This is a very basic and simplified guide to playing ETW modding it utilizing a basic trainer. In this case, we will utilize as our example a free and easy to use trainer mod known as "MegaTrainer" which will mod both ETW and NTW. This guide is limited to discussion of ETW. The overall mod changes that the trainer introduces to the rules of the game are:

1) unlimited movement
2) the abilitiy to add money in 50,000 increments
3) the ability to add population in 50,000 increments
4) the ability to research tech in just one turn
5) the ability to construct buildings in cities and outside of cities as well as port facilities in just one turn
6) the ability to recruit tactical land and sea units in just one turn in lieu of waiting several turns to recruit them

at any time, one can toggle off the mod and play the "vanilla" ETW.

We will discuss each of the features seriatim because the mod presents intriguing features which amount to an entirely different game altogether and present features of interest.

Unlimited Movement modding presents novel aspects to ETW which fundamentally change the dynamic of the game in new and intriguing ways. Because movement is unlimited, it is critical to negotiate UNLIMITED MILITARY ACCESS with each and every other country on the board, so that your armies, agents and ships can travel any route, anywhere, to get anywhere, in the shortest possible route. This is the first and most important aspect. Next we will discuss subpoints.

1) unlimited movement of agents

a) unlimited movement of rakes/spies - spies or rakes can now move any distance. Consequently, you can move a spy across continents if you need to in just one turn. One a spy/rake has been deployed and used, and a city taken, he should be re-deployed to the next theatre of critical interest. Where-ever this may be. However, it should be pointed out that a rake or spy can only be assigned one mission per turn. In ETW, a spy is capable of espionage, spying, or assassination, and thus performs multiple functions. In prior TW games, spies and assassins were separately recruited and deplayed.

b) unlimited movement of religious agents - it is important for the long-term to convert your populations to the religion of your civilization. If you are playing the English, to protestantism, if the French or Spanish, catholicism, and so forth. In America, because populations are small, this will be an easy task. In India, the Black Hole of Calcutta will take forever to convert, because millions reside in the capital of Bengal. In general, America converts quickly, India converts slowly, and Europe convertsly slowly. It is all population dependent. Consequently, you will need to deploy MISSIONARIES to these most populated spots to accelerate the pace of conversion. As well as build church schools/seminaries and so forth. Unlimited movement helps you to deploy missionaries to the key spots on the board where you can deploy missionaries to the spots of most unrest and most population in key need of conversion, and once a city has been fully converted, you can move the agent(s) to the next spot that is most in need instead of moving him to an adjacent spot, you can move him as far as needed to where he is most needed.

c) Gentlemen - you want to deploy them in your universities. Since they can pop up anywhere, you want to deploy them if possible in the universities in your home capitol first, and then in major points so that your research is never disrupted. They have other functions so they can be deployed to do these as well. Deploy them to the most advanced universities--Modern, then classical.

d) other agents and thinking globally - unlimited movement means thinking globally with your resources and agents. anything you have on the board is now a chess piece to be deployed in the turn. You need to keep this in mind accurately and never fail to move a piece or bring it to bear on the opposition.

2) unlimited movement of armies

a) stacking armies - since there is unlimited movement of armies, as you build, you can stack armies in key cities, then deploy them when war breaks out when and where they are needed. So if the recruitment queue is 2, 3 or 4 per turn, you can send all of the builds to one city under one excellent general, and build a wonderful army, and then deploy it when needed. When your empire is larger, you can do this at several spots. Obviously you want to pick key cities to do this, such as London, Paris, Constantinople, Tunis, Madrid, and so forth.

b) building and moving artillery - cannon are needed to break sieges, so you want to build cannon and move them with your armies, or siege with several armies, then send cannon to assault cities and break sieges. unlimited movement means you can assemble artillery in one city and assemble fine fighting forces in another city, then bring them together for sieges under fine generals.

c) fighting rebellions - unlmited movement means you can take your best generals and improve their skill ratings with your fine armies you are assembling by giving them practice against rebels. They will increase skill points and then they can rehab and rest after destroying the rebels.

d) conquering large countries like Russia - is now a breeze with unlimited movement. You can bypass forts and strongholds, and just lay siege to the key cities, and take them, and when all of the cities are gone, the forces of the opposition disappear. This applies to Persia, Afghanistan and India as well.

e) think globally - you can't move between continents, so be sure to separate America and Europe/India in your mind. You can move from India to Europe, but it takes a long time even with unlimited movement. Essentially, Constantinople is the gateway between the two continents, or Baghdad or Cairo, and with unlimited movement, you begin to see for the first time why Britain wanted control of Egypt, alliance with the Ottomans, control of the Qatars and Persian, and conquest of Afghanistan and India, because the land route between Europe and India lies across these lands and supplements the sea route. Welcome to the great game. We continue to play it today, if you'r e wondering what we're doing in the Gulf region to this day, wearing the shoes of the British Empire in Mesopotamia, Afghanistan etc. as Americans.

f) best generals - as you fight generals and fight rebellions, your generals' abilities will improve. After a while, or immediately, you will begin to have five and six star generals. It is imperative if you intend to attack a strong faction, that in stacking armies, you unite your best general (and two if possible) with your best units. To take a stronghold, generally it required four to six armies to siege the city, and then assault it the same turn. At least 2-3 of those armies should have a strong accumulation of good units and artillery and good generals. If you want to fight it out on the ETW screen you can do that too.

g) damaged units - After a battle, you will have damaged generals and damaged units. as a bookkeeping measure, it is generally a good idea to separate out damaged generals from the rest of the armies so they can recuperate on their own. There is a toggle switch to heal damaged units. Generally one can place two generals in each building one owns, and this is a good place to put damaged generals--two in each building you own, and it has the added advantage, once you place generals there, of showing your flag. As for damaged units, they should be segregated out and placed in a city behind the front lines to heal. If it is a five or six star general, keep him on the front lines for battle another day. If the unit is damaged but is still near full strenth, keep it around and near the front lines.

3) unlimited movement of navies

a) move your trade vessels to occupy all tradings spots rapidly. Since you can move unlmited lengths, you can build rapidly and move rapidly to occupy all of the trading spots on all four coasts available. This will take some time each turn but eventually you can place a maximum of 13 trading ships on each trading spot, and then protect them with any number of vessels which are armed. These are the East Indies, Ivory Coast, Coast of Brazil, etc. The maximum number of trade vessels which can occupy each spot of trading at each trading lane is around a dozen, give or take and build evenly.

b) Move your vessels to occupy all trading lanes.

c) Assemble large fleets. Since you have unlimited movement, you can use your builds to assemble large fleets along key spots on trading langes from ports. Large fleets should consist of ships of various sizes with at least one good admiral. The optimal size is 6.

d) If you are at war, obviously, block or reign in opponents naval ports and trade lanes until the war is over or settled or otherwise disposed of. And do it completely.

The ability to add 50,000 money at a time presents novel strategic and tactical aspects to ETW.

1) You can build all the buildings each and every turn. You needn't pick or choose.

2) You can build all the military and navel units each and every turn. You needn't pick or choose, except to pick and queue up the best units, and keep a very full queue.

3) Diplomacy. This is probably the most intriguing aspect of money.

a) Alliances - you can buy alliances by agreeing to pay countries about $5,000 annually for various terms, such as 5, 10, 15 or 20 years.

b) military access - you can buy this for about the same amount as alliances.

c) gifts - you should give gifts to allies and friendly countries in amounts of $5K or $10K each and every turn.

d) buying regions - If you are at war, you can very easily make peace with a country by defeating it in battle, then proposing peace terms by offering it peace, and also offering to buy its regions that are available and offering money for those regions, either in a lump sum or in an annual indemnity. European countries are often very happy to sell off their American possessions.

e) Trade - countries will agree to trade in exchange for lump sum payments of $5k or five years of payments of $5k.

f) other diplomatic concessions - similarly, other diplomatic concessions are well-lubricated by the mothers milk of politics, money. Basically, foreign aid, gifts, money, these are the tools of diplomacy.

4) keep an eye on your budget - you can't overcommit your budget, so don't promise away too much money.

5) ministers matter. be sure to keep a good cabinet.

6) taxes can be set to zero in all regions, or to zero in trouble regions, when you can raise $50k in the mod. Setting taxes to zero has salubrious effects.

7) Once you have a stable, large empire, you may want to revert to the vanilla game and see if you can run it properly under the vanilla rules, but normally if you have built a massive armada and massive land forces, you will be running a huge deficit at this point, which sort of proves that the ETW vanilla rules make it nearly impossible to sustain the kind of forces and naval forces necessary to really dominate. Making the trainer mod of interest.

The training mod allows you to add 5,000 population to a city's population.

This is very useful because in the lower lefthand corner of every city's information window in ETW, you will see a small green bubble that tells you that the next town will be available in 15, 20 or 25 turns.

If you add population, this bubble will decrease in turns either quickly or slowly (depending on the size of your city) eventually to 1, when you should stop and save.

At this point, you will get a new town the very next turn, which can be built into a university, a religious building or an industrial building, etc. Sometimes the new town is a new port, even better.

This is an exceedingly useful feature. Used tactically and strategically, and carefully, one can accelerate carefully the emergence of towns and ports that would otherwise not emerge for decades in vanilla ETW.

Thus, the following turn, you may have six to ten new towns, and six or seven new ports emerging, in a single new turn.

New ports mean trade, ships and warships and trade ships, and towns mean universities, religious buildings, industrial buildings and all manner of good things.

One caveat: if you add population, at some points the population bubble will reverse and the population growth meter will start declining from positive to negative. This means that you cannot add more population that turn. You need to stop and wait until the next turn to get down to the magic number. The city is not ready even with the mod to add a town quite yet.

Also, know that adding population will often cause some increased instability, so be prepared for rebellion and other instability.

Overall, this is one of the most useful modding features of playing with a trainer. Used strategically and tactically, it is very useful because it literally changes the map--adding ports and towns truly changes the map you are playing on. And it accelerates growth and the ability to do many other things. A very useful ETW mod.

Playing with a Trainer allows you to have one turn research. What this means is, for every university you have, you can click on a technology to develop and the amount of time to develop it will read "zero" with a big "0" listed.

What does this mean tactically and strategically?

1) At the start, buy all the technology you can from other countries. Generally, this will be with the major countries. Generally speaking, they will part with all of their tech for a payment lump sum of between $5K and $50K if you exchange tech with them. You can add 50K money each time you do this.

2) now you are about 1/3 down the tech tree. Now build all the universities you can, and acquire all the territories with universities you can. If necessary, destroy buildings that can be rebuilt as universities. Each universitiy can only develop one technology at a time, so you will need at least 5-10 to accelerate the pace of tech research until you reach bottlenecks.

3) you will need to monitor the pace of tech research each turn and reset the tech tree each time.

4) you will need to keep building universities.

5) At some point, you will need to be sure to build the buildings you need to enable certain technologies to be researched, and research the technologies to enable certain buildings to be built. These are synergistic and heuristic. You need to understand how the tech tree works.

6) The tech tree cannot be completed without a MODERN UNVERSITY. It is critical that you complete the PHILOSOPHY branch of the tech tree. Only certain countries can have modern universities, but if you are not one of them, then you must conquer a country that has a modern university and take it over. There is nothing more important than having a modern university and finishing out the tech tree.

7) completing the tech tree unlocks amazing units, both naval and land. First rates at sea, enormous artillery units on land, phenomenal land fighting units. These are the units you want for actual battles to play in real time.

8) Unlocking the tech tree will lead to your being first in prestige in "Englightenment". This is very Zen. Sir Isaac Newton would be very proud of you.

ETW modded by trainers to allow one turn construction is not literally this--it is one turn construction IF THE TECH TREE HAS DEVELOPED TO ALLOW THE CONSTRUCTION.

Consequently, you can build in one turn, those buildings within and without cities, that the tech tree has developed, which are allowed by your civilization/country's current state of tech.

If you understand the tech tree (see discussion, supra, of tech tree), then you will understand that certain buildings unlock tech, and that certain tech unlocks buildings. You will need to build as fast as you can, and research as fast as you can, in order for tech to unlock buildings, and for buildings to unlock tech.

One cannot emphasize this strongly enough. You must understand how the tech tree interacts with your buildings in order to build properly.

1) infrastructure - be sure to keep building infrastructure - even though you have unlimited movement, eventually you will be able with full tech to have metalled roads with rails, which means that you will have virtually unlmited movement anyway.

2) military buildings - you will be able to build better units and increase the queue

3) bigger v smaller cities - for whatever the reason, some cities will be able to max out at building four units a turn and building huger buildings, while some will be maxing out at building two units a turn and not go past certain buildings, no matter how much money or tech you have. Be not troubled. The big cities are Paris, London, Madrid, Cairo, Constantinople, Moscow, Lisbon, Philadelphia, Mexico City, to name but a few, and we leave it to you to discover the rest. These are the industrial and military powerhouses of ETW.

4) industrial buildings not in cities - you will need steam powered factories and other industrial buildings to finish out the tech tree.

5) agricultural buildings not in cities - necessary to feed burgeoning populations.

6) religious buildings - necessary to convert populations to your country's religion

7) universities - necessary to finish the tech tree, have other benefits besides.

8) other buildings not in towns - have various benefits, again, can be completed in one turn if the tech allows.

9) as the tech develops, you will need to review all your buildings in cities, and then all your buildings outside cities, to build them.

10) this mod will NOT accelerate the building of forts. They get built in the regular amount of time, so if you are building forts, particularly in unruly areas, build them early and often.

11) A checklist is useful to be sure you've built everything. Cycle thru your cities, then your ports, then your fleets, then your non-city buildings, then your forts, then check your tech tree, and finally, re-check your diplomacy.

12) be sure to save constantly. you never know when ETW will crash. or your computer for that matter. And back up your data.

Modding ETW with a Trainer allows one turn recruitment, but not as you imagine.

It means one turn to the extent of the queue, within the framework of the units available to that city, to the extent of the tech tree of that city.

For ships, you need to develop the port, whether it's trade or warship port, you need to build it up to increase the queue and the type of ships you can build and the number, before you can build.

For ships, the max for trade is two merchantmen per turn at a trade port, though you will probably want to build a merchantmen with a brig or sloop and pair them. For warship ports, the ultimate max is four ships per turn, normally ships of the line and first rates, whre you probably want to build two ships of the line and two other types of first rates, which are basically four ship armadas to roll out each turn.

Two of these make an eight ship armada.

In terms of military units, even with rapid building and rapid tech tree, it will take a while to get more advanced units and more advanced artillery even in the large cities to develop and become available. Consequently, one should probably work on building and on the tech tree, and avoid conflict until the more advanced units and artillery are available. (see discussion of diplomacy in money, supra). Using diplomacy to obtain regions and settle disputes is probably the preferred method of expansion in the early phase of the game. Only later on will any player, even in the mod, have the "muscle" to actually conquer by force.

even with one turn construction, only the biggest cities will be able to max out. Basically, most cities will max out at large artillery and very good units, building them two per turn. Only the very largest cities, e.g. Madred, Paris, London, Vienna, Constantinople, Cairo, etc. will be able to build at max four units per turn, and build the most advanced artillery and the very finest units.

One way around the unit limitations of your cities is to build in forts and ports. The units available in these are whatever units are allowed by the tech tree. Unfortunately, the mod does not allow one turn construction in these, but there is a diversity of units allowed, so you can if you wish to supplement units seasonably, build in ports and forts units you want or need. However, the queue is limited by region and you will only be able to build so many units per turn of these in each continent. It is suggested you do so, and then move those units to the cities where you are concentrating forces.

Once you start moving way down the tech tree, you will get some amazing units--mortars, and heavy mortars, huge cannon, all manner of grenadier and advanced line infantry, that are very fine indeed in battle. Youl will be happy to build these each turn.

This has been a guide to modding ETW with a trainer, in this case, the example of Megatrainer, a free, downloadable trainer, which can be utilized with ETW or NTW, is used, but this guide is only to use with ETW. We have presented some aspects of strategic and tactical play with trainer mod or mode. Comments are welcomed and invited.