Originally Posted by
PerXX
You can change the starting year and/or the events. It's a bit of work.
Basically, the various events such as Gunpowder and so forth happen X turns after the starting date, not at a specific date. So even if you changed the starting date to, say, 1500, you'd still have to wait just as long for the events to fire.
I'm not at my home computer, so I cannot give you specifics, but the events are listed in the data\world\maps\campaign\imperial_campaign\descr_events.txt file, and look something like;
event historic gunpowder_discovered
date 190 210
This means that the gunpowder_discovered event will fire somewhere between 190 and 210 turns after you start your campaign. You can change these numbers as you wish.
The starting date is changed in the data\world\maps\campaign\imperial_campaign\descr_strat.txt file.
You need to edit both files to get the effect you want.