Grand Strategy Imperator: Rome - the new grand strategy from Paradox

[Fedora Master]

So I clicked on the profile of the guy that defended the Romans being blacked and who also authored the We Wuz Kangz mod to make Egyptians black.

Turns out he is actually some kind of fedora, fat white guy with a fetish for African culture.

He likes to write about "sexy African women" and draws dinosaurs.

caution, high sanity loss:
http://archive.is/wh0zg
http://archive.is/lFnIv
http://archive.is/kcVK4

Spoiler

"Brandon Pilcher is a fantasy writer and artist who lives in Fallbrook, CA. His passions include dinosaurs, ancient history, anthropology, and sexy African warrior heroines."

This is the face of one of the guys who thinks Paradox's Romans look just fine. Just saying.

Either there's more than one fat nerdy KANGZ enthusiast or I heard about that guy somewhere else in the context of how awful the TV Tropes community is. Something about a fat nerd who clearly has a fetish for black warrior women but hides it behind "I'M JUST INTERESTED IN AFRICAN HISTORY" rhetoric.

 

[Agesilaus]

10 years old and already bald. This kid has seen some shit.

Anyway, game is better than EU: Rome and is more playable than day 1 HoI 3. Some of the mechanics don't make any sense, such as being unable to march through foreign land if the nation refuses to grant you access. In reality, ancient generals had the option of making a hostile march through "neutral" territory if necessary.

I was in an alliance with Sparta and they went to war with Epidauros, but I couldn't walk over there because.... a couple of tiny city states refused to grant me permission to walk across their minuscule territory. Their refusal does not grant you a CB, either, so I couldn't do anything without either bribing them to get the relationship high enough for approval, or pay to fabricate a claim (what does this even mean) or take a -2 stability hit and declare war. Or build a massive navy to transport my army by sea.

Speaking of navies, it appears that if a unit becomes loyal you can't detach it from the general... so if you need to break your army up into pieces to transport it by sea, how are you supposed to do that?

 

[Fedora Master]

Colonization is fucking hilarious. You can create a migrant horde, walk it around the empty places of the map, suck up all pops from those provinces, instantly convert and assimilate them with the mana you can't really use anyway as a low-tier tribe and then settle them somewhere - boom, instant 30+ pop city.

 

[Space Satan]

Ambition: Growing up.
It should not be restricted to children, obviously

 

[lophiaspis]

It's like mix of Amiga Centurion with Total War and Crusader Kings plus Civilization and some EU.

Yes, just like the contents of my bowels is a mix of all the delicious food I ate today.

 

[Goliath]

This game is so fucking easy

This is the easiest Paradox game I have ever played. Even starting out as a minor next to Rome isn't challenging. Even a filthy casual can rebuild Alexander's empire with ease.

There is also so much wasted potential. Like in today's Florry stream it looked like he actually faced a challenge for once. But only for a second. All three pretenders (all siblings of the heir) were rich as hell and raised massive armies after the death of the king, massively outnumbering Florry's own army. It was 20K vs. 3 x 32K. Massive civil war incoming! Except.. all he needed to do was: Click "Bribe" three times, and "Encourage deserters" once and it was all over.


This whole pretender / disloyal general/chief mechanic is a fucking joke right now because bribing is so cheap. There is no fucking threat at all!

 

[Agame]

This game is so fucking easy

Imperator: WIN BUTTON.

 

[Alienman]

Mana is one hell of a drug.

 

[Fedora Master]

 

[Average Manatee]

This whole pretender / disloyal general/chief mechanic is a fucking joke right now because bribing is so cheap. There is no fucking threat at all!

Yeah. Basically the ONLY thing that is actually bad and hard to manage that I've found is corruption, since it causes lots of problems and can only be removed (AFAIK) by that one oratory idea. If you have that oratory idea you basically can't fail at internal management.

Did an actual conquest-heavy game as Armenia on very hard. AE is definitely manageable up to at least 150 or so. You want to be the appeasing stance at all time to double your decay rate. You can annex around 1/3rd of the selucid empire in one go with a claim (don't take the claim so you can keep using it in future wars, obviously). AE increasing all power costs is full retard though.

Funny enough its actually harder blobbing in Europe because the 1 million separate tags all are impossible to get enough stability to attack, while in the east you can take 5-10 full provinces in one go (usually only fighting a few mercs since the AI can't manage manpower for shit, of course).

Can anyone tell me how the army system is supposed to function in theory? Because in practice all I do is spam horse archers. Anything else would slow them down, they fight everything at least 1:1 with the strategic bonuses and have absurd flanking power that wipes anything smaller than them (and with their speed they can easily mass up in a doomstack to overwhelm things).

 

[Goliath]

I think it's unrealistic that if you play as Judea, you can't infiltrate Rome with agents and make them fight your wars for you.

 

[Fedora Master]

The clan retinues of the Scythian tribes start out too big for the area they are in. Meaning you will suffer permanent attrition and loss of manpower.

 

[Average Manatee]

Deserts have a permanent 1% attrition at all times. Enjoy playing a nation with only desert.

I think it's unrealistic that if you play as Judea, you can't infiltrate Rome with agents and make them fight your wars for you.

You can actually use the make friends action with any character in range, including rulers of other nations. But I don't think its really useful for anything, it only seems to give +25 opinion with that nation. Nothing significant in terms of getting an alliance, once you get AE everyone in the world has -200.

 

[Merkwürdigliebe]

This game is so fucking easy

This is the easiest Paradox game I have ever played. Even starting out as a minor next to Rome isn't challenging. Even a filthy casual can rebuild Alexander's empire with ease.

There is also so much wasted potential. Like in today's Florry stream it looked like he actually faced a challenge for once. But only for a second. All three pretenders (all siblings of the heir) were rich as hell and raised massive armies after the death of the king, massively outnumbering Florry's own army. It was 20K vs. 3 x 32K. Massive civil war incoming! Except.. all he needed to do was: Click "Bribe" three times, and "Encourage deserters" once and it was all over.


This whole pretender / disloyal general/chief mechanic is a fucking joke right now because bribing is so cheap. There is no fucking threat at all!

Just wait for the next 20 dlcs to come out, surely it will be fixed by then for the low low cost of 19,99 a piece. Does anyone even still buy paradox dlc?

 

[a cut of domestic sheep prime]

Usually every DLC Paradox releases breaks the game even worse and a mod needs to fix it.

Not sure how it can get much worse than this though.

I’m not thinking about getting a single piece of DLC until the base game is fixed. Even then, the only time I buy their DPC is at a massive discount.

 

[Fedora Master]

You know it's bad when even normalniggers like Arch are complaining.

 

[M. AQVILA]

You know it's bad when even normalniggers like Arch are complaining.

"EU4, base game without any of the dlc or expansions, good game."

lolwut, we must not have played the same game.

 

[Life of the Party]

To help you understand a bit more how the development of a game works, I’ve decided to give you a more thorough explanation on the subject! I hope you will enjoy it and perhaps you will learn a few things here and there!

When developing games, you basically have to get all the features of your project locked-in for Alpha (a milestone in game development, if you will). Later on, you stop adding and revising (heavily) features when you get closer to Beta - another milestone I’m sure you are all familiar with. Once you reach the last two months before release day, you have little (if not any) room to include super-critical changes to your game. The only thing you can do is iron-out the stability of the game, ensure that everything is localized and that the AI knows how to play the game, and what game to play.

You may have noticed that after the first few sessions of Dev Clash (the grand multiplayer held internally that we broadcast on Twitch every Tuesday), there were no major changes made to the game. In a nutshell: the game was locked down for a final polish before release.

The 1.1 patch (Pompey) that will get out in June started developing around the same time - that is, two months before release. The people in charge of said patch included team members that were not busy with AI development, stability issues or localization. We gathered an enormous amount of ideas that we wanted to implement when the time was right, and we started working on them (along with potential issues to be fixed).

All the features for Pompey are, so to speak, “done”. However, the version of the game tied to the Pompey patch is currently unstable, the AI is not aware of the changes we made yet, and the graphics as well as the UI are still provisional. In addition, most balance numbers are off.

When the Demetrius patch is done and out (the 1.0.1 that will release next week), our team will start working on Pompey, and it should be ready for release about five to six weeks later. Meanwhile the design-team has to juggle with the fine-tuning of Pompey, and… writing up the design for the expansion and free update that will come afterwards…


And so it continues… Hope you enjoyed this post!

/Johan.

 

[Fedora Master]

Like they "locked down" the features for Stellaris?

 

[Average Manatee]

You know it's bad when even normalniggers like Arch are complaining.

"EU4, base game without any of the dlc or expansions, good game."

lolwut, we must not have played the same game.

EU4 had bad parts on release and most of those bad parts still remain. Imperator has many more bad parts and those parts will also probably remain.

EDIT: Just to be clear, I don't think EU4 on release was good. What it was was EU3 with all expansions + some minor changes (most of which I think were bad, e.g. mana and the trade system). The issue is that Imperator: Rome isn't EU4 with all expansions + some minor changes, it's EU:Rome with some minor changes (most of which are bad, e.g. mana) and a shit load more provinces to create an illusion of content. And EU:Rome was weak on release due to being a shallow imitation of EU3 + what would go on to become CK2, so you can see how far behind Imperator is.

 

[Life of the Party]

I wonder if removing India would improve the performance. Wouldn't mind a mod that does it.

 

[Merkwürdigliebe]

You know it's bad when even normalniggers like Arch are complaining.

So it's a DLC delivery platform. Will wait for the super GOTY edition available 2054 when it's done.

 

[Average Manatee]

Watched the video and its stupid. Apparently the problem with Imperator is that Rome and Carthage don't have special NIs, they share them with their culture group. Wtf? That's irrelevant shit. That's the kind of crap someone at Paradox makes up over their lunch break and dangles in front of fanboy's noses to get their dick sucked in the forums.

The only real problem he manages to hit is the awful building system. His complaints about combat and most other things are just him being awful at the game (not that combat doesn't deserve to be better, but if everything was copied straight from EU4 like combat was it would be a 100% better game). He probably never conquered more than one state. Apparently he's so awful at war that it took him 40 years to recuperate from a single one against a minor as Carthage. In that time I had a third of the Selucid Empire as Armenia.

Not a mention of pops being awful altogether with moving and promoting them, or how assimilation/conversion is ridiculous (and mana-gated, in the worst way too since governors randomly die and you need to re-do it all), or how AE is ridiculously stupid, nonsensical, anti-fun. All important things you'd notice if you didn't sit for 40 years on speed 5 because you somehow pissed away 60k manpower.

 

[Fedora Master]

Lumping in Carthage with some North African berber tribes is a pretty big fucking mistake as far as BELIEVABLE WORLDS is concerned. Same with Scythians and Persians or Etruscans and Romans. It just smacks of lazy design, most likely aimed at MP "balance" from the get-go.

e: Actually it's doubly lazy because they had already hashed out the various cultural and religious differences and possible bonuses for the game with CK2 for the most part.

 

[a cut of domestic sheep prime]

You know it's bad when even normalniggers like Arch are complaining.

something I haven't seen anyone speculate is that some of these problems may be by design.

all the simplifications, the instant claims, the lack of trade or government gameplay etc - yes, this could be incompetence or prep for future DLC, but this could all also be to support a casual multiplayer experience.