- Venice, Italian states and Denmark playable.
Venice, the Italian States and Demnark will now be playable with full victory conditions, no FOV issues, and a campaign description.
- Victory conditions added to Georgia, Morocco and Knights of St John :
Those factions now have victory conditions as any playable faction should.
Their conditions are lower than those of major factions, since they are tougher to play as.
- More complete roster for Morocco, the Barbary States, and the Mamelukes :
Those factions lacked artillery, now they have access to some artillery units ; as well as to more regional units, especially cavalry and a few new infantry units.
- Improved Safavid gamemplay :
Added three technologies to the Safavid Dynasty :
Pre-researched :
- Safavid Feudalism :
It represents the feudal system in the Safavid dynasty, and it's failures. The strenght of the ulema, as well as the many privileges the Qizilbash Turkmen society benefited. The ulema saw the Shahs as illegitimate rulers, and ethnic minorities envied the privileges given to the Qizilbash leading to internal conflits. In the meantime landowners, whom collected taxes kept most of what they collected for themselves and only gave a handful of the profit to the Shah causing economic problems.
All those conflicts would cause stability issues in the Safavid Dynasty and lead it to it's eventual fall in 1722.
To research :
- Aslahat Reforms : Fictious reforms that represents the modernization of the Safavid taxation system, as well as abolition of some privileges. Largely cancels the disadvantages of the Safavid Feudalism technology, but leads to a spike in unrest causing likely revolts.
- Aslahat Compromises : Represents compromises made to pacifiy the Safavid state after years of revolt.
- Buildings with industrialization maluses : are now worth building more. Indeed, other than the baseline growth related to the building improvement, every point in unhappiness adds +3 industry growth ; meaning therefore that the new updates are really worth building, and industrializing to the cost of popular happiness is now truly worth doing.
- Removed industry bonuses from common buildings, and enhanced those from industrial buildings : Having a developped industry is now a more important advantage and industralized regions will be more important, non-industrialized ones less important.
- Better morale system : Morale of the units is stronger if uphill, stronger if the flanks are covered, stronger if the general is present. Forts are less advantageous. Army destruction no longer highly penalizes morale, not from a realism standpoint but as an experimentation. That way, the ennemy army has time to rout before the end of the battle, and takes less casualties.
- Government buildings overhauled : They are more important, have larger bonuses. However, they are significantly more costly to upgrade, and are to be seen like a "city level" upgrade like in Medieval : Total War.
- Improved historical accuracy of names : Especially of Ottoman troops.
- JAM's Cohesion system : The most interesting and challenging fatigue-replacing system in Empire : Total War, thanks to the awesome work of JaM and DaVinci (full credits to them).
Description by JaM :
Former Fatigue was renamed to Cohesion (while fatigue descriptions were also kept) and now represents the state of units, how well they can respond to commands of their officers. Cohesion impacts the unit accuracy,movement speed, melee combat and morale, so its very important to keep Cohesion high so unit fight effectively. There are several ways how you can lose cohesion in ER.
Movement automatically reduce unit cohesion, as moving longer distances in line formation was very problematic and usually ended up with disorder if unit was forced to march too far in such formation. Musket fire is another way how to lose cohesion. Each volley reduces cohesion significantly, so normal trained men are usually only able to fire about 3 salvos until they get disordered by its effect. This is the main reason why no unit was able to keep using its fire drill for long time, as usually after first initial shots in combat, soldiers tended to fire their weapons out of order. Officers were unable to control it, because of all the noise and smoke produced by musket fire.Continuous musket fire also reduces accuracy, due to smoke which obscures the view, and overall disorder, where soldiers fired shots without aiming into the smoke. Therefore, its beneficial to check the unit status during firefight, and stop units from depleting their ammo without any significant effect.
Melee. Close combat was always bloody thing, as infantry didn't had any armor or any means to effectively protect themselves against thrusting bayonets. Any melee combat caused complete disorder of the unit almost instantly, which most of the time resulted in unit with weaker morale to withdraw before enemy reached them. Anyway if two units met in close combat, you can count on both being immediately disordered, which makes them vulnerable to counter-charges done by fresh units in reserve. Melee combat is always vicious, with huge casualties, but usually its very short and decisive. This was the main reason why bayonet charge become praised by all generals as the most effective tactics, even though musketry was responsible for much more dead than close combat,anyway that was more result of a fear being caught in close combat and killed which caused men to rout and run instead of facing enemy with bayonets.
Cohesion system applies also to cavalry practically the same way as it applies to infantry, but it has much more importance. Cohesion is the most important thing for cavalry. Their charge depends on it. Cavalry charging in close ranks with good cohesion is unstoppable, while disordered cavalry would get always repelled. Movement speed greatly affect cavalry cohesion, faster it moves, faster it lose the cohesion. if you order your cavalry to gallop across the battlefield to engage the enemy at the other side of the battlefield, your unit will get there faster,but completely disordered, which will make their charge ineffective (disordered units get 100% charge penalty), and their melee weak (disordered units have 50% melee penalty). Therefore, you need to plan the approach of your cavalry carefully, to avoid the ground that can be covered by enemy artillery while your cavalry is moving forward into position. Only when you are at distance slightly greater than musket range you should order them to do a charge, so they will do it with best results. Once you see your cavalry is getting disorganized, its better to withdraw them and charge with another squadron instead of keeping them in contact.