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.

Continent ID

cont_africa_south

cont_america_latin

cont_america_north

cont_europe

cont_impassable

cont_india

cont_middle_east

cont_se_asia

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