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 Kahuna, 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.

Rather than just present them in alphabetical order, we've grouped each file in main.pack into (hopefully useful) categories:

Geography

The tables in these files describe elements of the strategic map.

• regions_continents
• regions
• campaign_map_settlements
• campaign_map_towns_and_ports

Buildings & their Effects

• building_levels
• building_effects_junction
• building_factionwide_effects_junction
• building_units_allowed

Factions & their Units

• factions
• units
• unit_required_technology_junction
• units_to_exclusive_faction_permissions

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--MikeV 7 April 2009