ETW Data

At the heart of any game beats a spreadsheet (the cleverer ones hide this fact well). For complex games, there are several.

Thanks to the excellent Pack File Manager by LtChambers, we can now look at (many of) the data files for Empire: Total War.

When the Steam client caches the game on your system, it tucks the data files into %ProgramFiles%\Steam\SteamApps\common\empire total war\data, as a collection of .pack files. These are archives that contain other files, much like .zip or .cab files.

There are several .pack files: the following sub-sections contain a quick look at some of the interesting things revealed.

main.pack

This is the Big Cahuna, the key to most of the non-"eye candy" aspects of the game. As of version 1.11, the Pack File Manager does not decode all the contained files. But many that it can understand are quite useful:

regions_continents

This is simply a list of valid continent identifiers, as referenced elsewhere.

regions_continents

Continent ID
cont_africa_south
cont_america_latin
cont_america_north
cont_europe
cont_impassable
cont_india
cont_middle_east
cont_se_asia

building_effects_junction

This is a join table of buildings and their effects.

building_factionwide_effects_junction

This is a join table of buildings and the global effects they have faction-wide (instead of using a "global" flag in building_effects_junction).

building_levels

This describes the buildings and improvements to them that can be built at a settlement.

building_units_allowed

This describes what units can be built at which buildings.

campaign_map_settlements

This describes all the regions on the strategic map.

One interesting entry is "settlement:acadia:louisbourg_ep3", which is the name of the settlement for lesson (episode) 3 of the Road To Independence tutorial. In the regular campaign, the name of the same settlement is Fort Nashwaak.

campaign_map_towns_and_ports

This describes the small towns and ports for regions on the strategic map.

factions

This describes the major & minor factions.

regions

This describes the regions on each continent.

units

This describes the available units. There are lots of statistics, this table is a subset.

unit_required_technology_junction

This is a join table describing which techs are required before being able to build certain units.

units_to_exclusive_faction_permissions

Despite the long-winded name, this just describes which factions can build which units.

Note that the "episodic" units are for the Road To Independence tutorial lessons (episodes).

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--MikeV 19:07, 7 April 2009 (CDT)