Flames in Modern Europe news & patch notes

Greetings, dear players of Flame of Modern Europe! I am glad to announce that today update 0.7: "PLAYABLE!" has finally been released!

It contains many new and important changes, but the main goal of the update is to improve the playability of the project. In particular, through improved localization, basic in-game tooltips, deepening of existing mechanics, and so on.

Combat Mechanics

The combat mechanics update includes the addition of a large number of new variables, such as modifiers for attack, defense, combat effectiveness, etc. This was made possible by adding a full-fledged template editor to the game! Now you can bring your craziest ideas to life: from a regiment of drones to a brigade of motorcyclists!

What? Drones? In 2013? No! Well, not exactly. Because now the game has production!

This is a fairly simple mechanic that allows you to use your military factories effectively: sew clothes, produce artillery shells, and even manufacture chips. By the way, it is the chips that are needed for drones.

The brigade's resource supply directly affects all its indicators, acting as a final modifier.

To further improve combat mechanics, a new research branch for the army has been added to the game! It allows you to progress, in particular, in drone technologies, gradually making them extremely powerful!

And finally, a new and very cool feature for generals has been added — defensive points! You can add and remove them dynamically, without following the "line" structure. Very useful not only for planning defense, but also when you need to quickly move your troops somewhere.

Diplomacy

As you can see for yourself, the diplomacy window has been completely redesigned. Now it includes complete information about the state: from its government to the number of brigades and buildings.

Also, new diplomacy functionality has been added. In particular, influence, which allows you to promote your ideology in that country, or even issue ultimatums in which you can demand money, transfer of territories, or submission... By the way, interesting fact — you can also make concessions yourself, transferring your own funds and territories!

The peace treaties window has also been completely redesigned using a similar principle.

AI of States

Along with the improvement of diplomacy, it was logical to improve the AI. Now states independently study their courses (which is why you can observe an amazing civil war in Germany while playing as Slovenia), conduct research, form a budget that depends on the situation in their country, and even engage in production.

Italy

Italy has become the main country of the update, as it received unique content that includes several course branches, characters, and many events.

Game Quality

Probably the biggest focus of the update was on the overall improvement of game quality.

First, a full-fledged tutorial has been implemented. But since it could be completed in any scenario for any country, I decided to integrate it directly into the regular game. And if you are already an expert, you can disable them in the settings. By the way, you can also disable autosaves in the same place. Also, I want to note the button tooltips in the bottom right corner of the screen.

Secondly, game loading has been drastically accelerated. Personally, it used to take me about a minute and a half, and now — only 20 seconds!

Thirdly, a rather complex system for localizing effects has been implemented. Now they have colorization that indicates whether this change is good or bad. In addition, many effects previously had numbers incomprehensible to players, for example "0.05". Well — now it will clearly say that it is 5%!

And finally: new buttons and cursors. Many buttons now have cool animations with size changes, which makes interacting with them much more pleasant. And cursors reflect your possible actions. In particular, when interacting with brigades or generals.

Below you can see the full list of changes:

Greetings, dear players of Flame of Modern Europe! Exactly one year ago, on April 21, 2025, the game was released into early access. It came out very raw and had a lot of problems. I still remember how I didn’t sleep at all the first week, figuring out the crashes that affected some players.

But a whole year has passed since then, and a huge number of major updates have been released — especially compared to other games in this genre. In just a moment — a full 49 public updates!

In this post, I want to sum up the results, go through most of them, and also tell you a little about the plans for the future.

WHAT HAS ALREADY HAPPENED

Each game update brought very important and noticeable changes. There’s no point in even trying to write everything here, but I want to highlight the most important ones:

May — North African countries and alliances added

June — significantly improved map quality, FSR, nuclear explosion traces, full-scale offensive and elections

August — mentality, AI wars, region population, map normal texture

October — saves, parliament, significant economic improvements

December — content for Germany, France, Spain; new laws, 1800 cities on the map, region names, improved military AI, troops capture up to three provinces

March — incredibly large-scale content for Ukraine, the economy updated again, auto-saves, major bug fixes, incredible script and loading optimizations, supply system, debts. This was the first update that had a full beta test and was also focused on improving the overall state of the game

WHAT IS STILL AHEAD

I plan to continue doing what, in my opinion, is missing in a single-player game. Very soon you will see in-game tutorials, along with full combat mechanics that will include creating brigades from battalions. There will be posts about this both in Telegram and in the Steam community, so subscribe! Also planned is a complete rework of research — which can and should become a rather important mechanic, but has remained unchanged since the demo version.

Next — weapon production. It will probably appear in some form already in 0.7, but I can’t guarantee that here. I can only say that by version 0.8 weapon production will definitely become a full-fledged mechanic.

Interestingly, the game has had a closed Steam Workshop since the first week after release. Its release may even happen in 0.7, but here it depends on popularity: write if any of you are interested in downloading mods or creating them.

Content for other countries — I’m not the only one working on it, so it will be released regularly, and at least until the end of this year every major update will definitely include content for states that don’t have it yet.

I also want to expand the influence of the regions themselves on the state. For example, make a dynamic construction limit in regions (possibly in 0.7), resources (but there’s a nuance that not as many resources are mined in Europe as in the 20th century), and various variables such as region ethnicities, regional stability, corruption, and so on.

Investments — I have been planning to add this mechanic since the development of 0.5. As you know, construction prices in high-GDP countries are high, so it would be beneficial to have the ability to invest from, say, Germany into Ukraine.

I also really want to add multiplayer to the game, but it will most likely happen later than all the plans described above. It may appear only after version 1.0

As for version 1.0 itself — this version will definitely mark the end of the early access stage, and it will be the completion of everything that should be in a good real-time grand strategy, so it won’t come out anytime soon, but it will definitely happen before the second anniversary of Early Access!

Overall, even though the game came out very raw and in many aspects still remains so, I am still satisfied with its development — throughout this time, that is, since September 30, 2024, there hasn’t been a single week when I didn’t work on it, despite all my moves and other problems, and each update improved it a lot. I would like to draw special attention to the reviews — both the positive ones, as they are very important for the game’s visibility, and the negative ones that list specific shortcomings, because I have either already fixed those shortcomings or am fixing them.

Thank you for your support! Congratulations to everyone on this significant anniversary! Glory to Ukraine!

P.S: the picture was made using the “defense point planning” function, which is already in the alpha version of update 0.7

Welcome back, everyone!

The new patch significantly improves the quality of the game. It includes localization and bug fixes, along with decent optimization improvements, and new features like autosave and the ability to cancel troop movement with the S key. Additionally, two new languages have been added to the game! We welcome our esteemed players from Italy and Portuguese-speaking countries!

Below you can see the list of changes:

Over the past few days, several updates have been released, focusing not only on bug fixes but also on noticeable improvements to the game overall. Below you can see the list of changes:

Greetings, dear players of Flames in Modern Europe! After long months of development, the time has come for the next update!

I’m glad to announce that update 0.6 has finally been released!

This update became the longest in development time and brought a huge amount of new content, but no less importantly — this is the first update that had a full beta-testing phase! Thanks to this, there should be significantly fewer bugs in the game.

The main and only country of the update became Ukraine!

We decided that Ukraine should be the undisputed flagship of the game and have the largest amount of unique content.

You probably don’t even realize how much...

Ukraine already has OVER 500 PATHS!!! 🤯

I REPEAT: OVER 500!!!

Ukraine’s paths run from 2013 all the way to 2025 and include both more or less historical and completely crazy ones, for which you loved Rise of Kharkiv so much ❤️‍🔥

Ukraine also has the highest-quality and coolest icons — just look at them 😍

And there are already more than 120 new icons in the update! 🤯

Next, the game received a lot of other changes and improvements.

Economy: now you can take loans (let’s be honest — using debt will be part of the strategy), but they cost political will and increase interest rates. There are 6 ways to manage debt: IMF aid, European Union aid (only for member countries), debt monetization (halves the volume but +5% annual), restructuring, debt buyback and, in the extreme case, default — which completely removes the debt but destroys reputation. Reputation is now taken into account and affects the cost of borrowing; sanctions system is planned. Rough idea: the game has become tougher — money is possible, but you have to think.

Budget/social: mechanics rearranged — administration no longer eats almost the entire budget, but half of the budget now goes to social spending. Yes, social assistance is reduced, but the new budget section makes cost optimization critical. Admin costs still affect political will growth — you can’t get rid of them completely. Military spending finally has a real effect: manpower now depends on the budget.

Interface: new compact notifications, topbar became smaller and now shows the treasury, and the regions menu now displays two controllers at the same time (a truce mechanic along the front line is planned). It is also worth noting the very powerful optimization of cities on the map.

Optimization: AI wars were optimized to the incredible! Military simulations now do not kill performance even on old laptops. Also the number of brigades in AI countries has been doubled — the strongest countries now start with 100 brigades.

Combat mechanics: supply is fully implemented: capitals as supply centers, regional centers (cities with price >15) provide supply if there is a path to the capital, ports work through the sea. Absence of supply kills troops, and low supply dramatically reduces recovery and maximum strength. Player brigades are now present from the beginning of the game, the number of o/s brigades has been reduced, and AI has learned to avoid encirclements and to flee if they still occur.

Below you can see the full changelog (the largest in the entire history of development!):

Patch 0.5.1 is not just a bug fix—it adds a number of new and quite important changes, corrections, and improvements. Below is a list of them:

• Improved the German coup branch

• Revised courses and other content for France

• Revised courses and other content for Spain

• Added new effects for modding

• Redesigned overview of buildings in the region: images instead of a list with names and quantities

• Fixed a bug where the construction of new buildings broke the entire mechanics until the end of the game

• Rebalanced battles

• Added saving of country colors to saves

• Added player avatar to the main menu

• Fixed the timer for the current game session

• Fixed the localization of region names and other things

• Reduced the font size of downloads and changed the download bar to a single bar

• Fixed other bugs

Greetings, dear players of Flames in Modern Europe! Winter has come, but I have a way to make it a little warmer!

I’m glad to announce that update 0.5 is finally out!

Unlike previous updates, its development took almost twice as long, and it was focused on filling existing mechanics with content. In particular, Germany, France and Spain received full storylines with unique courses!

The main star of the update is Germany. It has the largest number of courses in the game, running from the 2013 Bundestag elections through the COVID pandemic, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and even to EU unification! This is directly tied to the record support the game has received from that country, for which I thank you very much!

France and Spain were developed by new members of the dev team. They worked hard, and those countries also have more than 100 courses, but honestly there are still a lot of bugs. They will be fixed in upcoming patches.

Now let’s move directly to the new features. The first thing you’ll notice on the updated map of Europe is cities. Yes, there are a lot of them now. Not just many... THERE ARE A LOT OF THEM! Almost 1,800 cities across Europe, North Africa and the Middle East! This greatly fills the map and improves its perception and readability. But if for some reason — for example due to a very weak CPU or GPU — you don’t like that, you can still disable them in the settings.

Also note the localization of regions. If before most of them displayed a simple index in the region menu like "11", "67", "480" and so on, now every region has its own real name! And if you want to write some cheat to transfer a region, you can still disable their localization in "Other".

Now let’s talk about mechanics — mentality, parliament and economy — since they also received important changes and much richer content:

Mentality: in update 0.5 this mechanic makes much more sense — it now affects not only stability and corruption, but also Political Will (one of the most important things in the game), population growth, the Human Development Index, and even revenues of various businesses in certain cases!

But there is a flip side — now researching or removing a mentality requires points called Traits. At game start you have only one available Trait. In some cases you can get more via courses, or you can always spend 500 Political Will to get one via a decision.

Parliament: well... you can see for yourself — there are a lot more laws now! 🤩

Want — ban LGBT!

Want — create a telethon!

Want — open all borders! 🥳

Also — now passing any law costs 50 Political Will.

Economy: it was significantly improved in 0.4, and 0.5 doesn’t introduce huge changes, but new buildings appeared. For example: universities, hospitals, and even dual-use factories!

What for? Currently those factories don’t do much beyond increasing treasury income, but that’s enough to gain an important status. Of course you can build offices endlessly, but each new office will yield gradually less income, and sooner or later you’ll have to construct other buildings. That’s where factories come in.

Also note a substantial rebalance of the economy, including stability growth.

Army: a regular item in every update. Now AI countries don’t just attack nonstop — they try to think strategically. It doesn’t always work well yet, but if they have fewer troops than you, they will attack where your forces are absent, try to hold a single defensive line, and even try to retreat from encirclements!

Another very important detail is the brigade rebalance. Now creating each brigade requires twice as much Political Will, but in return they have an incredible and significant advantage — each brigade can capture UP TO THREE provinces at once, if there are no enemy forces there!

Yes, you read that right! You no longer need a million brigades to conduct a wide offensive into an empty, undefended country!

This was done to bring the game closer to realism, and this change will continue to be developed in the future.

Loading: in addition to the previous point, now all countries have troops from the start of the game. Unfortunately this significantly slows loading, but removes the lags that used to occur in the first months of the game. Also, the map itself now loads when it is launched, not when a new campaign is started. I’d also like to draw your attention to the new and very nice loading screens!

Sound effects: the game’s sound effects were completely updated. Now the game has high-quality and atmospheric soundtracks, and much better UI sounds. Attentive players will also notice birdsong and sea waves.

Below you can see the full changelog of the update... except for the changes I forgot:

Greetings, dear players! Another month has passed, and it’s time for another major update. Game development is progressing incredibly fast, and it’s hard for me to compare it to any other game!

This update brings features to the game that you have been asking for a long time, including saving, improved economy, and parliamentary functionality! Let’s take a closer look at everything:

Saving

Finally, the game has saving, and with a rather nice interface! Note that saves will not be supported when moving to newer versions, but fortunately, you can now download older versions of the game from the Steam beta section!

Parliament

From the very beginning of the game, even in the demo version, the game had a parliament. At first, it did nothing and wasn’t even elected. Later, elections were added, and now an entire mechanic has been implemented! You can open it by pressing "W" or the political will button. Meanwhile, the decisions menu has been moved to "E" or the stability icon.

In this menu, you can pass or even cancel laws. First, click on the law you wish to pass from the list at the bottom; it will then appear at the top of the menu for voting. Using buttons, you can gain support or opposition from different parties, but note that with high probability, a party may be offended by lobbying another, so plan carefully. With each lobbying attempt, trust will decrease, which may cause even supporters to vote against the law. Fortunately, you can always increase trust using political will in the decisions menu.

Laws you can pass affect mobilization resources, the economy, population growth, and the ability to develop nuclear weapons.

Economy

The game already contained a HUGE number of variables affecting income and expenses. Now there are even more.

The HDI (Human Development Index) has been added, influencing GDP, revenues, construction speed, and other metrics. It increases with high stability and good infrastructure, but decreases with low stability and high corruption.

Budget: first, I sorted out all the “multipliers.” Previously, units, thousands, and millions of dollars were mixed up in various places. Now everything is clear in the code.

The budget is displayed in millions per day. Now it cannot be adjusted arbitrarily—you will need to spend political will. However, you can also see what it provides!

Additionally, construction has been reworked. Its duration is still influenced by the budget, which can accelerate it, but now GDP per capita also affects it.

In other words, the higher the GDP, the more money you need to spend to build at the same speed. Other factors, like HDI, also affect it, as mentioned earlier.

Moreover, now you will also need to spend money even for planning construction! The required amount depends on GDP, as richer countries make everything more expensive.

How to earn with all these complexities? Primarily through building offices. But note, the more offices you have, the less income each one generates...

For example, if 1 office brings 100 million, 100 offices will bring only 600M.

Other buildings also generate income, but some consume money, so be careful.

Finally, GDP per capita was previously almost impossible to change since it heavily depended on the average salary removed from the game. Now it has been fully removed, and GDP is calculated based on the price of all country buildings.

Many smaller changes have also been made, such as adding a brigade control scale and country’s line of sight. In other words, you can no longer see enemy units far from your borders!

Below you can see the full changelog:

Added game saving and loading

Added parliament mechanics

New countries added to the game in the main menu

Added brigade strength scale

Now the player can only see enemy brigades near their country borders.

Completely reworked economy, including calculations for all existing variables such as stability, income, expenses, GDP per capita, etc.

Reworked budget menu

Now the budget must be approved using political will

Added Human Development Index

Construction planning now costs money

Most variables are linked to GDP per capita, from administrative expenses to construction cost

Rebalanced and significantly increased regional prices

Rebalanced military creation for AI-controlled countries

Improved mod localization support

Added decisions to increase parliamentary trust

Construction hints now show estimated duration and planning costs UI improvements, including better background textures

Improvement of the legendary (and objectively worst) exit confirmation menu

Fixed “stuck” resizing of most hints

Various bug fixes

Optimization of record number of country variables (won’t significantly affect final speed but necessary for future game development; a lot of time was spent on this)

Other minor changes

Greetings, dear players of Flames in Modern Europe! I’m glad to announce that the largest update so far has just been released – version 0.3: The Nation Code!

The focus of this update was on adding new mechanics and improving gameplay. It brings much larger and more significant changes compared to previous updates and touches on every aspect of the game in one way or another.

This update drastically changes the game, adding many new gameplay elements, mechanics, graphical improvements, and—very importantly—optimizations. Here I will briefly outline the main changes, and below you can read the full changelog.

Mentality Mechanic

The game now has a brand-new feature – the mentality mechanic. You can find it in the state menu by pressing the “Our Mentality” button.

Mentality traits mainly affect different modifiers, in particular the growth of stability, corruption, tax efficiency, and ruling party support.

All countries already have certain mentality traits at the start of the game, but they are not always positive. Fortunately, you can not only research new ones but also remove your existing ones. However, this process takes quite some time, since people cannot be changed overnight...

Regional Population

Back in the demo version you could already see the population of your country, and it was quite dynamic thanks to stability. However, it was calculated as one total number for the whole country, which caused problems when playing as, say, Transnistria or Luxembourg, since conquering new territories didn’t increase population.

Now, a huge file with the population of all regions has been filled in, and you can finally see the population of each region in its respective menu. This makes the gameplay much more engaging.

Wars Between AI Countries

Previously, the game world was rather static: the player could attack other states, but nothing much happened globally. Now, AI-controlled countries will declare wars on each other depending on the aggression level set at the start of a new game. AI will also create armies from the very beginning, and in case of war, it will mobilize and later demobilize. Incredible changes in the world are already waiting for you!

Graphics Improvements

This is probably a regular part of each update, but this time the graphics have improved significantly.

First, the map has become much more volumetric thanks to updated shader normals. This makes it more beautiful and even “tastier.”

Second, borders have been reworked. This applies to both their color (previously state borders were light, now they are dark) and their logic—they are now much more precise, fixing a bug with displaying borders of some provinces.

Smooth borders have also been greatly improved—you can now choose the degree of smoothing in the menu!

Optimization and Modding

The game engine has been updated to Unity 6.1 to improve performance and speed. A large number of scripts have also been rewritten to enhance optimization.

And the most exciting part of this section—players can now write their own localization for mods and add custom sprites!

Below you can see the full list of changes:

• Added new mentality mechanic

• Population transferred to regions

• Ability to cancel planned construction

• Wars between AI countries

• Reworked “status quo” peace treaty, sped up this event dozens of times

• Peace treaties between AI countries

• AI countries can now demobilize after war

• Reworked brigade-related scripts for significant optimization and improved combat logic

• Ability to destroy encircled armies

• Army destruction without manpower

• Map border quality settings replacing old smooth borders

• Highlighting of selected province on the map

• New events, especially related to new functions in the game

• Rebalanced stability changes from administrative expenses

• Ability to mod localization

• Ability to mod icons

• Game engine updated to Unity 6.1

• Added Mac OS support

• Border highlighting replaced with darkening for a better map look

• Added normal map texture for the world map, greatly improving its quality

• Other shader improvements

• Fixed textures of various 3D objects, including armored vehicles

• GPU optimization

• FPS cap settings

• Changed main cursor

• UI improvements, added beautiful glow effects in various places

• Reworked state menu

• Fixed bug where AI sometimes didn’t create brigades

• Manpower now updates in real time to prevent exploits

• Reworked map shader to increase border detection accuracy

• Brigade models now spawn at different angles

• Added clock to in-game menu

• Fixed settings menu during gameplay

• Reduced game size

• Now you must both own and control a region to create troops

• Fixed volume settings bug

• Other bug fixes

• Automatic language detection on first launch

• Massive optimization of state and army scripts, greatly improving performance and reducing CPU load

• And much more!

Unexpected? For many, probably yes, but right now, on this occasion, the game has the biggest discount in its history – 30 percent! There won’t be a bigger discount this year. So for those who haven’t bought FIME yet, this is the perfect opportunity! 🤩

🫡 I am very proud that FIME made it to this festival. I am proud that we created the first Ukrainian strategy with a provincial map. I am proud that we created the first Ukrainian global strategy in 3D. And most of all, I am proud that we created one of the most beautiful global strategies in the world! 😍

Thanks to everyone! Glory to Ukraine ❤️‍🔥 – Stand with Freedom!

-Marsenko

I’m excited to announce the biggest update so far is now live! This update brings major graphical improvements, powerful optimizations, deeper gameplay complexity — and much more!

Originally, this update was meant to only add parliamentary elections... but it quickly grew into a complete overhaul of the map shader, camera (again 🫠), and textures!

🗺 Honestly, I can’t imagine how we used to play before this. Now the map is truly stunning — even at maximum zoom! 🤩

Previously, the game used a 12K resolution terrain texture. It looked decent from afar, but as you zoomed in, the blurriness became very noticeable. Now the game uses a completely different technology — even on the lowest settings, the terrain stays perfectly sharp! 🥳

📸 Naturally, this required a camera update as well, allowing for much greater zoom-in. In the future, zoom range might be expanded even further.

I’ve also started investing financially in the game — this update includes paid integration of FSR. Players with weaker GPUs will greatly benefit: instead of lowering resolution to improve FPS, they can now just turn on FSR! It can also be used on native resolution as a high-quality anti-aliasing solution, which the game was lacking until now. ✍️

Visual effects like region highlighting have been reworked as well — it makes a huge difference to immersion. That glow... simply breathtaking 😍

As I mentioned before, regular Parliamentary Elections are now in the game. But no less important are the new Presidential Elections! These take place in two rounds, where parties can endorse candidates from other parties between rounds. A new UI has been added to view candidates — this is only available during the campaign period, which starts two months before the first round.

Nuclear weapons have become even more terrifying... and unforgettable. Literally! Thermonuclear strikes now not only destroy all buildings, but — just like regular nukes — leave permanent visual marks on the map. 🤯

Armies have also evolved, and more improvements are coming. This update introduces several new features: First — the Frontline System is now functional. While you won’t see visual lines just yet, the underlying logic is already implemented.

Second — full-scale invasion. It’s very simple: click one button, choose a target country, and your army marches in! Pure satisfaction... unless you’re the one being invaded. Especially now that your opponents can also deploy up to 50 brigades — thanks to the massive optimization work I’ve done recently.

Last but not least — brigade movement arrows. Veterans will remember the ugly red "stick" from the first gameplay teaser — a clumsy, floating line between provinces. That’s now a thing of the past. Just check the final image in this post to see how clean and stylish it looks now. I really love the result.

Here’s the full changelog of this update:

• The map shader has been completely reworked — Europe now looks amazing even at maximum zoom

  The old 12K terrain texture has been replaced with new tech that removes blurriness even on low settings

  Maximum camera zoom increased — you can now inspect the terrain much more closely

  FSR support added — massive FPS boost for players with weaker GPUs. Also works as high-quality anti-aliasing at native resolution

  Visual effects have been redesigned — especially region highlighting

  Construction icons have been updated — now fully colored. Further UI improvements in this area are coming soon.

  Brigade movement arrows fully reworked — old red "sticks" replaced with clean and bright arrows

  Nuclear and thermonuclear weapons now leave permanent visual marks on the map

  Thermonuclear weapons completely destroy all buildings in the region

  Frontline system added — functional logic implemented, though still invisible visually

  Full-scale invasion option added — allows a general to order total offensive into enemy territory

  AI opponents now create dozens of brigades — scale enabled by deep optimization

  Regular Parliamentary Elections added — in the future, this will be central to political gameplay

  Regular Presidential Elections added — includes two rounds with vote transfers between parties. Candidates can be viewed during campaign via a button above Parliament

  Construction cost rebalance — an important economic tweak that increases difficulty

  UI improvements across various menus — especially the general's interface

  Critical bugs fixed — including some that existed since the demo

  Fixed a major bug that broke construction until the end of the game