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!

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)

Colombians?

Well. This is an awkward post, here on the blog, after almost an year.


Surprisingly, the Discord server was quite the success, now hosting more than 1000 users! And a very good environment where I can talk with people and offer live support, while also giving players a way to report bugs faster and give their input on features under development.

But I can't let a year pass without a blog post so here we are.

So I want to address the above comment made HERE and explain, once again, why I added the civilizations that I added so far.
And why I might also add Colombians. Maybe.


Both the Swedish and Italians were two civilizations already heavily featured in the game's files, the original game released back in 2005, that is. Both civilizations have all kinds of unfinished and unused assets, ranging from building models to textures, flags and even units. In the case of the Italians, the Italian Explorer and Architect models used in the mod were already in the game, fully functional but just unused.

Both civilizations however had less colonial influence compared to other civs in the game (but still had some) which is probably one of the reasons why they were cut. But since we still got Germans and Russians, it's safe to say time constraints were also an important factor. It could also be the case that these civs were planned at a time when colonialism might not have been the main theme of the game but that's another topic.
These civilizations would have brought the number of civs in the original game to 10, from the current 8.

And so, when thinking what civs could be "immersively" added into the game, well I had to look no further than Swedish and Italians. Which again, had some colonial adventures to justify their presence in the game.

Now the Americans civ, well, I mean, it's the US of A. Featured several times throughout the game's campaigns and one of the biggest outcomes of colonialism. So, again, it made sense to include them.
And let's be honest, all these 3 civs, they were relatively easy to make because they follow the European civilization style. And easy to make is important for such a noob as myself.

I would of course like to maybe add some more exotic civs, some African civs to go along with the new maps that I added (which will still be reworked) but that would require extensive work on new models which is not really that easy for AoE3 for several reasons. One being destruction animations. If I would add an entirely new building set made from entirely new models, I would prefer if those models were also fully animated for the physics engine.

I know, I know, I'm expecting too much and setting myself up for disappointment. So then, why do it at all? Why add something that doesn't look and feel good enough? Just because? Yes, the strongest argument that can be made here is diversity, but if it's not near perfection then it's not good enough for me.
I don't want to add something that looks too much out of place.


So then what's left? Well, I recently started to consider Colombians as a new possible civilization. Just as the Americans civ, Colombians would represent an important outcome of colonialism in South America, and so it would still fit with the game's theme. A North American civ and a South American civ.

The civ will represent Gran Colombia, led by Simon Bolivar. Now you could say that this whole civ happened too late in the AoE3 timeline, BUT I'd have to point out the fact that the game's timeline goes as far as around 1876, featuring the Battle of the Little Bighorn in the TWC Shadow campaign.
And also, Simon Bolivar is featured in the vanilla Steel campaign where you help him fight the Spanish.

Although other arguments can be made against this civ, and I welcome them, you can see that it would be a pretty reasonable civ to implement in the mod.

Outcome of colonialism, a state that encompassed a large territory and culture, easy to make, "claimed to be one of the most powerful nations on the planet" by an American president, it ticks all the right boxes.

This post has gone for long enough so I will end by saying this: I am still not 100% convinced and although I worked on the civ's homecity and some flags already, I'm not that happy to spend hundreds of hours on making a new civ.
So anyone who plays the mod is invited to offer their opinion and ideas for the new, possible civilization on the mod's Discord server (or here if you want).

Thank you and as always, have a nice day!
Adios.

Improvement Mod Discord Server

After a poll on the mod's blog, asking if people would use a Discord server for the mod, I decided to go ahead with it due to positive results.

Here's the link:
https://discord.gg/WRvuVFg

I will use the server to post news, work in progress (some hot, never before seen stuff in there), ask for opinions and you can use it to tell me how shit the mod is and the infinite amount of problems you have.

It's a win win situation.

I hope to see you there.
Thanks for playing.

New Patcher and server

So the old Patcher server went down and I thought this was it. But I was wrong.
I have to say that, in my modding years I have met some really nice and awesome people, people who have helped me without asking for anything in return. Two such people are Expression93 and TechAUmNu, who have offered to host my mod on their awesome servers, helping me deliver content in such a way that it rivals actual corporations. Thank you deeply.

The Patcher is now back up and running but on a different server, which means that everyone needs to download a new Patcher.
All links throughout the blog which redirect to the Patcher are the same, so just go ahead and click on one of them, like THIS one.

For the people who can't get the Patcher working, for some reason or another, a new installer will eventually come but it will take some time until that happens. I have A LOT of stuff to work on before I call it a day.
So in the meantime use the manual installation links, I guess. Please contact me if the Patcher doesn't work for you, this is ridiculous, it should work for everybody.

I would also want to thank DayoftheNinja from the Wars of Liberty mod, who offered to help host the mod in case everything else fails.

Thank you all for being here and for playing!

African progress

Although it may look otherwise, finishing the implementation of the African continent is still my main focus, even though I've been slacking a little recently. But now that I started working on it again, I thought it was time for a progress update.

Right now the mod is a bit of a mess, Swedish are not finished (finished their names though, thanks for contributing!), all African maps are not in and there might be a few "Out of sync" problems as well. The Patcher is also in trouble. It's a lot to do and little time to do it.

But I promise you this, once I finish, everything will look neat and tidy and will play just as good.

With the intention of adding more African natives, finding good houses to use for Dahomey was hard, and the only solution I had was to use Indian houses and maybe retexture them. But it wasn't ideal, so I thought I should try something else. 

After a lot of consideration, I decided to use the Age1 Egyptian houses from Age of Mythology, who would fit my needs just right (plus a sleek pyramid to serve as the KotH monument on African maps).

Working with models, however, is not my expertise. But with help from wyteraven (King's Return mod) I managed to successfully import models into AoE3.

(work in progress)

But this is not all, for a more authentic African experience, I will be adding many new animals, custom ground textures and proper treasure guardians.

Plus another African native tribe, the Zulu. Again with help from wyteraven, the Zulu will have their own new buildings, units and all that.

This will bring the number of African natives to 3, which will be joined by Sufi (in northern Africa) and Jesuits (in southern Africa; without the Asian look, of course).

There are also 4 new African maps to be released, 2 of which are done and 2 of which I still need to work on.

One of the new maps, Great Zimbabwe, will have each player start in a Star Fort!

Something like this:

Actually it's exactly this, maybe a little more compact around the towers. It might also feature a capturable fixed gun (from the campaigns) to help you lay siege to your enemy!

Another thing I want to talk about is the Immigrants technology. In its original form, the Immigrants tech makes houses useless, has no counter and makes the Sioux free pop bonus and the Spanish TC pop card pointless.
All of this, plus the fact that many players still want a bigger population limit although I explained all problems related to this, gave me an idea for a new Immigrants tech.

I want to change Immigrants so that, instead of doing what it does now, it will convert all your existing villagers into immigrants, who are the same thing but do not take up pop.
So if you have, let's say 100 villagers (which means 100 pop) and you research the tech, 100 pop suddenly becomes available for military units.
But this will only affect your current villagers, so if you lose them you will have to train normal villagers.

I might need some opinions on this idea so please, do not hold back.

Thanks for playing!

Swedish names and Updates

Alright, so, I need Swedish names for Town Centers, Forts, Ships, Explorers, Generals and Churches. I'd like mostly historically accurate names but if none can be provided then your dog's name would work just as good, if it's in Swedish of course (kidding about the dog part, btw).

I can always do all the research myself if no one wants to help but I thought this would be a nice way to let you guys get more involved with the mod, just as we did for Italians.


Now onto other updates, there's a lot coming. The reason there hasn't been an update in a while is because I started something which is... so horrible to work on... that I keep delaying it. Though in the meantime I worked on other things so I'll just release updates with that THING unfinished, for now.

The THING I'm talking about is unit descriptions. I want to go over every single unit description and make them show what type the unit is and what it counters, instead of just "Cavalry armed with cold steel"... Yes, very helpful game...

Other things I worked on include new cards for several civs, such as Sioux, Germans, Americans, Italians and Swedish (yes, it's finally happening), new African maps (we still have 4 to go and 2 will be released soon)  and new African animals, such as Gazelles, Cranes and Asses (Donkeys) (courtesy of WoL).

And other **** I probably forgot about.
So yeah, stay tuned, awesome stuff is coming and the game will only get better!

Africa and Oceania

Update: After learning how to improve map visuals I went through some of the maps from the African update (around half of them) and improved their textures and props. I also added Nomad support for the new maps that didn't have it. New Asian maps have also been added and more African maps are on the way.


Note: Forgot to mention, if you get "Out of sync" in multiplayer, go to where you have the game installed, delete the RMM folder and run the Patcher, then try again.

The long awaited (took more than I thought) big awesome update with new maps from Africa and Oceania is here!

A total of 19 new maps, plus fixes, changes and additions to existing maps are part of this update. Including new animals and natives for the new maps.
One of the fixes adresses the bug which caused starting units (such as explorers) to not spawn at the beginning of a game. This bug should no longer occur on any of the "official" maps.

Before we go any further, I want to make it clear that none of these maps were made by me from scratch, they are made by the community map creators Garja, Neuron, R.F. Gandalf and Durokan.
All maps are, however, modified by me to fit the African and Oceania themes.
Proper credit has been given for each map creator ingame during the map loading screen.

I also have to mention that the new loading screen images for the new maps are taken from the Wars of Liberty mod, although they are also modified by me to fit the project.


Now, let's go through each of the new and old maps from this update:


As mentioned above, all maps received the "starting units do not spawn" fix and Control Flags have been removed from all maps. The only Control Flags still present are the ones each player starts with and the ones from Trading Posts.

Water Maps: a new map option which randomly chooses between all water maps; water maps are maps with a water homecity flag, and are basically all maps not present in the Land Maps option.

Sahara / Large Sahara: a large, arid desert where all resources are concentrated around oases.
Congo / Large Congo: a dense jungle where the numerous trees are both a blessing and a curse.
Nile River: a river splitting into the resource rich Nile Delta.
Savanna: the iconic African Savanna, a grassland filled with exotic wildlife.
Madagascar / Regicide Madagascar: a huge, isolated island in the middle of the ocean.
Kilimanjaro: the peak of a dormant volcano.
Unknown - Inland: replaces the old Unknown map which was extremely bugged; the new map randomizes between properly made terrains with some African flavor.
Unknown - Coastal: same as above, only that it randomizes water maps.

Australia / Large Australia / Regicide Australia: the gold rich Australian Outback.
Indonesia: a large archipelago with diverse wildlife.
New Zealand: the last major landmasses settled by humans.

Rockies - Lower: a valley in the Rockies mountains; to contrast Himalayas - Upper.

Irrawaddy Valley: a valley surrounded by wood rich canals.
Khingan: a very randomized map inspired by the AoM Acropolis map.

Guinea Coast: coming soon.
Sahel: coming soon.
Great Zimbabwe: coming soon.
Horn of Africa: coming soon.


Regicide Yellow River: now actually looks like Yellow River.
California / Ozarks / New England / Plymouth: cliff texture inconsistencies/bugs fixed.
Pampas / Sonora: increased map size.
Plymouth / Orinoco / Texas: added more trees; for Texas this is actually a bug fix since the map was always suppose to have random trees but the codes were bugged.
Winter Wonderland: added proper mercenary and KotH support.


Besides these map changes, the new African animals are the Zebra and Dromedary and the new natives are the Saltpeter and Dahomey.
Also, added proper Mongolian voices for the Mangudai and Mongol Scout and Korean voices for the Wukou Pirate and Wukou Jong/Junk.
New voices have also been added for the new Sufi native warrior, the Bishari Archer; instead of making a new elephant unit for Saltpeter which proved difficult, I instead moved the War Elephant to Saltpeter and added a new camel archer for Sufi.

And this should be about it. As always, if you find any kind of bugs make sure you let me know so I can fix them as soon as possible.

Thank you for your time and as always, thank you for playing!

I need help

Update: With help from Marco from the comments of this post, I have managed to make some changes to the exe and now it should not appear as a threat for antiviruses anymore. But I need people who had this problem to confirm if the fix worked, so please, if you had security problems with the mod's exe, update, check again and report here.


For the past month I have been working on one, if not THE biggest update the mod ever had.
I have a total of 18 new maps, focused around Africa and Oceania, some incredibly awesome stuff and I am really excited to finish everything and release it.

But for all the excitement and pride that I have working on this project, there is also a lot of sadness and helplessness.

As some of you might know, for years AoE3 modding has been very restrictive and many times when someone suggested something radical or even somewhat simple looking, many times the answer was the same: "AoE3 modding is very limited and we can only do so much with what we have".

But a while ago this changed. Two very awesome guys joined forces and released the Unhardcoded Patch, a tool which allows us to do things which were impossible before, like adding completely new civs without replacing any existing civs, including population increase and so much more.

But this awesome patch has a nasty side effect, being applied on the game's exe, it makes the exe lose its official digital signature from Microsoft and this makes it show up as a threat for antiviruses.

I don't know how to fix this, and what I found on the internet, it all costs money, money I cannot pay and even if I did buy a new digital signature I have no idea how to implement it.

I don't want to deal with all this mess, I just want to mod and make awesome content.
I need help, or else the mod will suffer for absolutely no reason.
If anyone has any idea how to work around this or any other info, I'm all ears.

You can check the mod's exe HERE, and if you click on File Detail you can clearly see the problem, which is:

Signature verification  The digital signature of the object did not verify.


There's more to this though, the mod's Patcher also used to show up as a threat, and still does for some, for the same reason.
Shyke, the Patcher's creator did all he could to improve the Patcher so that wouldn't happen anymore, but...

We need help.

Population and ships

There are two very important things we need to focus on, population and naval warfare. Taking any decision on these two things is hard and so I have to ask what my players think.


Let's talk about population first.
I have an interesting plan for how to handle population which will please those who want more pop while still keeping population to manageable numbers.

Here's my idea: flexible population. What this means is that there is not set pop limit, and instead pop depends on how players play. I already made Docks support 5 pop a while ago, and I thought I should also make Trading Posts support 5 population and have no set limit to pop.
What this means is that, depending on how players play, building Docks and taking over Trading Posts, their population will also increase.

For example: The normal max pop an European civ can reach would be 240, with all 20 Houses and 4 Town Centers. If the player builds 2 Docks, pop will be increased to 250. If he builds 2 Trading Posts, pop would be increased to 260 pop.

And so on. I will of course have a high max pop limit of maybe 300, to make sure scenarios don't make pop too crazy. And some players have also noticed that civs like the Spanish and Germans can get to ridiculous pop limits of 600 or 700 because of some cards. Those would have to be remade as well.

This whole system is similar to how Age of Mythology handles population with Settlements.
So, what do you guys think?


Now moving on to naval warfare.
I tried tackling his before and it didn't turn out too good, but I want to try again. Naval warfare should be a big part of AoE3, just like it is a big part of AoE2, but naval warfare has too many problems in AoE3.

The main problem is the lack of choice. Each ship has a small build limit and that's it. It can be increased via cards but it still limits the player and makes counter play almost impossible.

The best thing to do here would be to have a naval only population system, to have something like 20 naval pop and then be able to spend it like you want, 20 Caravels or 10 Frigates, for example.
But sadly that is not possible so we need to find something else.

There's another big problem with naval warfare in AoE3 which I tried to fix now. There is no counter system between ships, like in AoE2. So I simply made one, as best as I knew.

Here's what I did: we now have 3 ship classes: Light Warships, Heavy Warships and Siege Warships.
Light counters Heavy and Heavy counters Siege.

The ships that are part of this system are:
All Caravel like units - Light Warships
All Galleon and Frigate like units - Heavy Warships
Monitors - Siege Warships

I know this might be a bad set up but as I said, I did it like I thought fit and I need help to make it better.

What I also did to ships is make them cheaper. All ships are now cheaper to make them more appealing to build.

I also thought we could maybe try and remove limits from ships again and instead make them take pop... again. Something like: Fishing Boat 1 pop, Caravel 2 pop, Galleon 3 pop, Frigate 4 pop and Monitor 5 pop. I know it might sound too little but remember we must make ships viable.

I need all the help in the world with this problem, we need to find a way to actually make naval combat fun and worthwhile.


If you actually read all of this, you are awesome.
Thank you.

Game Balance

The thing is, there's never been a proper discussion about balance in the mod. Sure, some people left balance related messages here and there, I also went and took balance ideas from other mods, the Fan Patch, the ESOC patch, that huge balancing thread on the Heaven forum, because let's be honest, you would be mad to ignore them. But some of those ideas didn't fit with my mod, for example I still ended up balancing the Dutch how I thought fit for the mod.

But is my way really better? This is what we need to discuss. I have a friend who helps me out with balancing but he has many ideas and, the truth is that an entire game cannot be balanced by just one man, as different people have different opinions about what is fair and balanced and what is not.

So, in the hope that people will be interested in helping out, I made a special thread on the mod's forum. Please go there and leave your opinion if you want the mod to be as balanced as possible.

http://impmod.freeforums.org/post677.html

Italian names and Patcher state

Ok, let's get one thing out of the way, I am not here to give you people viruses or any other kind of malware, the mod has been released in 2009 and the patcher in 2013, and since then no one has reported any kind of information theft or god knows what...

What I'm trying to say is that, although most antiviruses now find the old patcher as malware, it's nothing more than a false positive and you have nothing to worry about. I think it happens because of the way the patcher works, a casual downloader that can download anything in your PC and has access to your windows registry, I can understand why it looks scary for antiviruses, especially if someone made a virus that actually works like that.

But this has nothing to do with the patcher. And I said "the old patcher" because Shyke has now remade the patcher and it doesn't show up as malware anymore (I don't know how long this will last though).
It now also automatically sets the mod's exe to run in Windows XP SP3 compatibility mode (if you still have problems with settings not saving make sure this is actually the case).

- DOWNLOAD -

Now let's get down to the real business then. Italians, I just added their voices and finished their tech tree, which means that only their homecity is left. 

But there's something else left as well, names. The Improvement Mod adds random, most of the time historically accurate, names for Town Centers, Churches and Generals (and don't forget Explorers) (and Fort names) (oh, and ships... damn). 

Italians needs such names as well. And although I could find them by myself, I thought I could involve you guys. 

So, are you Italian? Do you want your name, or maybe your town's name in the mod? 

Then look no further than the comments section of this post! 

Please try to keep the names as historically friendly as possible, especially for generals (I'd like names of real, Italian generals from the colonial and Napoleonic eras please). 

I could always do it by myself if no one is interested... Just saying.

Improvement Mod 6 is out for the Patcher

This is still NOT the full, official version 6 release, this is another PROTOTYPE!

The mod's patcher has now been updated to support the new installation system of version 6 and because of that, for easier testing of the prototype, I will release Imp Mod 6 through the patcher as well. For further testing. TESTING!

Because yes, we have a lot more to test now. As you might know, there's been a huge breakthrough in the AoE3 modding community in the past week, a breakthrough which allows modders to finally and completely add new civilizations into the game!
Yup, we can now add an infinite(ish) number of new civs completed with AIs and ESO support.

And because of this, I went back and revived my American civ from the dead. Went through it, updated everything, fixed most bugs and I am now releasing it in the prototype as well.
You can now create a new American homecity just like you create for all other civs, same for ESO.

So do a clean reinstall of the game, get the patcher, download everything and start playing! I mean testing. Please report all the bugs that you find.

Also, I need to stress this again, people who have the old version of the mod, if you plan to run the patcher again from this point onward, please reinstall your games first or else it will break everything.

When you reinstall the game and install the mod, make sure you run the original game (Asian Dynasties) at least once so you enter your cd key and all that. Only AFTER that you can run the mod.

That's all. Have fun.

- DOWNLOAD -

Installation (on a fresh game)

- copy the 'AoE3ImpModPatcher' to your AoE3 directory, by default:

/Program Files/Microsoft Games/Age Of Empires III/

- for the Steam version, use this path (always inside the bin folder!):

/Steam/steamapps/common/Age of Empires 3/bin/
- run the patcher as administrator and make sure it's not blocked by firewalls

Also make sure you run the original game first (to enter the cdkey and all that) and THEN run the mod's exe (this applies for both Steam and non Steam versions)!

Improvement Mod 6 Prototype

This is NOT the full, official version 6 release, this is a PROTOTYPE!

Alright, so, you're probably asking yourself "WTF IS THIS?". Well let me explain, this is the next logical step in the mod's development, and is what other big AoE3 mods have already done.

I'm talking about making the mod not affect the original games by having a different executable and different file paths. What this will end up doing is allowing you to play the modded game while also being able to go back and play the unmodded game at the same time, from the same installation.

It will also render the past three blog posts useless... Because it fixes all of those problems.

With Improvement Mod 6 you will be able to play AoE3, TWC and TAD without problems and without errors on ESO with people who don't have mods, while also being able to play the mod separately and it will still work on ESO as well, and you will have a uninstall option (FINALLY).

As you can tell by the title, this is a prototype, but it's not the first one. I already had people testing it and so far everything works perfectly.
All of this is more like a warning, because as soon as this will hit the patcher's server, it will break the game for everyone who had the old version.

To install Improvement Mod 6 and beyond you will need a clean reinstall of your game!
And after you install everything, including the mod, you will need to run the new exe, "age3m", in order to play the mod. To play the original games just start their own exes.

And that's all! I will give some time for this news to sink in for as many people as possible, because as soon as the new system hits the patcher, there's bound to be people who will have broken games without knowing why and blame me...

If you find any problems in the prototype be sure to let me know.
Thanks for playing!

- DOWNLOAD -

Installation (on a fresh game)

- copy everything from inside the 'imp_mod_6_prototype' folder to your AoE3 directory, by default:

/Program Files/Microsoft Games/Age Of Empires III/

- if you plan on installing the mod over the Steam version, use this path (always inside the bin folder!):

/Steam/steamapps/common/Age of Empires 3/bin/

Make sure you run the original game first (to enter the cdkey and all that) and THEN run the mod's exe (this applies for both Steam and non Steam versions)!

AoE3 and TWC are fixed!

After 6 years, Age of Empires 3 vanilla and The WarChiefs expansion finally work once again with the Improvement Mod.

BUT, they do have problems. As I mentioned in the post bellow, the mod modifies files used by all three games and as such, it will force these files upon the older games as well.
This was the reason it broke the older games in the first place, but I didn't knew which files specifically did it.

Attention has been brought to me on this issue again recently and so I finally managed to fix it.
The bugs you will encounter will most likely be sound and UI bugs (do not use the minimized UI in AoE3 and TWC, you have been warned) and yes, I know it's bad that they are bugged but at least they work now.

Which I'm not sure if it's such a good thing either, at least previously it forced players to play Asian Dynasties, which is the proper way to play and the game for which this mod was designed.
Now I fear I'll get people telling me they've installed the mod and it bugged their game, because they will not be playing Asian Dynasties...

Oh gods, I can even see it... If this will happen a lot I swear I will break it again.

By running the patcher you will get all of them working, if it doesn't happen then do a clean reinstall of everything.

Outdated, check THIS!