Terra Incognita is a campaign-focused mod for Empire: Total War. The primary aims are to introduce a more strategically challenging gameplay, to allow victory by peaceful means and to introduce new concepts hitherto unseen in the Total War games.
Right now, I'm the only developer for TI but I would happily accept help offers, especially concerning the battle side of the game which I don't have enough time to address properly. However, you should be aware that TI uses a public domain license. That means any change you make that is primarily intended to go into this mod will be free for everyone to use. I might integrate third-party modules that have another license, though, as a separate download.
Before downloading, I would like to give you the opportunity to learn about the major changes in Terra Incognita (and sometimes a bit of the reasoning behind them):
Resistance: Regional traits allow it to implement a resistance system that is much more painful than the one in vanilla. Not only does it add 12 additional unhappiness points, it also lowers recruitment, supply, manpower (see below) and tax income.
Manpower: Terra Incognita now has a fully implemented manpower and (global) supply system. It consists of a value for each theatre and if you have no manpower left or are over your supply limit you will not anymore be able to recruit units in that theatre. Manpower is a measure of how many recruits you have in a theatre while supply shows how many soldiers you can support at a time.
Research speed balance: Research speed is much lower in TI. Gentlemen cannot steal techs anymore (they can't duel, either) and you get fewer of them because building a royal observatory is only allowed in your capital. More importantly, however, schools now have an upkeep cost that is subtracted from the region's town wealth over time (or directly from your treasury).
Base happiness: It's a bit harder to keep your population happy. Repression bonuses from government types are gone and provinces with a large population will show some amount of resistance all the time. However, the government buildings now have a higher happiness bonus.
Economic rebalancing: The economy has been hugely rebalanced. More advanced buildings are now actually worthwhile, administration cost has been cut in half and larger population in a region will mean a higher tax rate. The economy is scaled better between difficulty settings to allow players a bit more laxity on Normal or Easy difficulty settings. Tax bonuses have been revised to a more linear progression so high or very high taxes may now actually make sense if you need the money.
Population matters: Since population boosts your manpower (especially your manpower growth) and recruitment slot number as well as your tax rate it's not irrelevant anymore how many people live in a province. France for example will afford you a lot more units than for example New France.
May 21st: Version 0.2.1 released
Version 0.2.1
Changes from the last version:
There's a huge number of changes in this version, too much to list them all in full detail. I will give you a run-through of the new features and then you should just try to find out the specifics by playing - it's the most fun!
Manpower: This is the main new feature in version 0.2; a full-blown manpower system was implemented that enables/disables your recruitment capabilities in a theatre depending on how many soldiers you recruit there. The ratio is 1 soldier = 1 manpower (I can guarantee this on Medium settings, it should work like that on different unit scales, too).
Generally speaking, the more population a region has the more manpower it yields but there are some additional factors involved (like resistance). If your manpower pool is depleted, don't worry too much as it's going to regrow over time (and will be fully refilled after a maximum of 25 turns) - again, the more quickly your population grows the more quickly your manpower will grow, too.
When you select one of your settlements, the advisor will pop up telling you how much manpower you have for the three theatres and how much the region you selected is contributing.
Pop Growth: The food bonuses from all sources have been lowered (except for the base growth). This gives you a much more realistic pop growth rate of between 0 and 1% per turn (immigration notwithstanding)
Economic Rebalancing: A lot of building bonuses have been changed to make high-tier buildings actually worthwhile. You have a bit more money in TI than in vanilla 1.2 but not on the higher difficulty settings. Government buildings now add town wealth growth instead of a tax rate bonus (so build them early if you can).
Education upkeep: Education buildings now have an upkeep. This is subtracted from town wealth but if town wealth is too low for the player it's directly taken from your treasury at the end of the turn. The actual effect of this upkeep is obviously modified by the tax rate in the region so it may make sense to use low-tax regions for schools (this is something to be fixed later). The values are: School - 5000, College - 7500, Classic University - 10000, Modern University - 15000
The modern university is now much more worthwhile, though, giving you 40 research instead of the 20 of a classic university (you can only build it in your capital). In addition, the schoolmaster trait that lowers your research efficiency if you have multiple schools is still in place.
Peaceful Occupation: Peaceful occupation of a province will give you a lower resistance
Population Matters: Population now has some direct effects. It will boost your manpower and supply as well as your tax rate. It also adds some resistance though so you need more happiness to keep some regions in check than others.
House rules:
Terra Incognita is meant to be played with a certain set of house rules. For the best gameplay experience these should be seen as compulsory rather than a proposition but of course I can't and don't want to force you to use them.
1. Don't replenish units if they aren't in a region where you could recruit them at the moment (i.e. don't replenish if your manpower is low, your supply is overstretched or you couldn't recruit the unit anyways)
2. Don't claim more than two trade spots per trade theatre
3. Don't exploit the fact that you can circumvent resistance by gifting a conquered province to a protectorate (giving it to them to create a buffer zone is acceptable, I'll fix the problem in a future version).
4. Don't exploit the one turn delay for manpower disabling your recruitment (i.e. don't recruit units if that would drop your manpower below 0)
Changes in version 0.2.1:
- Cost for education facilities is now displayed properly when selecting a school
- Manpower now works for emergent factions
Installation Instructions:
First of all, please go to your ETW main campaign directory (usually C:\Program Files\Steam\steamapps\common\empire total war\data\campaigns\main) and rename or backup scripting.lua (to scripting.lua_vanilla) and startpos.esf (to startpos.esf_vanilla). Then go to your data directory and rename any localisation mod files (called "something_en.pack" usually, don't meddle with patch_en.pack though) by changing their file extension from .pack to .pack_backup
Now you're ready to download TerraIncognita_0_2.rar from the link below and extract the contents into your ETW directory (C:\Program Files\Steam\steamapps\common\empire total war). If it asks you to overwrite any files click on yes (again, make sure you have a backup of the script and startpos files). Then download TerraIncognita-0_2-to-0_2_1.rar and likewise extract it into your ETW directory.
Run the mod by double-clicking on TerraIncognita.bat in your empire total war directory
Advanced User Instructions:
Instead of using the batch file you can create a shortcut in steam, right-click on it, click on properties and add "mod TerraIncognita.pack" to the command line. You can also edit your user.empire_script.txt to run other mods together with Terra Incognita
The preferences file:
Terra Incognita comes with a preferences file that allows you to easily tweak the scripted sections of the mod to your liking. It can be found in the "empire total war/TerraIncognita" directory and is called TI_prefs.lua - you can open this file with any text file editor such as notepad. Double-click it, choose "select program from list" when queried by windows, then choose notepad.
The settings within this file should be fairly self-explanatory (except for those which you shouldn't use) so just play around with them or look into the script files to see what they do exactly.
Download
Compatibility:
Terra Incognita requires the official version 1.2; it should be more or less compatible with a lot of mods but there will be some problems. Use LtChambers' mod launcher to check for conflicts.
Make sure that you have no other mod installed that uses its own localisation (usually a pack named something_en.pack) and if you have, rename that package.
License:
Terra Incognita is in public domain. This means you are allowed to change and redistribute any files in this release without any restrictions whatsoever.
Earlier versions
Version 0.1.3c
Spoiler Alert, click show to read:
Version 0.1.1
Spoiler Alert, click show to read:
Version 0.1.1
Spoiler Alert, click show to read:
Version 0.1
Spoiler Alert, click show to read:
Developer Versions
The current work in progress version of the mod, without documentation, can always be found on the project SVN space. I will try to update it everytime I change something important so I can recommend checking it from time to time if you want to see the experimental stuff I'm working on. That said, I can not always guarantee that the latest version will work ;)
Browse the SVN Space
A very convenient way to always have the newest version installed is to check out TI from the SVN server. For that, you need an SVN client, I prefer Tortoise (http://tortoisesvn.net). It's nicely integrated into Windows explorer and easy to use. After downloading, installing and rebooting simply set up a new folder, right-click into it and select "SVN Checkout", this should pop up a checkout window. Into the URL line you have to insert this: https://terraincognita.svn.sourcefor...ncognita/trunk - then simply click on OK and Tortoise will start downloading.
Whenever you want to check for an update, right-click on the checked out folder and select "SVN Update". This will check for new and changed files and automatically download the changes. Then simply copy the files into your ETW folder and you're fine.
You can check out directly into the ETW folder if you want to but I'd be careful with that because there are some vanilla files I'm overwriting (scripting.lua and startpos.esf) so make sure you backup them before updating or checking out.
