Following the release of the Maltese, their greatest enemies have now also arrived: the Algerian Barbary Pirates!

Led by Hayreddin Barbarossa, the Algerians are THE mercenary civilization, and their bonuses include:
- they train outlaws and mercenaries exclusively, both on land and water
- they can train Pirates from their Town Centers to fight and Sailors to gather resources
- they advance in Age with Special (Big Button) technologies from economic buildings
- they have a vast array of unique cards, ranging from free resources to buffing buildings and mercenaries
- they can build Stockades that train prisoner villagers from other cultures to leverage their bonuses:
-- Iberian Prisoners can build Artillery Depots to train European artillery
-- Mughal Prisoners can build Red Forts to defend the frontier
-- Tribal Prisoners can build and dance at Fire Pits for various bonuses

And as usual, the update also includes numerous bug fixes, map changes, new cards for several civilizations, and much more.

@ageekhere has also been busy working on the new Improvement Mod Launcher some more *(and a new AI but more on that later :eyes:)* and now the Launcher can also set what IP the game uses for LAN multiplayer, which should help with things like Radmin and Hamachi.

https://www.moddb.com/mods/improvement-mod/downloads/improvement-mod-manual-install-new
https://www.moddb.com/mods/improvement-mod/downloads/improvement-mod-launcher-new

Thank you for playing!

The time has come: the full release of the Maltese is here!

A campaign inspired civilization of heroes and knights (and circles). Help the knights carve a new path for their order!

And to help the knights, other changes have also arrived, to name a few:

- map tweaks for Nomad, sizes and spawn locations
- you can train Ironclads from Factories if you build them near water and revolt (or if you play as Americans or Colombians)
- fixed several vanilla bugs related to save/loading and the ESOC observer UI (if you want to use it with the mod)
- optimizations for some smoke particle files and big underbrush models on some maps (for example Araucania)
- fixed "Out of sync Restoration" which can load multiplayer games and fixed "Out of sync" errors for some recorded games
- European civilizations can now send a Battleship, naval fortress that can train units
- fixed an issue where rotated buildings would not build on top of hunts
- the mod now works on Windows 7 again (maybe even on XP)
- fixed issues with ingame fonts being too small on high resolutions and missing ingame fonts on Linux
- new cards added to various civilizations and some civilizations received some roster changes
- added new Treaty Maps, Free For All Maps and Oriental Maps options to randomly select from among the best maps for those game types
- added new maps: Yellow River - Flood, Indochina - Inland, Oregon Trail, Urals, Colorado, Karafuto
- big improvements for all AIs

And many other changes you can read about in the Discord #sneak-peeks channel!

moddb.com/mods/improvement-mod/downloads/improvement-mod-manual-install-new
moddb.com/mods/improvement-mod/downloads/improvement-mod-launcher-new

A new Launcher has also been made by our AI master @ageekhere to replace the Patcher, and it can keep the mod up-to-date, change AI models and install prerequisites. But remember, it is not necessary to play the mod.

Thank you for playing!