I've been making and sharing AoH3 mods for a while, and working with the game taught me a lot about what I enjoy and what I wish I could change in grand strategy games.

Eventually I reached the point where some of the ideas I wanted to make went beyond what I could realistically do through AoH3 modding.

So I've decided to stop working on my AoH3 mods and take a pretty big risk: I'm starting development on my own grand strategy game from scratch.

A lot of its design ideas come from the things I learned while modding AoH3, although I'm not trying to make an AoH clone. I want to build something with deeper mechanics while keeping the accessibility that originally made me enjoy AoH.

Since this is the community where I started sharing my work, I wanted to share the transition here too.

For people who play/mod AoH3: what mechanics do you think a game like AoH gets right, and what would you most want to see done differently in a new grand strategy game?

So I have discovered a bug which is annoying but doesn't make the game unplayable. I still want it fixed. So, where can I send the bug Report to Lukasz?

https://preview.redd.it/0s3db02o4yjh1.png?width=1896&format=png&auto=webp&s=12a6e2995b46b0f66a3c0ad7cfa3045e5db904c9

It fixes some things and adds some thing. Check it out here: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3785168375

What mods are good and i should try??

0.82 is all about rebuilding the systems underneath the map — making great powers fight, economies matter, populations matter, and wars actually reshape the world.

This is only the foundation. 0.83 will focus on the 1066 world itself, with regional population reworks, unique military units, technology-tree differentiation, and much stronger identities for individual civilizations.

1. AI Warfare & Expansion

One of the long-standing problems in both Historia Universalis and vanilla AoH3 is that major powers rarely go to war with other major powers.

For 0.82, I focused heavily on this problem.

1) AI aggression toward weaker neighboring countries has been significantly increased.

2) Several conditions required for AI countries to prepare for and declare wars have been slightly relaxed.
Compared with vanilla AoH3, some of these values have been increased or reduced quite substantially.

3) I have been extensively testing the various conditions that influence AI war preparation.

Rather than changing only one or two obvious values, I have been testing many smaller variables individually and running observer games after each change.

For example:

AI_PREPARE_FOR_WAR_ONLY_IF_CIV_STABILITY_IS_BELOW_100

was tested through a very wide range of values:

0.134 → 0.402 → 0.001 → 1.34 → 13.4 → 0.926

This kind of trial-and-error testing is still ongoing.

4) ★ One of the biggest achievements of 0.82 was identifying and modifying a value that appears to influence how the AI evaluates the military strength of other countries.

By adjusting this value indirectly, I was finally able to significantly increase the frequency of major-power vs. major-power wars.

This value may still be adjusted in future versions depending on further observer testing.

Observer results

① In the 1440 scenario, the average number of wars during the 1500s increased to roughly 60–75 wars, and the number remained around 90 wars even during the 1630s.

② Major powers began forming much cleaner and more stable borders than before.

③ Most importantly, the Ottoman–Mamluk rivalry began naturally emerging as both powers grew.

In one observer test, the Ottomans and Mamluks fought six wars by 1716, with the Ottomans winning all six.

For the Ottoman–Mamluk conflict specifically, I plan to further encourage the Ottomans' natural historical expansion through AI and event adjustments in 0.85 or 0.90 and later.

2. AE System Rework

AE was found to be excessively restricting the long-term expansion of major powers, while a single coalition could sometimes completely destroy an otherwise successful empire.

Therefore, several AE values have been adjusted.

1) AE gained per province has been reduced to a more manageable level.
However, it is still roughly twice as high as vanilla AoH3.

2) AE generated by declaring war:

Vanilla: 7.5 → 0.81: 15.0 → 0.82: 10.0

3) ★ AE decay

After multiple observer tests, I found that AE decay appears to have a surprisingly strong relationship with the internal mechanics governing AI war activity.

Therefore, AE decay per year has been brought back to approximately the vanilla AoH3 level.

The goal is to prevent AE from completely shutting down the expansion of major powers while keeping coalitions meaningful.

3. War Score & Peace Negotiations

Capital annexation cost

PROVINCE_VALUE_CAPITAL

1.2 (0.80) → 1.0 (0.81) → 0.75 (0.82)

This was changed because smaller countries could sometimes lack enough war score to annex a one-province country.

This issue has not been completely solved yet, but the situation has improved.

Allied war contribution

WAR_SCORE_ALLIES

0.1 (vanilla) → 0.6 (0.81) → 0.8 (0.82)

This was increased because wars involving multiple fronts and many allies could sometimes result in extremely strange war-score calculations, making wars drag on indefinitely.

War reparations

The required war score and the amount of war reparations have both been reduced by roughly half.

4. Manpower System

Maximum manpower recovery time has been reduced from 25 years to 20 years.

Large wars could leave countries with almost no manpower and heavily depleted armies, resulting in extremely long recovery periods.

The change is partly a compromise between historical/strategic simulation and actual gameplay.

5. Investment & Building Balance Experiments

This version included extensive experiments comparing buildings, local manpower investment, tax-efficiency investment, and economic buildings.

During gameplay in version 0.81, I noticed that the Ottoman Empire had a very large manpower pool but surprisingly low income. This imbalance was another reason why the taxation system was reworked.

Manpower: Barracks vs. Local Manpower Investment

Testing showed that local manpower investment could be significantly more efficient than barracks in certain high-population provinces.

As a result, manpower provided by buildings was increased by approximately 50% compared with 0.8.

After testing:

Roughly speaking, local manpower investment is more efficient when local manpower is around 0–2, while buildings become more efficient beyond that point.

This was designed to make both strategies viable depending on the province.

Tax Efficiency vs. Economic Buildings

I also tested the relative efficiency of tax investment and economic buildings.

The results showed that:

• Tax-efficiency investment becomes more effective in provinces with low existing tax efficiency.
• It becomes particularly powerful in high-population, low-efficiency provinces.
• Under certain conditions, tax investment was substantially more efficient than simply constructing markets.

Therefore:

• Tax investment costs have been increased by more than 50%.
• Economic building efficiency has been increased by approximately 100%.
• Markets and food markets now provide a small amount of local tax efficiency.

The goal was to reduce the gap between investment and building-based economic development.

Example from testing

20 markets built: approximately +3.79 monthly income

Tax-efficiency investment varied greatly depending on population and existing efficiency.

In particular, provinces with:

>

showed very high returns from tax investment.

6. Unit Maintenance

As economies grew, both AI countries and players were accumulating excessive amounts of money.

I initially experimented with increasing army maintenance by around 50% depending on country rank.

After multiple rounds of testing, however, I decided to return the maintenance cost of individual units to approximately vanilla AoH3 levels.

This is because other economic systems have already been substantially strengthened:

• Commodity prices have been increased since 0.80.
• Tax income has been significantly increased since 0.80–0.82.
• Population-based income has also been increased.

Rather than making armies artificially expensive, I wanted the overall economic system to determine whether a country can sustain a large army.

7. Population Growth & Terrain Balance

Population growth

The penalties for deserts, drylands and other difficult environments were found to make long-term population investment disproportionately inefficient.

The desert population-growth penalty was therefore reduced:

-10% → -5%

The goal is to make population investment more consistently useful across different terrain types.

Terrain defense

Defensive terrain bonuses have also been increased.

This serves two purposes:

1. Improving historical/geographical realism.
2. Preventing increasingly enormous armies from making defensive terrain almost meaningless.

Current defensive bonuses:

• Plains / Steppe / Dryland: +1
• Forest / Marsh / Savanna / Semidesert: +2
• Hill: +3
• Jungle: +4
• Mountain: +5

8. Obsolete & Previously Developed Units

Previously developed units and unit types can now appear in the military recruitment interface.

This was implemented with the upcoming large-scale special unit overhaul in mind.

Special units can remain recruitable even if their technology is slightly outdated, allowing historically distinctive units to remain relevant rather than disappearing immediately when a new military technology is researched.

9. Population as a Core Economic Foundation

Around 1650, I noticed that repeated wars between the Ottomans and Mamluks could leave their economies at roughly one-third of the economic strength of countries such as Qara Qoyunlu and France.

I therefore increased the contribution of population to national income.

BASE_INCOME_POPULATION_INCOME

0.1 → 0.2

Population-based income is now twice as strong as in 0.80.

This means that highly populated countries have a stronger economic foundation and can recover their economic strength over the long term.

This change also became particularly important after returning unit maintenance closer to vanilla levels.

10. 1060 Scenario Balance

Observer testing of the 1060 scenario revealed a major balance issue:

The Byzantine Empire was sometimes able to defeat a combined force of the Fatimids, Seljuks and Ghaznavids and expand far beyond what I considered reasonable for the scenario.

As a result, I decided to begin a historical population rework of several major powers, including:

• Fatimids
• Seljuks
• Ghaznavids
• Liao
• Goryeo
• and other major powers in the region

This work will continue into the upcoming 0.83 — Rise of 1066 update.

11. Miscellaneous

Nomadic governments

The maximum number of loans for nomadic governments was adjusted:

-1 → -5

This was done to keep the loan limit proportional to the increased number of loans available since 0.80.

Population Rework

The population values of Timur and his subject states were reworked in 0.82 based on historical population estimates.

12. Special & Unique Units

https://preview.redd.it/pkiolbvtdpjh1.png?width=1536&format=png&auto=webp&s=5c85a859da41a51077847266c73e0e5437fcb510

New Special & Unique Units will begin to appear starting with version 0.82.

In 0.82, the Ottoman Janissaries have been added as the first unique unit.

The Janissaries were initially given a relatively high maintenance cost to reflect their status as an elite military unit. However, this was later reduced for two reasons: the economic difficulties observed in the Ottoman AI during testing, and the historical fact that the Janissary corps was largely composed of slaves and the sons of prominent families, who were trained and maintained as part of the Ottoman state military system.
The goal is to preserve the Janissaries' role as a distinctive elite force without making their maintenance cost excessively burdensome for the Ottoman economy.

Coming Early Next Week - Rise of 1066 -

Historia Universalis 0.83 -Rise of 1066 -
A major update is coming, bringing new historical units, military changes, and extensive balance improvements to the 1066 scenario.

More details soon!