Elysium Remastered

An Opus Magnum of productive procrastination, Elysium Remastered revisits every class, plane, and system in the game. The goal was to keep the spirit of the original intact while making things feel more consistent, better balanced, and more replayable in the long term. Most changes follow the logic of flavor first, mechanics second. This isn’t a content dump—where new content was added, it’s because something felt missing. I tried to keep clutter to a minimum.

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What’s New

General Improvements
• Lots of tweaks to balance, functionality and quality of life. Lightning attacks scale less well, ant hills burn, ancient forests can be capped by all classes etc.
• Many sprite upgrades pulled from Dominions and other community mods

Class Overhauls
Every class has been touched in some way. The idea was to give each of them:
• A clearer sense of identity
• Unique mechanics and new content
• A longer runway for late-game development and exploration
• Fewer filler rituals and useless units
• A more even footing overall—though it’s still wildly asymmetrical

Highlights:
• Markgraf — undead labor reforms, vampires, and vivisection
• Witch — darker nature magic, Baba Yaga vibes, and a branching endgame
• Scourge Lord — reworked into something like a Dark Sun/Arabian Nights villain (no more graffiti or breeding pits)
• Enchanter & High Priestess — more sustainable playstyles, less terrain destruction
• Necromancer — better balanced, must find and exhume the remains of giant monsters in order to reanimate them

Expanded Planes and Exploration
• New monsters, terrain, and treasures across all planes
• Agartha feels like a real underdark: interconnected tunnels, slime pools, ancient ruins, buried gods
• Sky Plane is more alive, with higher resource density and reasons to conquer it
• Celestial Realm, Inferno, Aztlan, and the Primal Plane have unique recruitment and better defended citadels (good luck killing God)

AI Rework
• Smarter ritual use, better army composition, less suicide
• Builds thematic garrisons and levels mages properly
• Class-specific logic: the Markgraf becomes a vampire, the Baron gets crowned, the Dwarf Queen actually works

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Overview of contents (not exhaustive, and increasingly outdated. See change notes as well): https://docs.google.com/document/d/1S42LwkNoo29–LIVgq8KPTP4qwGIqNFd1Zxg3ZDw-VI/edit?tab=t.0

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Compatibility: Modprio is set to 1 – this will usually get overridden if there’s overlap. Competing terrain groups or event triggers will still cause problems though. Also, this is a huge file. High likelyhood of some sort of conflict with other big mods.
Performance: Slightly longer loading time at start-up, but no laggy background events—runs smoothly once you’re in.

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Credits
This mod was inspired by major overhauls like:
• CoExpanded
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2580936249
• Large Overhaul
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2957711744
• AXPmod for CoE4/5
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3459944026

It also draws on work by many other authors across the Conquest of Elysium and Dominions modding community.

Thanks especially to:
Nullpointer, who is basically a coauthor by now. Also Sturm, Executor Nyaxe, Juz, for sprites, especially a lot from Sturm. Many ideas from Alexthebeetrayer and Nethermind. If you find something you really like, there’s a good chance it came from one of them. The mod files include references if you want to track where something originated.

Sprite sources include:
• Sturm’s Sprite Overhaul & The Gathering Sturm
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3459944026
• Executor’s Confluence & Legendary Mods
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3411126459
• Ny’s New Nations
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3240957628
• Juz’s Enhanced Classes
https://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561198014387315/myworkshopfiles/?appid=1606340

Also thanks to Merlin and ColonelDraculaJoinsTheNavy for making the game files accessible.

Feedback & Support

Feedback and ideas make the mod better. If you have an idea, or something feels off, let me know!

Also, if you enjoyed the mod, consider giving it a 👍. It lets me know it’s worth to keep working on. Thanks!