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

[Alexios]

Johan himself is the main problem at this point. I don't remember any of his recent designs to be good. There may be some underlying genius on the basic level (like in the case of estates or mana), but horrible implementation makes those nominally good ideas terrible and just unfun. There's also some inability to think outside of the box. All Johan's games still follow the same basic design of risk-eque map painter, even though CK2 clearly showed that character-based gameplay is the way to go and be improved upon. But because Johan is the God Emperor at Paradox, nobody is in the position to challenge him.

Paradox doesn't lack talent. Doommark designed CK2, which is perhaps the best game of that studio. Wiz salvaged Stellaris into something that's actually playable.

HOI4 is also one of their better games, and Johan has had nothing to do with it. Telling.

 

[Catacombs]

Got it on release day.
Played for two hours.
Didn't find it interesting.
Got refund.
Clocked in over seven hours on CK2 today.

Sometimes you have to stick with what works.

 

[a cut of domestic sheep prime]

Got it on release day.
Played for two hours.
Didn't find it interesting.
Got refund.

nice. I would probably have done this if I didn't want to try to mod the negros out of Rome.

sacrifices must be made.

then again, I got as discount, so I only paid around $25 for the deluxe edition.

 

[Mortmal]

So, the most notable thing about this game is not in its qualities as a game but in how little effort Paradox expected to get away with. Not that it was any difficulty to foresee. Another 2019 trainwreck.

Last CK2 DLC was excellent, adding many features , could have expected imperator to follow that trend.

 

[Aemar]

Got it on release day.
Played for two hours.
Didn't find it interesting.
Got refund.

You forgot to review bomb it.

 

[a cut of domestic sheep prime]

Got it on release day.
Played for two hours.
Didn't find it interesting.
Got refund.

You forgot to review bomb it.

yeah. got to make that score go down to 35% or so.

because it seems that anything more means that steam still calls it "mixed"

 

[Catacombs]

then again, I got as discount, so I only paid around $25 for the deluxe edition.

Nice. Getting it nearly more than half off is worth just keeping the game until it improves in a year or two. I couldn't justify spending $40 just to wait a while for it to get better.

 

[Catacombs]

You forgot to review bomb it.

yeah. got to make that score go down to 35% or so.

Done.

 

[Life of the Party]

Spoiler

Hi everyone and welcome to the first post-release development diary for Imperator!

As soon as the first patch, Demetrius, is ready, it will be released this week.

For Imperator, some things will be similar to how we have developed games since we released CK2, and some will be new. We will aim to have two major updates each year, with accompanying big expansions, where we focus on flavor in the paid content, while having core systems primarily part of the free patch. We have been working on ideas for our first expansion, but before starting on that one, we are doing a big free patch, which contains a lot of free features for all of you.

This free patch has been in development since the release version was frozen in mid february, so it contains all the things the design team have been working on, while QA and Coders worked on stability, AI and polish for the release.

Our first big patch called ‘Pompey’ will be out before the summer holidays, and will contain some new features, and lots of balance changes. We’ll talk about some of the balance changes in this development diary, and for a list of most new features go to the roadmap at https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/index.php?threads/imperator-current-roadmap.1170956/

Technology

While the technological research in the game was working mostly fine, we had some edge cases that did not work out all that great. First of all, it was impossible to really catch up when you were behind, unless you were a really small country, so we did a reversed ahead of time penalty from when you are behind Secondly, it was also possible to stack your research output so high that ahead, rendering the ahead of time penalty useless, so we made the ‘ahead of time penalty’ a multiplier on your tech speed. Finally we changed the base time for a new technology from 15 to 20 years.

Shattered Retreat

The action of voluntarily doing a shattered retreat was a bit over-powerful, in that while it was useful, it had almost no drawbacks. Now when you do a manual shattered retreat from the unit interface, that unit will also lose 50% of its remaining strength.

Truce Breaking

As you may have seen in the dev clash, breaking a truce had no impact on your reputation, so it will now increase your aggressive expansion as well, just like some other games we do.

Mercenaries

Mercenaries, while performing mostly like we intended, where too much of a renewable resource. What we have done is reduce the amount of mercenary companies, and not stack them all in the most heavily populated areas.

We also made it so that mercenaries can not be stackwiped, and if they would have been, instead they now charge their disband fee from employer, and leaves his employment.

Mercenaries that are no longer employed and marching back to their home city, will no longer reinforce during the march.

You can no longer recruit mercenaries that have not recovered all their strength.

Regnal Numbers

We have added in the functionality for monarchies to use regnal numbers on their rulers. So your 4th Alexander will be “Alexander IV Argead”.

Assassinations

These were a bit powerful, and rather devastating if you played a monarchy or tribe. So in those nations, the military skill of your master of the guard or bodyguard reduces the success chance of that action.

Governors

One thing that was completely missed when developing the game, was the aspect of having the governors attribute matter. This obviously needed to be changed, so now finesse skill of governors will impact the output of the cities they govern by 5% for each finesse.

Population Growth

Population growth also had a few problems in that we had only one variable to play with. After a lot of discussion and testing we split it up into population capacity, which terrain, technology, civilization level and granaries impact, and population growth, which is impacted by resources and situations like your city being burned to the ground by invading armies.

Stability

The old stability mechanics were partly legacy from the first PDS game ever made, with a range from -3 to +3, and also one of the most complained usage of power that we had in the game, in that people did not enjoy being able to instantly increase stability if they just had power.

First of all stability is now 0-100, and decays towards 50 over time. Of course all events and mechanics changing stability have been adapted to the new range.

Stabbing a pig costs 100 power, and gives +0.5 stability a month & increased pig-stabbing costs by 50% for 5 years, and this is stackable, so the more pig-stabbing you do, the faster it will increase in that timeframe.

Threshold for starting wars is a minimum of 10 stability, and you need 10 stability to appoint people to government.

War-Exhaustion

In a similar way War-Exhaustion has also been overhauled, in that it is no longer an instant reduction for some power. You now spend power to add an overtime reduction of it, and this can be stacked in a similar vein as pig stabbing.

Legitimacy

When changing Stability and War-Exhaustion, we also took a look at legitimacy, and made it work the same way. Legitimacy is no longer instantly increased from a button press, but a stackable short-term increase you can pay to get.

Modding Support

One little thing with all these balance changes is that to make them more easily handled, we changed the price-structure we use for lots of actions, to support 4 new values, instead of just gold, powers and manpower.

These 4 values are stability, tyranny, war-exhaustion and aggressive expansion. So if you wish for assigning ideas to increase your war-exhaustion in your mod, now you can do it.

Stay tuned for next week, when we’ll go deep into how much more fun the naval game will be in 1.1.

 

[ZeniBot]

Spoiler

Stability

The old stability mechanics were partly legacy from the first PDS game ever made, with a range from -3 to +3, and also one of the most complained usage of power that we had in the game, in that people did not enjoy being able to instantly increase stability if they just had power.

First of all stability is now 0-100, and decays towards 50 over time. Of course all events and mechanics changing stability have been adapted to the new range.

Stabbing a pig costs 100 power, and gives +0.5 stability a month & increased pig-stabbing costs by 50% for 5 years, and this is stackable, so the more pig-stabbing you do, the faster it will increase in that timeframe.

Threshold for starting wars is a minimum of 10 stability, and you need 10 stability to appoint people to government.

Oh god they think the HOI4 stability system was a good idea. Are they fucking retarded.
Stability shouldn't even work like this, its already covered by Unrest and Government Disloyalty. This is just stupid.

 

[Life of the Party]

 

[a cut of domestic sheep prime]

lol, seems like every nation casts the same spells with slightly different names.

I myself rely heavily on the tax spell when I hire mercenaries.

 

[ZeniBot]

Wow Rimmy not being an unbearable cunt. Now I've seen everything.

 

[Fedora Master]

>Cassius Bellai
What is it with Anglos and their inability to Latin

 

[Agame]

yeah. got to make that score go down to 35% or so.

Surprised they havnt gone on a bad review deleting spree, but they have been banning people on both steam and the official forum.

And yea that dev diary is a nice glimpse into the future of the game, fiddling around with systems but fundamentally everything will stay the same.

Stability shouldn't even work like this, its already covered by Unrest and Government Disloyalty. This is just stupid.

Yes -3 to 3, or 1 to 100, its the exact same shitty mechanic.

 

[fantadomat]

Got it on release day.
Played for two hours.
Didn't find it interesting.
Got refund.

nice. I would probably have done this if I didn't want to try to mod the negros out of Rome.

sacrifices must be made.

then again, I got as discount, so I only paid around $25 for the deluxe edition.

Poor you,it is sad when a member of the community gets scammed in such a brutal way. By the way i recently came in to the possession of some newly developed mongolian cream made from the dicks of great step stallions. The whole recipe is very secret,but the effects are 100% real. The cream stimulate your growth hormones and when implied o n your dick it makes it grow! It is a incredible new invention that will revolutionize the world. I got a bonus box of from my friend,and i am wealing to part with for the low low price of 2000 euros. Have in mind that i am giving it away for free,in the name codexian solidarity. I am just charging you for the shipping and the redtapes around it.

 

[a cut of domestic sheep prime]

Surprised they havnt gone on a bad review deleting spree

they may still.

as I posted in the steam thread, steam has a review bomb prevention feature that a developer can turn on.

that said, I think it's mainly for deleting reviews criticizing DRM or DLC/loot box practices.

 

[fantadomat]

Fuck me fucking sideways! For first time in my life i did see a good and intelligent discussion on mother fucking steam! Here is a link:

https://steamcommunity.com/app/859580/discussions/0/1676938384253178009/

 

[The Brazilian Slaughter]

Got it on release day.
Played for two hours.
Didn't find it interesting.
Got refund.

You forgot to review bomb it.

Review Spirit Bomb!

Wish I could buy this game, just to join my powers to yours!

 

[Catacombs]

Wish I could buy this game, just to join my powers to yours!

Don't bother.

 

[AwesomeButton]

Stabbing pigs?

They are just making fun of their players at this point

 

[Agame]

Well this stupid release made me fire up TW Rome 2 again, Divide Et Impera mod is actually pretty good, probably not up to Rome 1 EB level but still good.

 

[razvedchiki]

If folk enjoyed eb 1 they will be delighted with europa barbarorum 2( its still medieval 2 so dont expect miracles).

 

[AgentFransis]

Likewise, playing EB 2 right now. Great game, half the fun is just conquering new regions to see what cool new units you can extract from them. But the AI is still retarded so you need to larp.

 

[Anthedon]

So this game has the same issues as Stellaris and HoIIV on release? You'd think Paradox would have learned something from those two trainwrecks.