Recent Updates

I remembered this place exists so here's some change logs I posted on the Discord server and ModDB of all the goodies the mod has received over the recent years because yes, it's still going strong with no stop in sight:

- added new maps: Andes - Lower, Kazakh Steppe, Caucasus, Appalachians, Grand Canyon, Bosawas, Guatemala, Viedma, Chattahoochee, Hokkaido, Kyushu, Shikoku, Nile River, Cape Agulhas, New Guinea, Micronesia, Calcutta, Nepal, Manitoba, Zavkhan, Greenland, Newfoundland, Shangri La, El Dorado
- added new special ESOC maps: Vietnam renamed to Plymouth, Herald Island renamed to North Pole (replaces Winter Wonderland)
- the following maps now have naval trade routes: Alaska, Caribbean, Hispaniola, Dhaka, Honshu (and Regicide Honshu), Cape Agulhas
- American, Swedish, Italian, Maltese and Colombian AIs now have unique voice sets; the Alain and Bolivar AIs use the same voices from the campaign
- added new Asian, African and European revolutions: Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Egypt, Barbary States, South Africa, Romania, Hungary and Poland
- added new random Firepit dances; each age Native players will get a fixed dance and a random dance (except for Age 5)
- you now get Wonder Wagons as Asian civs when starting in later ages to build missed wonders; also buffed various wonders
- added new activatable abilities for many Explorers and Warchiefs, obtainable via their specific cards
- homecity deck card limit increased to 40; deck size is now increased every 5 homecity levels
- Japanese Monks can now gather from Berry Bushes and Orchards
- fixed names and descriptions of newly added passives and auras not showing up
- fixed random hero names not working properly when creating a new homecity
- fixed the textures, player color and transparency of multiple buildings and units
- fixed a silent crash from the original game related to an Indian Town Center model
- fixed the infamous cliff lag for all cliffs and maps (scenarios need cliffs reapplied inside the editor)
- fixed a looping "can't do" sound bug related to the Fire Pit
- fixed various map bugs and inconsistencies
- improved the textures of various buildings, units and trees
- female Pronghorns now exist
- significantly buffed the healing speed of all healers and buildings (such as Field Hospitals and Aid Tents)
- fixed units with auras from flickering when behind buildings or trees (legacy bug)
- fixed numerous homecity, proto and techtree code issues, bugs and inconsistencies
- added the Sika Deer, Honshu Wolf and a new treasure to the four Japanese maps
- added HD portraits for Politicians, Revolutionaries, Council Members, Consulate Allies and Wonders
- added HD sounds for Alligators/Crocodiles, Camels, Lions and Pandas
- added HD flags to the UI and ingame (heroes can now also paint the ground with flags)
- improved the textures of various buildings, units and trees
- overhauled and remade more parts of the game's UI
- optimized terrain textures further
- new animations for some pikemen and swordsmen
- added improved water effects
- upscaled textures of Native Asian buildings
- homecities no longer display incomplete models on 16:9 resolutions (basically a widescreen HC fix)
- upscaled and improved various textures from the Sioux, Iroquois and Indian homecities
- fixed the campaign menu UI not selecting scenarios properly
- overhauled and remade more parts of the game's UI
- added new portraits for all AI personalities
- tweaked the food balance and visuals of multiple maps
- Japanese can now train Sacred Cows from Shrines
- different unit types can now move together in formation when selecting the same tactic
- added a new model for the Swedish Flagship and added new (steam) ships to British, Americans and Indians
- restored Explorer, Warchief and Monk hitpoints (buffed from previous mod values)
- Architects can now build more buildings (TCs, TPs and Docks)
- Crazy Horse can now build Campfires (that heal units and offer LOS)
- reconverted terrain textures to fix mipmapping and improved some cliff textures
- added Pheasants and Rabbits (plus Chickens) as starting random animals
- added the Peafowl as a new hunt on some of the new south east Asian maps
- added the Seal as a new hunt on some of the new north American/Asian maps
- upscaled textures of Native American village buildings
- female Moose and female Turkeys now exist
- upscaled all animal textures
- fixed broken player spawns on Florida
- added capturable Trading Posts on Arizona
- the Aztec Warchief is now ranged (rebalanced accordingly)
- more new HD sounds (arrows, crossbows, buildings, impacts)
- new exe icon and new HD ingame mouse cursors
- added cultural ambient sounds to the Ottoman homecity and Mosque
- added new soundtracks during quiet moments and during battles
- restored a censored campaign voice line for Morgan Black
- Fencibles now have two types of armor ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
- file structure optimizations
- the mod is now fully compatible with Windows 11
- UI texture optimizations and further UI redesign
- optimizations for sound files added by the mod
- added new firing sounds for ships, cannons, muskets and modern rifles
- fixes for two memory errors
- recolored multiple bodies of water
- AI fixes and improvements

You can now select what AI the mod uses from the Patcher. there are currently 5 available options, very different from each other.
Remember that you need to press "Start AoE3 Imp Mod" in the Patcher at least once after selecting a different AI for it to be installed

ModDB

Patcher

Manual Install

Discord

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.

Randomization!

You know what, Bob... WoL...
I'm a man of many contradictions. I've thought long and hard about a speech about balance, about realism, about rule of modding. Then I decided... I just say "fuck it"...
And hang the consequences.

This has been an exciting year for the mod. In the modding community we had a lot of breakthroughs in modeling and UHC features, and then there's AoE3DE which will release soon and... god help us all.

Somewhere around the start of the year I released the UHC2 version of the mod in the form of "age3b.exe", an extra executable along with some extra files that the Patcher downloads but which needs to be started manually (remember to put the exe in WinXP SP3 compatibility mode for settings to save).

I've already talked about some of the new stuff UHC2 brings in a previous post (stuff like 95 unit selection limit, multiplayer save and load game system, many engine fixes) but this post is about a specific, new, lit feature which right now is exclusive to the Improvement Mod: tech randomization.

But what did I use this new feature on? Well, I used it in one of the most controversial ways possible, I made European politicians, Revolutions, native Council members and Consulate allies random.

Now please, calm down, I know how it sounds. It sounds horrible. You're probably deleting the mod right now. But hear me out, you're not the first to think that, and I have honestly converted and convinced everyone who doubted the feature after they've tried it.

AoE3 is 15 years old. By now, there's hundred of metas and builds and not many surprises to be had. Which is why many people play mods. And which is why I wanted to add in these randomization systems.
In my opinion, the way politician ageups are made in AoE3, they screamed of randomization. The way there's multiple of them but some are only available to certain civs, and how the same politician can send different things for different civs. There are powerful hints there that it could be more. So I went ahead and made it more. Added a few more politicians along the way as well.

But how does this randomization work?
At the start of each game, a set number of techs are picked from a list to be made available that match to the player. Just like random mercenaries which have been in the game since the WarChiefs expansion.
Politicians (and councillors) and Consulate allies are random but shared between all players that play the same civ. So all French players will have the same politicians, all British players will have their own set of politicians and so on. This was made this way to ensure mirror games are still as fair as possible. Revolutions however, and randomized individually per player, because they are less impactful and for even more diversity.

"But Mandos" Bob may ask, "what do you mean with random Revolutions?"
Well, since many revolutions didn't make sense for the civs that had them anyway (looking at you Germans, Russians and Ottomans), I took all Revolutions from all civs and added them to a single pile from which 2 are chosen every game for every player.
Same thing for politicians. I took all age2, 3, 4 and 5 politicians, added a few more because I wanted to have 8 politicians to choose 4 from for every age and voila.
Native Council members are a bit different. For technical reasons I could not randomize the councillors themselves so I instead randomized the shipments they send. So, besides the 5 possible types of shipments councillors can send, per civ, which scale with every age, there's now 5 more for a total of 10 for every Native civ.

But you might have noticed something is missing from all this madness. That's right, Asian Wonders. I plan to add this feature to them as well, and again because of technical reasons, it will be done the same way as I did it for Natives, keep the Wonder buildings the same but randomize the shipments they send.

But this might not be all! This randomization feature has a lot of potential. A lot of potential to keep the game fresh and engaging every match. I've considered maybe using it on Firepit dances in some way or maybe on a new type of ingame events system, where at the start of each game an event is chosen which affects the game in some way, giving buffs, enabling units or techs, stuff like that, for all players.

And yes, you're right, such a system requires rigorous balancing. Which is why I always need help with balancing and why you can join the mod's Discord server to help out.

As for the elephant in the room, yes, I plan to make an Improvement Mod for AoE3DE if I can.
I just hope there will be people who want to play it.

Special thanks to Kevsoft from the Project Celeste team for making all of this and more possible!

Thank you for being here and for playing!

UnHardcode Patch 2

Through recent updates the mod now contains UHC2 and its new features, UHC being the project that allowed us to do more with AoE3 modding by "unhardcoding" game features to be modified. You can find more details here: https://eso-community.net/viewtopic.php?f=33&t=17284

However, for this mod right now the update needs thorough testing in multiplayer to check stability (Out of sync errors) and the new and updated AI made by @ageekhere, as we've had issues with them during our previous tests.

Because of this, the update comes with its own files and exe. After updating the mod, running the patcher or age3m.exe will run the UHC1 version of the mod. You will need to run the new age3b.exe to run the UHC2 version (please put age3b.exe in WinXP SP3 compatibility mode for settings to work properly).

If you need more reasons to try the new version, know that army selection limit has been increased from 50 units to 95 (95 being the max stable limit).


Thank you for your help and please report all issues.



(let's all act as if this is not just a copy-paste from the mod's Discord server. please join here)