Emperors! Today we're releasing Update 1.2 "Echinades" our biggest update yet. From a sweeping expansion of Balkan and Greek content, overhauled HRE and a system for AI Personalities, and the much requested event viewer. 1.2 touches nearly every corner of the game. Please find out highlights below!
Checksum: 5be7
Date: May 6th, 2026
1.2 highlights:
Balkan Content — 300+ new advances, ~150 new Dynamic Historical Events, and extensive new content for Greece and the Balkans, a couple new formables, reforms, and privileges.
Overhauled Economy — Updated trade route logic and Maritime Presence mechanics, a new Trade Orders feature, Urban Rights, the Megalopolis location rank, and some tweaks to hopefully reflect a more historically accurate economic setups.
Orthodoxy Rework — Patriarchs are now characters, with a reworked Law and Tenet system, and Religious Influence fully replacing Rite Power.
Deeper Politics & Diplomacy — Overhauls to the HRE (new Imperial Diet, UI rework, Imperial Armories), a new Papal Authority system, and AI Country Personalities and Disposition Systems.
Improved Military Systems — Overhauled logistics, a Heavy/Light troop split with distinct upgrade paths, some improvements to both land and naval combat, and new tools like army templates and City Walls.
UI, Art & Accessibility Improvements — New in-game Event Viewer, a sans-serif font accessibility option, 3D City Walls visuals.
~2,000 Bug Fixes & Modding Support — Lots of under-the-hood polish plus new modding tools including Bureaucracies and Movements as fully moddable Systems to be expanded upon later.
Want to see it all in action? Check out our 1.2 Feature Breakdown video for a brief walkthrough of everything new in Echinades:
The patch notes for this update come out to just about 72 pages in google docs (Fun fact, based on our quick calculations that's about 21m long if you printed it out on A4 Paper). These notes are too long to share directly here on steam, however, you can find our full patch notes on our forums here:
https://pdxint.at/EUVEchinades
⚠️ WARNING You are able to load the save game from 1.1.X versions but our testing indicated that you will probably encounter your country in a unrecoverable state due to how many rules of the game have changed. For this reason we highly recommend starting a new save with 1.2
We hope you enjoy update 1.2! We couldn't have put it together without your feedback, so keep it up.
In the coming days and weeks we'll be monitoring you feedback and preparing some hotfixes and minor patches to follow based on that.
As usual, here is a list of handy EU5 links:
Have fun and Be Ambitious!