Over 40 New Maps!

 HA! You thought it was DE, but it was me, Improvement Mod!

Like I said before, I don't plan to stop modding the original game so here's an update that adds 42 new maps plus 9 Regicide variants and a new global wall repair button which, when clicked enables repairing on all wall pieces a player owns (so no more individual repairing for each wall piece) across the map.

The new maps have been taken from the now abandoned ESOC project and from the great map maker Gandalf's collection. However unlike their ESOC counterparts the maps in my mod have fixed layouts and terrain, fixed starting units spawns and Nomad and King of the Hill support, and they also feature new fauna, flora, treasures and natives.
Oh and the mod now also features HD terrain textures at double the original resolution (with no performance costs) ported from AoE3DE, for all old and new maps plus a few completely new terrain texture sets for some new maps.

And you can now see the map layout in the lobby before starting a game!
Here are the new maps bellow:

Now, maybe you've noticed that some of these maps are already in DE or will be in DE with the upcoming African DLC. That's because most "new" maps in DE are just existing, old maps the community has made over the years, added in the game and then renamed and maybe retextured.

Anyway, several original maps have also been drastically changed and rebalanced in this update, such as Andes, California, Hispaniola, Ozarks, Pampas and New England (changes made by the Fan Patch). So you really gotta play the old maps and the new maps to see everything that's new. There's even new treasures to find in the old maps. There are reports that the Circle of Ossus might be looking for ancient treasures in some locations.

So run the Patcher or get the mod manually and experience the greatness of this update and that new repair button that repairs all walls and makes dreams come true.

As always, thanks for being here and thanks for playing!

Discord

New Features

 Listen, I get it. DE is out so why would you still be playing this mod for the old game over the "new game"?

The best answer I have for that is because, even though DE has adopted many fixes my mod had for years (they recently accepted my alternative fix for the box formation issue for infantry, after they butchered it for cavalry), this mod still has many more amazing and ground breaking features DE doesn't even dream of. And I have recently invested personally in even more such features!

Let me give you a quick rundown on some of the new stuff:

1. Through the mod, Age of Empires 3 "legacy" as they call it, is now more compatible with Windows 10, having the display features fixed if the game's exe is not ran in compatibility mode (though it's still recommended just in case). Oh and new the High/Low poly Cliffs option is fixed now, so you can play those Gandalf maps with more than 5 FPS.

2. Ottomans are now a semi-Asian civilization, they have a changed Mosque, to better match the Monastery, they now have Export and yes, they also have a Consulate with new unique Asian allies (Indians, Chinese and Japanese). I flipped the board on them for uniqueness. They of course also have new cards for the Consulate and mercs.

3. Ships can now move over shallows on which ground units can also walk. This is big. AoE3 as you know, does not have the best water combat, and the fact that ships are huge, water is small and that they get blocked by shallows doesn't help either. Well, besides my other changes to make water combat better, ships are no longer blocked by shallows such as those on Northwest Territory and Indochina. Speaking of which, you can now dock and make ships on Bayou.

4. On the topic of ships, remember how they used to fire their cannons randomly, resulting in cases where if two identical ships fought, the one that fired first could actually lose the battle because of random cannon fire? Yeah, that's no longer the case in the mod either. Ships now fire consistently and accordingly to their assigned rate of fire.

5. And one more amazing thing for this post: you know how villagers walked randomly around Mills and Plantations while gathering, resulting in wasted gather time which was only increased the more villagers you had on one Mill or Plantation? That's gone as well. When they gather from Mills and Plantations, villagers now stay in place just like on Farms and Rice Paddies.

I said "for this post" because I don't really plan to stop. The way to keeping this mod desirable is to offer features DE does not have, and to offer an overall more enjoyable AND replayable experience.
Yes, you could say it's a bad idea to keep investing in and working on the old game, but DE doesn't yet want big mods to be made for it and will likely not want that for a long time to come, because of continuous official updates and even the possibility of future DLC and "expansions", now that AoE2DE broke the ice in that regard, which will make a lot of the work us modders could put into the game for a big mod pointless.

Right now I'll continue working on my current mod as best as I can. I am also working on updating the entire UI to something nicer and cleaner (using some inspiration from DE) and I might even use DE to update some of the uglier textures in the game, like terrain textures. But we'll see about that.

So regardless if you still do it or not, if you've ever played my mod I want to thank you again for giving it a chance and I hope you'll try it again sometime.

The patcher can be found in the same location as always and on ModDB.