introduced in Total War: Napoleon and iterated upon in subsequent games. Damaged land units will passively recover a certain percentage of lost manpower at the start of each turn, provided they are in a region which their faction controls or to which they have military access.
• The base rate of replenishment is determined by checking where in a region the unit is located and whether the region can currently recruit that unit.
• Additional bonuses to global replenishment come from technologies. There are no replenishment bonuses from characters.
• When using this new system, tapping-and-holding on the “Select All” button in the card bar for an army with damaged units will equalise casualties between units of the same type.
• Tapping-and-holding this button when using the original manual system will instead set all damaged units to be retrained.

Replenishment - Naval

• An automatic system for replenishment has also been implemented for naval units. This is now the default, but the original can be reenabled during campaign setup.
• Replenishing ships recover a flat amount of hull damage and lost crew instead of a percentage. This means that bigger, tougher ships will replenish proportionally slower than smaller ones.
• Ships can always replenish, with the rate of replenishment varying based on their location.

Auxiliaries - Land

• Enabling “Automatic (advanced)” land unit replenishment during campaign setup also enables the new “auxiliaries” system. This system makes it cheaper for factions to garrison their regions with a few basic units, and also boosts the replenishment of these units, making them more expendable.
• Units impacted by this system are marked as “auxiliary” in their abilities.
• These units receive a discount on their upkeep cost and a bonus for their replenishment. This means that the more auxiliary units you control in the region, the smaller the auxiliary bonus each receives.
• An auxiliary can only qualify for the bonus in a given region if the auxiliary is in the recruitment pool for that region.
• The Ottoman Empire has a base land auxiliary bonus of 80% rather than 60%, to reflect their historic reliance on irregulars to secure their borders.

Auxiliaries - Naval

• Enabling “Automatic (advanced)” naval unit replenishment during campaign setup also enables this auxiliary system for naval units.
• The formulas and mechanics are the same as for land units, with the bonus scaling negatively with the number of auxiliary ships you control in a given ocean, sea, bay, etc.
• Auxiliary ships qualify for the auxiliary bonus in all regions; recruitment pools don’t matter.

Research

• The research system has been changed to provide a more convenient UI flow on mobile, and to a more consistently engaging research experience at all stages of a campaign.
• In the original desktop release, research was conducted by assigning new technologies to individual universities. With the new system, universities & gentlemen add research points to a central pool, which can then be assigned to researching technology.
• By default, the maximum number of research points that can be assigned to a given technology is 10. Added to 8 of the game’s technologies is an effect which increases this maximum by 5.
• Military Syllabus (Military T2)
• Reorganised Procurement (Military T4)
• Reformed Naval Administration (Naval T2)
• Selective Breeding (Agriculture T3)
• Measuring Tools (Metal Industry T2)
• Machine Tools (Metal Industry T3)
• Interchangeable Parts (Metal Industry T4)
• Mass Production (Textile Industry T4)
  
• The research points provided by each tier of university have been tweaked to create neat increments of 5 points.
• Under the original system, stationing a gentleman in a university would expedite that university’s research. Using the “modern” research system on mobile, gentlemen now provide their bonus research points as long as they’re located in one of your regions.
• Gentlemen can now also steal technologies from multiple locations. All technologies can be stolen from Universities as before, but now:
• Entering main settlements allows for the stealing of military and ordnance tech;
• Entering ports allows for the stealing of naval tech;
• Entering farms or wineries allows for the stealing of agricultural tech;
• Entering factories allows for the stealing of industrial tech (both metal and textile, regardless of which factory you enter);
• Entering universities allows for the stealing of philosophy tech or tech from any other tree.
• Entering religion, entertainment, plantation, fur, mining or timber locations does nothing.
• Tech-stealing calculations have also been refined. Originally, this was a simple success/failure dice-roll chance.
• When failing to steal technology outright, Gentlemen now generate points towards that technology for your faction. The more progress towards that technology that the target nation has made, the more points generated.
• The technology details panel now shows which other factions know a particular technology. These factions are colour-coded depending on whether they are allies, enemies or neutral to you.

Sieges, Fortifications & Artillery

• Fixed bugs preventing repair, upgrade and demolition of fortifications.
• A number of tweaks have been made to battle AI, primarily in the context of sieges:
• The detection zone for when a unit is “in front” of a gate had unlimited length, which made it too easy for the defender to accidentally open their gates for the enemy when sallying out with their troops. Detection zone length now has a limit.
• AI defenders on walls should be more effective at shooting back at enemies on the ground with their muskets. Previously AI units on walls could be trapped in indecision loops where they’d march back and forth across the walls between different possible firing positions. Now they’re more likely to stay in any one position and fire from it if there’s an enemy they can hit from there.
• Logic has been added to teach the AI defenders to sally against attackers. This logic should only be invoked when the AI significantly outnumbers the attacker but the attacker possesses at least one artillery unit.
• Besieging soldiers manning fixed field artillery are less likely to abandon their guns and charge the enemy walls as infantry.
• Non-artillery units of AI attackers should be less likely to get in the way of firing artillery.
• Infantry on the walls of a Star Fort should be more effective at identifying and manning the wall-mounted guns.
• Wall-mounted guns had a very limited firing arc, resulting in significant “deadzones” where the attacker could deploy their guns and the defenders wouldn’t be able to shoot back at them. Firing arcs have been increased, which should largely eliminate these angle-based deadzones. This change should also make wall guns more effective at concentrating their fire when a small number of spaced-out enemies are present.
• Fixed field guns (demi-cannons, mortars etc.) have also had their field of fire changed from 0o to 90o. In their case, a 0o field of fire was actually a 360o field of fire (which was not reflected in the user interface). Players will now need to be more careful with the positioning of these weapons.
• Forts have been given an upkeep cost and a town wealth growth penalty, but also provide an upkeep discount and ammunition bonus for garrisoned troops.
• On some maps, defenders would be unable to deploy inside or near the settlement. We’ve fixed a number of cases of this.
• Pathing through gates has been improved.
• Modified aiming behaviour for artillery weapons:
• Previously, artillery would tend to aim towards one corner of a targeted enemy unit. They now aim for that unit’s centre.
• Fixed a bug where artillery could find themselves consistently overshooting their target.
• Artillery now lead their shots more against moving targets.

User Interface Improvements

• All UI assets have been replaced with higher-definition images.
• When a settlement is selected, the card bar will show all of the buildings in the region.
• Provincial buildings now have an icon for Prosperity/Resource Yield rating, as well as pips showing current and maximum building tier.
• Campaign Radar map now shows theatre travel zones.
• Campaign and battle minimaps can be resized by dragging on their bottom-left corners.
• Treasury HUD element now also shows expected income next turn.
• Added a new Notifications menu.
• Added a display in the commodities panel showing the global production of each commodity, factors affecting commodity prices, and the current top exporter of each commodity.
• Lists menu now shows additional information in each tab, such as building upgrade opportunities.
• In Settlement Details, the population growth tab now shows the number of turns for each town to emerge.
• Also included is an icon showing whether that emergent town will be a port or a town proper.
• Ship unit info panels now show the size and number of cannons in each part of the ship.
• Building info panels for wealth-generating buildings now have an estimated Return on Investment display.
• In addition to all of Feral’s previous adaptations of Total War’s battle HUD for mobile, grouped units can now be set in “locked” and “unlocked” states.
• By default, all created groups are locked, but a group can be unlocked by tapping and holding its icon in the Group Grid, located in the top-left of the screen.
• Locked state (default): The formation of grouped units remains unchanged, and its width or depth cannot be changed.
• Unlocked state: When ordered to move, the formation of grouped units is set in a line next to each other; the formation’s width and depth can then be changed at the player’s discretion by tapping and holding two fingers on the group.
• In naval battles, firing cones for ships are white while guns are reloading, turning red once all guns are fully reloaded.
• Some bugs have been fixed relating to ‘Firepower’ values in naval unit info panels.

Town Wealth & Town Prosperity

To avoid confusion, this section will use the term “town wealth” to refer to the type of region wealth that is affected by town wealth growth; and “town prosperity rating” to refer to the rating applied to town & port building slots, which applies a multiplier to the wealth of those buildings.

• A new “town wealth saturation” mechanic has been added in order to reduce the wealth of all regions and factions in the late game.
• This mechanic works as a penalty applied to town wealth growth in a region, with the penalty scaling based on the amount of town wealth in the region.
• As part of this change “town wealth saturation mitigation” has been added to certain buildings (namely universities, pleasure buildings, culture buildings, capital-tier government buildings and high-tier roads). This stat increases the threshold before town wealth saturation kicks in, and reduces the rate at which it is then applied.
• Prussia & the Marathas both start the campaign controlling regions with unusually high town wealth. Both have received small balancing tweaks so that they do not also start with severe negative town wealth growth arising out of this new mechanic.
• Fixed an issue where town wealth did not correctly increase town and port prosperity ratings.
• Once this logic was fixed, the numbers were tuned a little to reduce the rate of intended interval growth.

Other Economic Tweaks

• Increased the export capacity of tier 1 trade ports from 30 to 50, and tier 2 trade ports from 60 to 90.
• This export capacity value is now surfaced to the user in building details.
• Florida was unable to export its goods at the start of the game as its port slot (Pensacola) was an undeveloped fishing village. It now starts the campaign as an empty but available slot.
• A timber resource has been added to the México region.
• The tax rate modifiers of the Comptroller and Tax Farmer followers have been adjusted.

Religion

• The formula for religious conversion calculation has been refactored. Before and after our changes, at the end of each turn the game performed the following calculation in each region for each religion that the population can be converted to:
• A) Sum all the sources of that religion’s zeal in the region (Z);
• B) Convert Z into a certain number of conversion points (CP);
• C) Convert CP into a certain number of converted citizens.
• In step B) (if Z>0) the formula imposed a high minimum onto the value of CP, which meant that it would be impossible to add weak sources of religious conversion to the game’s mechanics. This minimum has now been removed, and several weak sources of conversion have now been added:
• As part of step C) a modifier is applied to CP based on which religions are involved in the calculation. The values of this multiplier have been tweaked slightly for overall balance.
• All factions generate a 1-zeal “state religion” effect in all of their regions. This increases to 3 for their capital region.
• Hindu/Abrahamic religious buildings now provide a small zeal effect to all regions their faction controls. Tier 3 religious buildings apply a 1-zeal effect to all regions (in all theatres where a faction of that religion controls at least 1 region).
• Small zeal effects have been added to a number of native American buildings.
• The zeal provided by priests has been increased from 1x to 5x their skill.
• The zeal effect religious buildings provide to the region they’re in has been increased from X to X+3, where X is equal to the tier of the building.

Naval

• Originally, the “Unit Size” option had an effect on both land and naval forces. For land forces, it affected the number of men per unit. For naval forces, it affected the maximum number of ships you could have in a fleet (6 for Small, 10 for Medium, 14 for Large and 20 for Ultra). This caused substantial variance in naval game balance, especially with regard to the exporting of trade goods from the trade theatres. This option now only affects land unit sizes (and has been renamed accordingly); max naval fleet size is now always 20.
• Fixed an issue in one of the projectiles tables which resulted in the 400-range 6lber guns firing 42lber (80 damage) solid shot instead of 6lber (8 damage) shot. This bug increased the broadside and/or chaser firepower of Galleons, Fluyts, 1st Rates, 2nd Rates, 4th Rates, Dhows and Bomb/Rocket Ships, giving them a disproportionate advantage in combat and a vastly increased chance of exploding the powder stores of other ships.
• Fixed an issue where Galleons and Race-Built Galleons had the same unit description.
• Fixed an issue where certain unplayable factions had access to both generic and faction-specific variants of their ships.
• Fixed a bug where certain technologies granted ships-of-the-line a greater-than-intended bonus to campaign movement speed.
• Increased campaign movement points of all frigate vessels from 83 to 88.
• For multiple reasons, the “Rifled Cannons” technology provided no benefit to the faction when researched (but did still make their ships more expensive to build). The technology now provides an increase to the range and damage of all ship cannons, with larger cannons having a disproportionately greater benefit. Carronades and non-cannon naval weapons are unaffected.
• We did not wish to do a general pass over unit stats as we wished largely to preserve the original game balance. However, a few of the more peripheral units were given some improvements:
• Increased Xebec speed from 17 to 21. Also improved the speed modifiers that are applied based on wind direction; Xebecs are now appreciably better than most ships when sailing close to the wind, but their advantage diminishes when sailing downwind.
• Increased Xebec accuracy from 60 to 70 and reload skill from 40 to 60, the same as other light ships.
• Increased Xebec recruit cost from 720 to 840 and upkeep cost from 180 to 200.
• Xebecs are now recruitable from tier 3 fishing ports, tier 2 and above trade ports and tier 1 and above naval ports.
• Carronade Frigates are now available from tier 1 and above naval ports (when the required technology has been researched) as well as tier 3 and above trade ports. 6th Rates are now available from both of these sources at the same tiers.
• Increased generic Carronade Frigate reload skill from 40 to 45. Increased the reload skill of all faction-specific variants by 5 as well.
• Decreased hull strength of generic & all variant Carronade Frigates by approx 8%.
• Decreased recruit cost of generic & all variant Carronade Frigates by 120-140 (depending on faction-specific variant).
• Decreased upkeep cost of generic & all variant Carronade Frigates by 40-50 (depending on faction-specific variant).
• Increased range of 32lber carronade grape shot from 125 to 150.
• 5th Rates are now recruitable from tier 4 trade ports.
• Razees are now recruitable from tier 3 naval ports and above, just like US 24lber Frigates.
• For convenience and to prevent accidents, “Quick Embark/Disembark” prompts have been added whenever units move into a port and an embark/disembark action is possible.

Traits & Followers

• Traits & followers are now colour-coded in the character details UI depending on whether they’re beneficial, detrimental or a mixed blessing.
• Fixed a number of traits and follower triggers that should only apply to Faction Leaders that were not correctly triggering.
• Female characters are no longer referred to as male in flavour texts.
• “El Hechizado” has been given a unique portrait.

Diplomacy

• Removed your faction’s “Public opinion towards them” from the diplomacy UI as it was not used in any diplomacy calculations.
• Added a “Proposal Balance” to diplomatic negotiations, indicating whether an offer is likely to be accepted before players propose a deal.

Other Improvements

• We did not wish to do a general pass over unit balance in order to largely preserve the original game experience.
• However, Bashi-Bazouk defence was increased from 3 to 5.
• The performance of the “Platoon Firing” ability (unlocked via the technology of the same name) used to vary enormously depending on the player’s choice of “Unit Size” setting.
• At the lowest unit size, the technology worked correctly and resulted in a continuous rippling fire across the line, but at higher sizes, most soldiers spent their time not shooting as they waited their turn to fire. This was due to the number of firing sections into which the unit is divided increasing with unit size, creating a timing backlog in the logic. The number of firing sections is now constant across all unit sizes, which should result in a consistent experience.
• Smoke effects have greater persistence in battles.
• Artillery impact crater effects have been backported from Napoleon.
• A Cheat Console has been added.
• This is activated by tapping and holding both top-corners of the screen simultaneously.