Hey all! I’m sharing a tool I’ve been building: Empire Forge, a civilization builder for Age of Empires II: Definitive Edition. It lets you design a custom civ from the ground up and generates a ready-to-install mod, right from your own machine.
What you can build
A full tech tree — pick exactly which units, buildings, and technologies your civ has access to, unit by unit
Civilization bonuses — a searchable catalog of bonus effects to mix and match. Multipliers available.
A unique unit — start from any vanilla unit or build a custom one from scratch, override its stats, cost, and name
Castle and Imperial unique techs — pick a vanilla tech or make your own from individual bonus effects
A team bonus (or bonuses)
A hero unit — optional
Architecture set, castle skin, wonder, monk skin, starting scout, and voice lines are all pickable too, so your civ looks and sounds how you want.
Why there’s no server
Empire Forge runs entirely on your own computer - there’s no hosted site, accounts, or logins. Two reasons:
Servers cost money, and I’d rather put that into the tool than keep a website alive.
Nothing to go down. If you have the app, it works - no outages, no “the site’s offline again,” no depending on me keeping something running forever. Your PC is the server!
It reads your actual installed game files directly when it builds, instead of relying on a fixed snapshot of the game’s data, so it keeps working as new DLCs ship, rather than breaking every time the game updates. Note: New DLC units and bonuses will need to be added – but I’m on top of it!
Before you open it: the Windows warning
Because the app isn’t code-signed yet, Windows SmartScreen will throw up a big blue “Windows protected your PC” screen the first time you run it. This is normal for small independent tools without a paid certificate. It does not mean anything’s wrong. Click More info, then Run anyway. It’s fully open source if you want to check the code yourself before trusting it: github.com/napkingcole/aoe2-empire-forge. I’m in the process of applying for free code signing, which should make that warning go away in a future release.
Getting started
Requires AoE2:DE installed (Steam or Microsoft Store) — the app auto-detects your game files
Already have civs from another builder? There’s an import path to bring existing civ files in and keep editing them here.
Bugs/feedback/feature requests welcome — Discord: discord.gg/cQ5x7bfxDB, or open a GitHub issue
A final note on bugs
There will almost certainly be some bugs, but it’s to the point where it needs more play testers, and works pretty well. Just a FYI, in case something doesn’t work as expected. Please report any bugs so I can fix them!!
Happy to answer questions here or on Discord. Screenshots below if you want a look at the builder before downloading.
Unfortunately Krakenmeister hasn’t been able to update his builder much. There was a small update in March before I decided to build Empire Forge, but before that, the last update was May 2024. There was an update in August, but there’s still a lot missing from the most recent updates, and from what I see on discord, quite a few breaking bugs.
In a perfect world, Empire Forge doesn’t exist. But, as it took more and more effort to try to get KM-generated mods working (South American biomes still spawn Gaia unique units instead of berry patches, capybaras, and the new boar, as far as I know), to the point where creating a working mod was near impossible, I decided to try building my own. I loved making my own OP civs that me and my brother could use to beat up on a bunch of extreme AIs! I didn’t want that part of this game to go away.
Krakenmeister’s civ builder was the gold standard, of course. I tried to carry over the steps, tech tree, and visual card layout so it would familiar to those that have built civs before.
I tried to improve on it, as well. Some new features:
set custom names, costs, and stats for your unique unit, including some special effects: can’t be converted, regenerate hp, and more
select vanilla unique techs, or create your own, with its own name, cost, description, and up to five unique tech effects (multipliers allowed)
Select your own hero - give it whatever name you want, as well as it’s own stats and cost
plus a lot more coming. I’m taking requests as well!
I really like the idea of users being able to add their own graphics for units. Do you have an example you could share with me? Either a link or on discord?
Preview looks great!
One question about civ bonuses: Is it possible to create custom ones (or planned in the future) or user is limited only to choosing from the existing ones? By custom bonuses i mean, for example, creating new discounts or adding aura effects.
Mangonel is just because I was able to match my snip tool just right but longsword has 90/53 scorpion 87, Archer and Skirm 54 and Eskirm has 53 implying Turk deletion and spearman is 106 implying its twice as existant?
For Mangonel Im guessing a doubling effect happened and then it subtracted the 4 Rocket Cart civs
Nice!
Could you add any Chronicles stuff (UUs, bonuses, navy, and/or double techs)? Also, some (or all) of the custom techs from KM are missing (Replaceable Parts is the one that I noticed).
A very good app; it has a great design and is simple to use.
As previously mentioned, it would be great to be able to use the Chronicles expansion pack assets (architecture, technologies, buildings, units, and unit voice lines).
It will be possible to edit and/or replace the Chronicles civilizations, since all civilizations share the same dataset?
Thanks for the feedback regarding the Chronicles civs! I honestly overlooked them because that is the one DLC I don’t have. I’ll have to look into it some more.
