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Warbirth is a series of mods whose main preoccupation is chiefly around mercenary units - units that are trained predominantly using Wealth and at a quick speed, as well as an aeclectic training and upgrade system.

This project originally started off as a personal response to the atrocities Da3sh (otherwise known as ISIL) committed in Syria, particularly the razing of the ruins of the Assyrian city of Nineveh and was intended to explain to the public at large why protecting the pre-Islamic archaeological patrimony of the Middle East was important. Since then, it however has blossomed into six different chapters covering both historical and ahistorical subjects.

Mod features

Mercenaries

Mercenaries are the meat and bones of the game. While they continue to be weaker or outdated versions of UUs, some mercenaries like Gutians, Dardans or Cimmerians can be powerful additions to your armies. Some primitive cultures provide little more than spear fodder and meat shields, but others, such as Chinese, Greek Scythian or Kushite mercenaries are the very avatars of their ancestral military traditions. Equally there is now an Agent system in place:

  • Temples can produce Priests, Shamans and Councillors, while
  • Mercenary Quarters and Sentry Posts are required for Spies and Scouts.
  • The Warrior Hall allows for the training of elite units, but can also be used to recruit select mercenary units, depending on which chapter you are playing.

However, in Age of Empires, some factions cannot train Spies - if they have no mercenary pools at the Mercenary Quarters, they will not have access to Spies.

Developmental bottlenecks

Warbirth continues New World Empires’s rush-based emphasis, with cities and libraries being costly, but not so much as the. Unlike the latter however, auxiliary buildings — Mines, Barracks, etc — aren't discounted, so expansion is as difficult as it was in ancient times.

Cities, too, also have a higher build cost, but while they are not as prohibitively expensive as in New World Empires the cost increase (relative to vanilla Rise of Nations) makes it so that forward building and border rushing is not as viable a strategy as it normally would be, making you more reliant on the use of Forts (or Castles, for The Raj of Steam and Steel) to expand your national borders and the territory you can claim. This is meant to reflect the challenges of pre-modern urban development, which often was hamstrung by deficiencies in logistics and transport.

Morale and information warfare

LOS in Warbirth is used to represent morale and professionalism. The more highly trained or motivated a unit is, the greater the LOS. Low LOS can lead to problems, such as being liable of ambush or bribery. The highest level of training and indoctrination usually results in a unit that is capable of scouting and spotting hidden units. Understandably the best and most powerful units usually can do so, but ships and Siege Towers will invariably have the most extensive LOS.

Scouts and Explorers are absent from Warbirth. In their place, however are Envoy units, who can gather intelligence either by uncovering parts of the map, or inserting Informants into enemy units and structures. Envoys will also cloak when not moving, thus making them highly useful early on especially when protecting your mercenaries from Bribery.

Our mods

All mods can be downloaded from our official site on Patreon.

Ancient history mods

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Warbirth was originally designed to be an ancient warfare/Bronze Age mod. Even so, Age of Empires turned out to be the first instalment, and we expect the other two instalments to be completed within years of now.

Generally, each chapter represents several geographic regions and periods, namely:

  • Age of Chariots: North Africa and Eurasia, 1360-600BCE;
  • Age of Empires: North Africa and Eurasia, 241BCE-539CE.
  • Rise of the Ancients: Entire world, 4000-550BCE

While Rise of the Ancients and Age of Chariots are intimately linked to one another and share many units, Age of Empires however is different, owing to its later time period. As such while some mercenary units can be trained in Age of Empires, it relies more on mainstream regular units trained at the Barracks, Corral or Fort, while the other two mods of this triad in turn reflect how armies were raised and organized during the Bronze Age, with a greater reliance on mercenary units and less on regular standing units.

Mediaeval history mods

287450 3346064090.png Watch this space...

Warbirth’s unique combat mechanics have made it suitable as a testbed for other mods, and the result of this is The Crucible - another mod, but this time concentrating not on the ancient world but rather late mediaeval warfare. This mod is set during the tumultuous tail end of the Hundred Years' War in Western Europe (as well as other peripheral conflicts, eg the final showdown between Christianity and Islam in Iberia, and the rise of the Swiss in the Alps) and mates the different themes of Warbirth’s classical triad - lots of mercenaries, costly cities, and melee battles - with the mechanics meant to reflect the changes firearms brought to mediaeval Europe.

As of October 2025, a second chapter mod not too dissimilar from The Crucible is being drafted. Expect more details on this project to emerge....

Alt-history/low fantasy

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In contrast to all other mods, Warbirth: The Raj of Steam and Steel is a mod loosely based on the Peshawar Lancers series of novels (The Peshawar Lancers, Shikkari for Galveston)and short stories by Canadian alt-history author S M Stirling, and depicts a world in which human progress and development have been all but stymied by a cataclysmic event, keeping humanity locked out of industrialisation well until the mid-21st century CE. While The Raj uses the Warbirth tech tree system, it nevertheless uses the same sort of mainstream units that are present in Rise of the Moderns and Fallen Giants proper, even as some mercenary units originally included under Rise of the Ancients make a comback.

The Raj is basically for all purposes a Warbirth mod that swaps out armoured spearmen and chariots for airships and tanks. Yet as befitting its postApo/Steampunk background it is also a mod where pre-and proto-industrial colonial warfare reigns supreme: while aircraft is available to most factions from the get go, armoured vehicles are harder to come by - and are easily killed off with some good shots by heavy artillery. Choose where you build your cities and your units with care!

Other projects

Kings & Conquerors: Hammurabi

Watch this space...

Watch this space...

Having been released almost simultaneously as Age of Empires, Kings & Conquerors: Hammurabi is the fourth instalment of the five Rise of Nations mods that form the Kings & Conquerors family. While it shares many traits with the Hellenistic Era series of mods, it features a totally different world and set of stories compared to that of the former: the rise of the Aryan races in Central Asia, as well as the life of its titular character, Hammurabi of Babylon (early 18th century BCE). This mod can be said to be a "prologue" of sorts for Rise of the Ancients, given that it replicates the same building and unit systems of that mod (but not its research tree). Coming soon .... Coming soon ....

Credits & Acknowledgments

Original concepts

Graphics

Audio & sound engineering

Researchers and consultants

Quality assurance

Maintained by Beelim Solutions.
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