update 1.4

Rustem · **Joined:** Wed Nov 12, 2008 1:00 pm **Posts:** 559

1 September:

Jack Lusted CA Staff wrote:

Hi,

I am pleased to confirm that update 1.4 will be out in late September.

First off, some new items that will be going into 1.4:

- 2 new historical battles: Battle of Rossbach and Battle of Fontenoy. Both available in single player and multi player.
- Missile cavalry can now fire and reload whilst on the move.

And previously announced, the update will contain the following fixes and balance changes.

Balance changes:
- Overhaul of naval balancing as talked about in 9th July Update.
- There is now a cap on how many of some units you can take in MP. Examples of such units are Ferguson Rifles, many of the Elite Units of the West, and other unique units such as Royal Ecossais etc.
- Dragoons are available from higher building levels and now have fire by rank to allow them to better fulfil the role of mobile infantry.
- Light Dragoons have gained longer range guns to allow them to skirmish better.
- Reworked cavalry costs to better reflect their value on the battlefield.
- Increase in cost to Windbusche Jaegers and Ferguson Rifles.
- Some improvements to projectile balancing.
- Balance improvements made to Road to Independence Episode 3.

Fixes and improvements:
- Significantly increase the rate of naval invasions. Including those across theatres.
- Increase AI aggression and improve use of armies.
- Increase the creation and retention of strong mixed higher level unit armies by the CAI.
- Fix for texture allocation in sprite cache that was causing a memory crash.
- "Backstabber" and "Dishonouring Treaties" diplomatic factors change so don't apply when joining an ally in war.
- Fix for some towns in regions still giving bonuses to income when damaged for raiding.
- Improvements to siege AI in how it approaches and assaults walls.
- Units with fire by rank now fire correctly when behind walls.
- Bug with fort cannon targeting fixed, making them much more accurate.
- Many fixes to sound bugs improving overall sound across the game.
- Fixed issue with default battle preference not being saved.
- Fix to include protectorate owned regions in explicitly-specified victory condition regions.
- Various crash fixes.
- Fixes to various group formations to improve formations used by player/AI.
- Fix for routing unit cards losing faction colour.
- Fix for auto unlimbering causing the attack order to terminate prematurely resulting in an inability to stop the unit from firing.
- Fix for troops on fort walls not using fort gun range when judging when to fire on enemy troops.
- Fix for fort guns using wrong targeting formula.
- Fixes to fort pathfinding and use of ropes.
- Multiplayer soft lock fixes.
- Fix crash in quotes table.
- Cumulative updates to improve AI invasion behaviour.
- Bug fixes and improvements to AI counter offers.
- Improvements to AI diplomatic valuation of military access and alliances.
- Fix for wind sounds not working in naval battles
- Fixed ship wakes not always working.
- Fixed potential crash disembarking agents from navies.
- Fixed armies not being booted out of regions when losing military access gained by joining an ally in war.
- Improved AI diplomacy valuation of technologies.
- Fixed reinforcements from unreachable positions.
- Balance of power fix for attack of opportunity.
- Fixed bug that was causing issues with embarking an army containing multiple characters.
- Minor tweak to stop some ship sails endlessly play furling sound.
- Fixed path blocked bug (pathing into ZoC).
- Diplomacy counter-offer improvements.
- Fix for fast forward not working as intended on some PCs. Will always speed up if camera is still, if camera moves fast forward will be as fast as possible on each PC.
- Fixed issue where artillery would be told to stop firing but continue.
- Fixed issue with the virtual file system whereby on certain hard drives / raid configurations / partitions which were experiencing a crash with sound enabled.
- Fixed a boundary pathfinding crash.

Thanks

Jack

Moopere · **Posted:** Fri Sep 04, 2009 10:07 am

Excellent. So, there we are, doubtless end of September as they say and no mention of the MP campaign, damn!

One more month of the current mods before everything breaks again. Anyone want to bet that this will be the last serious patch before NTW comes out ... or perhaps ever?

Moo

Gunner24 · **Posted:** Fri Sep 04, 2009 4:03 pm

Yes, I will bet that Moopere......NapTW is the game there interested in, not Empire.

General Beale · **Posted:** Wed Sep 23, 2009 11:15 am

Wow, what a change,
The whole background changed to the Warpath campaign, (only for CA to promote the expansion) but i believe that it will go after it's release (I hope)
Two new historical battles as promised
Prices have risen for some units
New music, I like it, but not the native american music thought!
I still haven't had time to to play a single player custom battle. Tell me how the AI differs from before!

I have also heard a leak somewhere that another patch is heading our way towards the end of the year! 2009/2010

Moopere · **Posted:** Wed Sep 23, 2009 11:30 am

I got to like my favourite mod a lot and miss it now I've fooled about and managed to stuff up both my installs of ETW (cry cry).

Having said that, this is a lot closer to the game we thought we were buying back in March I think.

Pro's:

- Performance is ok. Still boggles my mind the PC you need to run this thing but its better now than it was
- Artillery better behaved. I've still had my gunners get 'stuck' between limbering and firing though which is always annoying and means the battery is out of action for the game - aside from this its ok. Don't know how vulnerable it is to counter battery yet as I've not had an MP
- Campaign is much improved, particularly diplomacy. This should make a really good base for SP/campaign modders now
- You can hear the orders and whatnot of the enemy troops intermingled with your own troops in their own language. Its a small thing but I reckon it makes a big difference and like it a lot.

Con's

The same old ones mostly

- Artillery struggles to be sane as alluded to above. Gunners forget how to fire. Batteries become ineffective once they get confused about whether they should be limbering or unlimbering, etc
- Too fast .. everything is too fast
- Spikes
- Grenades
- Missile Cavalry can fire whilst on the gallop under some circumstances. I know this is put up as a big feature but I don't like it. Makes cavalry way too powerful in my view. Watch for spammed Dragoons.
- No new official maps

Moo

Gunner24 · **Posted:** Wed Sep 23, 2009 1:22 pm

Is it me or what, I had one MP game with Smokehammer and I hated it, I somehow won the test game but it was so silly, my men were being blown to bits by grenades and my cannons were mowing down Smokes men with cannister, stuff was going on at a million miles per hour.....aghhhh.....the only thing I like about vanilla, which everyone else does not like, is at least I can see where my cannons are firing with the tracer shot !....In Tac War I often have no clue where there shooting.

Moopere · **Posted:** Wed Sep 23, 2009 1:28 pm

hehehe. Its way way way too fast, thats for sure. Grenades are silly. I find canister about right for my tastes, but I don't like shrapnel.

Overall I could probably live with most of the stupidity if we could just slow it down, remove grenades and remove spikes. Even mortars are not as completely silly as they originally were.

Moo

nwg

update 1.4

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