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

[Life of the Party]

Spoiler

Hello and welcome to another development diary for the free Pompey update! This time we’ll talk about new benefits to playing tall, and also discuss changes to barbarians, slaves and much more.

Trade Changes
We have done some changes to trade that may not seem that impactful to you at a glance, but gives us more tools in making the game deeper and more flavorful.

We removed the sources of easy extra trade routes in all provinces, as it was too powerful, and was a no-brainer to always go for those, and they also made for a huge snowball of trade.
We also made trade entirely handled as a province activity, and not a city activity. While each city provides some commerce from its citizens, the income from commerce is handled at a province level, so you can see the income from a trade-route at the one place it happens.

We removed the hardcoded benefits on a trade that were going to be exported, and instead we have 2 unique modifiers increases the value of your foreign imports and your foreign exports. The economic policy for commerce is now used for whether you want to strength your benefits from exports or your benefits from imports.

Improving your Provinces

One problem we identified was the lack of options at times when playing tall, and that you had too much resources that you had no use for when you were not busy conquering. Now he have added 4 new province level abilities, that each cost 400 power of its given type, and starts a process that 2 years later will give you a permanent bonus to that province. These can then be repeated as much as you like, but you can only have one process going on in a province at the time.

• Install Provincial Procurators - Military Power for 2% Population Output and 0.01 Monthly Province Loyalty
• Promote Infrastructure Spending - Civic Power for +1 Building Slot.
• Entice Business Investments - Oratory Power for +1 Import Routes
• Make Religious Endowments - Religious Power for +3% State Religion Happyness in Province

There are also other ways to do these State Investments, other than spending lots of power. There are events and decisions, like country-forming, that will give you an amount of free state investments, which is then used instead of the power cost.

Also, there are three different abilities you can do in each city.

• Move Capital - First of all, you can move your capital to that city, for a large cost of civic power cost, where it becomes cheaper to move to a bigger city, and more expensive to move to a smaller city.
• Relocate Provincial Capital - You can change which city is the capital city of a province for 50 civic power . Province Capital will be set at start of the game, and only change otherwise if conquered by another nation.
• Coordinate Urban Development - Pay 100 Civic Power to start a process that at the end of 2 years time, you will get +1 local civilization in that city until the end of the game. This can be repeated as much as you want, but you can’t do it more than once in a city at the same time.

Buildings have changed with the population rework mentioned earlier, and by the trade rework mentioned today.

• Marketplaces : +10% Tax Income from City
• Training Camp: +10% Manpower
• Fortress: +1 Fort Level
• Granary: +5 Population Capacity

Now some of these may make you go “wtf?”, I like to point out that granaries just dont give +5 pop capacity in most cases.. As there are modifiers like Grain giving +10%, Adjacent to Major River +50%, Warm Climate +90% etc...

Barbarian Rework

A lot of things regarding Barbarians work similar to have they did in the original EU: Rome, and that was just not good enough anymore. In Pompey you will now see the following changes to barbarians.

• Paid off barbarians will no longer loot your territory.
• Barbarians that have not fought in a battle will never accept to surrender.
• Barbarians will no longer care about “potential strength” when you negotiate with them, only about armies in the same general area.
• Barbarians are no longer clever enough to use zone of control propagation, even if they do take a fort.
• Barbarian have no longer any attrition in unowned provinces.
• Barbarians reinforce twice as quick when not sieging.
• Barbarians will now grow in size as they take over provinces containing tribesmen.

Zone of Control Changes

There have also been two major advantages to friendly zone of control in Pompey. First of all, they now protect against all the nasty things barbarians do on your territory, but most importantly, friendly zone of control now protects against the attrition you get from bad climate. This makes is so that you don’t lose half your army because you live in a desert, nor will you take a huge hit every single winter as a german tribesman.

Slaves Distribution

We did some changes to slave distribution in Pompey, in that each time you take a city, the amount of possible cities getting slaves are far larger, and not weighted towards 50% reaching your capital. Now it will consider more provinces the bigger your nation is, and also add in ports, and not just provincial capitals, and cities where the commander has holdings etc, to get a better spread.

Heritages

One of the biggest complaints we had with the release was that nations felt the same. While we had a wide variety of countries, with different populations and governments, there needed to be a bit more of identity to them. Even if any city state on Crete would have a great number of similarities with other City states on the same island, there were also differences. This is why we are adding Heritages to the Pompey Update.

A Heritage has 2 benefits and 1 drawback, so give a sort of identity to your country. There is a dozen different generic heritages that depends on your geographical position, for instance you would get Seafaring Heritage if you start with a port, and Desert Heritage if your capital has desert terrain.

Over 20 countries will have unique Heritages in Pompey, and we will keep adding more in future patches. Some are for powers that have their glory days behind them while others are for countries that would rise to become influential in the future. As an example here are some that we have added for Egypt, Carthage, Syracuse and Athens:

 

[ZeniBot]

Release retrospective podcast by Paradox VPs and Director Johan Andersson.



I did not listen to this myself, but I guess that like/dislike ratio and comments are telling?

I did. TLDR; "We're really happy with the product, we didn't have to crunch this time, The games selling really well, we have an 82 Metacritic. Who gives a shit about the steam reviews" - Johan.

Meanwhile the rest of the team jerked each other off into Johan's mouth.

 

[Straight elf]

Spoiler

Hello and welcome to another development diary for the free Pompey update! This time we’ll talk about new benefits to playing tall, and also discuss changes to barbarians, slaves and much more.

Trade Changes
We have done some changes to trade that may not seem that impactful to you at a glance, but gives us more tools in making the game deeper and more flavorful.

We removed the sources of easy extra trade routes in all provinces, as it was too powerful, and was a no-brainer to always go for those, and they also made for a huge snowball of trade.
We also made trade entirely handled as a province activity, and not a city activity. While each city provides some commerce from its citizens, the income from commerce is handled at a province level, so you can see the income from a trade-route at the one place it happens.

We removed the hardcoded benefits on a trade that were going to be exported, and instead we have 2 unique modifiers increases the value of your foreign imports and your foreign exports. The economic policy for commerce is now used for whether you want to strength your benefits from exports or your benefits from imports.

Improving your Provinces

One problem we identified was the lack of options at times when playing tall, and that you had too much resources that you had no use for when you were not busy conquering. Now he have added 4 new province level abilities, that each cost 400 power of its given type, and starts a process that 2 years later will give you a permanent bonus to that province. These can then be repeated as much as you like, but you can only have one process going on in a province at the time.

• Install Provincial Procurators - Military Power for 2% Population Output and 0.01 Monthly Province Loyalty
• Promote Infrastructure Spending - Civic Power for +1 Building Slot.
• Entice Business Investments - Oratory Power for +1 Import Routes
• Make Religious Endowments - Religious Power for +3% State Religion Happyness in Province

There are also other ways to do these State Investments, other than spending lots of power. There are events and decisions, like country-forming, that will give you an amount of free state investments, which is then used instead of the power cost.

Also, there are three different abilities you can do in each city.

• Move Capital - First of all, you can move your capital to that city, for a large cost of civic power cost, where it becomes cheaper to move to a bigger city, and more expensive to move to a smaller city.
• Relocate Provincial Capital - You can change which city is the capital city of a province for 50 civic power . Province Capital will be set at start of the game, and only change otherwise if conquered by another nation.
• Coordinate Urban Development - Pay 100 Civic Power to start a process that at the end of 2 years time, you will get +1 local civilization in that city until the end of the game. This can be repeated as much as you want, but you can’t do it more than once in a city at the same time.

Buildings have changed with the population rework mentioned earlier, and by the trade rework mentioned today.

• Marketplaces : +10% Tax Income from City
• Training Camp: +10% Manpower
• Fortress: +1 Fort Level
• Granary: +5 Population Capacity

Now some of these may make you go “wtf?”, I like to point out that granaries just dont give +5 pop capacity in most cases.. As there are modifiers like Grain giving +10%, Adjacent to Major River +50%, Warm Climate +90% etc...

Barbarian Rework

A lot of things regarding Barbarians work similar to have they did in the original EU: Rome, and that was just not good enough anymore. In Pompey you will now see the following changes to barbarians.

• Paid off barbarians will no longer loot your territory.
• Barbarians that have not fought in a battle will never accept to surrender.
• Barbarians will no longer care about “potential strength” when you negotiate with them, only about armies in the same general area.
• Barbarians are no longer clever enough to use zone of control propagation, even if they do take a fort.
• Barbarian have no longer any attrition in unowned provinces.
• Barbarians reinforce twice as quick when not sieging.
• Barbarians will now grow in size as they take over provinces containing tribesmen.

Zone of Control Changes

There have also been two major advantages to friendly zone of control in Pompey. First of all, they now protect against all the nasty things barbarians do on your territory, but most importantly, friendly zone of control now protects against the attrition you get from bad climate. This makes is so that you don’t lose half your army because you live in a desert, nor will you take a huge hit every single winter as a german tribesman.

Slaves Distribution

We did some changes to slave distribution in Pompey, in that each time you take a city, the amount of possible cities getting slaves are far larger, and not weighted towards 50% reaching your capital. Now it will consider more provinces the bigger your nation is, and also add in ports, and not just provincial capitals, and cities where the commander has holdings etc, to get a better spread.

Heritages

One of the biggest complaints we had with the release was that nations felt the same. While we had a wide variety of countries, with different populations and governments, there needed to be a bit more of identity to them. Even if any city state on Crete would have a great number of similarities with other City states on the same island, there were also differences. This is why we are adding Heritages to the Pompey Update.

A Heritage has 2 benefits and 1 drawback, so give a sort of identity to your country. There is a dozen different generic heritages that depends on your geographical position, for instance you would get Seafaring Heritage if you start with a port, and Desert Heritage if your capital has desert terrain.

Over 20 countries will have unique Heritages in Pompey, and we will keep adding more in future patches. Some are for powers that have their glory days behind them while others are for countries that would rise to become influential in the future. As an example here are some that we have added for Egypt, Carthage, Syracuse and Athens:

More opportunities to exchange mana for +0.1 bonuses is exactly what everybody wants from this game.

 

[Tigranes]

That circle-triangle-rectangle icon is probably a good logo for the entire game's design philosophy

 

[Mortmal]

Release retrospective podcast by Paradox VPs and Director Johan Andersson.



I did not listen to this myself, but I guess that like/dislike ratio and comments are telling?

yes not worth listening, game is fine, user reviews dont matter, completely dellusional.Think they will be in a surprise when they will see their sale drop drastically next game.

 

[fantadomat]

LoL the game is broken beyond believe!

 

[Fedora Master]

Spoiler

Hello and welcome to another development diary for the free Pompey update! This time we’ll talk about new benefits to playing tall, and also discuss changes to barbarians, slaves and much more.

Trade Changes
We have done some changes to trade that may not seem that impactful to you at a glance, but gives us more tools in making the game deeper and more flavorful.

We removed the sources of easy extra trade routes in all provinces, as it was too powerful, and was a no-brainer to always go for those, and they also made for a huge snowball of trade.
We also made trade entirely handled as a province activity, and not a city activity. While each city provides some commerce from its citizens, the income from commerce is handled at a province level, so you can see the income from a trade-route at the one place it happens.

We removed the hardcoded benefits on a trade that were going to be exported, and instead we have 2 unique modifiers increases the value of your foreign imports and your foreign exports. The economic policy for commerce is now used for whether you want to strength your benefits from exports or your benefits from imports.

Improving your Provinces

One problem we identified was the lack of options at times when playing tall, and that you had too much resources that you had no use for when you were not busy conquering. Now he have added 4 new province level abilities, that each cost 400 power of its given type, and starts a process that 2 years later will give you a permanent bonus to that province. These can then be repeated as much as you like, but you can only have one process going on in a province at the time.

• Install Provincial Procurators - Military Power for 2% Population Output and 0.01 Monthly Province Loyalty
• Promote Infrastructure Spending - Civic Power for +1 Building Slot.
• Entice Business Investments - Oratory Power for +1 Import Routes
• Make Religious Endowments - Religious Power for +3% State Religion Happyness in Province

There are also other ways to do these State Investments, other than spending lots of power. There are events and decisions, like country-forming, that will give you an amount of free state investments, which is then used instead of the power cost.

Also, there are three different abilities you can do in each city.

• Move Capital - First of all, you can move your capital to that city, for a large cost of civic power cost, where it becomes cheaper to move to a bigger city, and more expensive to move to a smaller city.
• Relocate Provincial Capital - You can change which city is the capital city of a province for 50 civic power . Province Capital will be set at start of the game, and only change otherwise if conquered by another nation.
• Coordinate Urban Development - Pay 100 Civic Power to start a process that at the end of 2 years time, you will get +1 local civilization in that city until the end of the game. This can be repeated as much as you want, but you can’t do it more than once in a city at the same time.

Buildings have changed with the population rework mentioned earlier, and by the trade rework mentioned today.

• Marketplaces : +10% Tax Income from City
• Training Camp: +10% Manpower
• Fortress: +1 Fort Level
• Granary: +5 Population Capacity

Now some of these may make you go “wtf?”, I like to point out that granaries just dont give +5 pop capacity in most cases.. As there are modifiers like Grain giving +10%, Adjacent to Major River +50%, Warm Climate +90% etc...

Barbarian Rework

A lot of things regarding Barbarians work similar to have they did in the original EU: Rome, and that was just not good enough anymore. In Pompey you will now see the following changes to barbarians.

• Paid off barbarians will no longer loot your territory.
• Barbarians that have not fought in a battle will never accept to surrender.
• Barbarians will no longer care about “potential strength” when you negotiate with them, only about armies in the same general area.
• Barbarians are no longer clever enough to use zone of control propagation, even if they do take a fort.
• Barbarian have no longer any attrition in unowned provinces.
• Barbarians reinforce twice as quick when not sieging.
• Barbarians will now grow in size as they take over provinces containing tribesmen.

Zone of Control Changes

There have also been two major advantages to friendly zone of control in Pompey. First of all, they now protect against all the nasty things barbarians do on your territory, but most importantly, friendly zone of control now protects against the attrition you get from bad climate. This makes is so that you don’t lose half your army because you live in a desert, nor will you take a huge hit every single winter as a german tribesman.

Slaves Distribution

We did some changes to slave distribution in Pompey, in that each time you take a city, the amount of possible cities getting slaves are far larger, and not weighted towards 50% reaching your capital. Now it will consider more provinces the bigger your nation is, and also add in ports, and not just provincial capitals, and cities where the commander has holdings etc, to get a better spread.

Heritages

One of the biggest complaints we had with the release was that nations felt the same. While we had a wide variety of countries, with different populations and governments, there needed to be a bit more of identity to them. Even if any city state on Crete would have a great number of similarities with other City states on the same island, there were also differences. This is why we are adding Heritages to the Pompey Update.

A Heritage has 2 benefits and 1 drawback, so give a sort of identity to your country. There is a dozen different generic heritages that depends on your geographical position, for instance you would get Seafaring Heritage if you start with a port, and Desert Heritage if your capital has desert terrain.

Over 20 countries will have unique Heritages in Pompey, and we will keep adding more in future patches. Some are for powers that have their glory days behind them while others are for countries that would rise to become influential in the future. As an example here are some that we have added for Egypt, Carthage, Syracuse and Athens:

They are already beginning to second-guess their own mechanics, just like they did with Stellaris.

 

[KMJ]

Typical Paradox, release something bare-bones and fill it out with DLC that should have been base features. Might be fine in a couple of years after the Punic Wars DLC, Gallic Wars DLC, and Triumvirate/Civil War DLC.

Sad yet all too likely, when these should have at the very least been alternative starting dates/conditions, if not an actual year-by-year slider to select exactly in which conditions (belligerents, territories, alliances...) you want to start with. This is such a historically packed period with a *lot* of things that would have had long-lasting impacts on the world (Caesar going East as was the fashion rather than in Gaul? Pompey winning the civil war?). As is, I doubt the AI allows for anything remotely like the historical conditions around those times. I can appreciate that it's unlikely they'll whip up an AI that good (and that actually might end up super boring too), but a set of historically meaningful starting conditions?

They didn't because of how much work is needed for the tribes to more or less accurate. Pinning the big empires of the times is not a hard thing to do,but the small and irrelevant ones are hard to research. There will always be some authist that goes insane because one of the tribes in his home country is not what it was in reality. Tho the whole thing could be fixed if you have thread or a forum where people could post historical information and sources to help the "devs" researchers.

Oh for sure the outrage would be real, but the foundation would be there, the world would mostly look like what it likely was then, and you'd expect mods to simply pop up over time to address some of those issues (meaning Paradox wouldn't even have to actually bother fixing it). From my cosy chair I see it as low-effort big-payoff but then, it's not my job so I might massively underestimate the issues. The only thing I can think of is that any starting date from Marius onwards would make for a short game, but meh, if it makes for an interesting short game, it has to be a worthwhile alternative to a map painting slog.

A CK2 style game with a focus on character interactions, with Vicky 2 style pop management shoved in, would have been perfect for this game. But they only implemented the CK2 and Vicky2 style features in a very barebones way. Barely even matters.

Playing as a provincial governor in the late Roman Republic would have been cool. You have to answer to the Senate, put down rebellions of local pops, try to settle Roman soldier pops in some of your provinces to offset the high rebelliousness of the native pops, etc.
As a barbarian you could make an alliance with Rome and send your sons and daughters to get educated in Rome. You could play as a Seleucid ruler and choose to adopt Persian culture and gods rather than Hellenic, cool stuff like that.

But noooo, they had to turn it into another map painter rather than the cool "do dumb shit with your character" game that CK2 is. And this era would be PERFECT for doing dumb shit with your character. Manage a Roman senatorial family with a long tradition and increase your prestige. Play as a barbarian lord who Romanizes in order to gain a powerful ally and Roman military knowledge. Play as a Celtic raider and sack Rome, the mechanics could work like CK2's viking raids.

CK2 and Vicky2 are the best Paradox games because while they also have map painting, it's not the focus. The focus is on doing fun cool shit with characters and pops. Imperator Rome is just EU4 in ancient times - map painting with little else to do.

EU: Rome had this exact problem (half-assed economy/pops + pointless characters). Except it came out before both V2 and CK2 - showing Paradox learned nothing.

 

[Wyatt_Derp]

Games - Patch edition
1990 - You get what you get, and you're lucky to get anything at all.

2000 - We're having some trouble getting our game to work with the fresh XP OS. A small patch will uploaded to our website by the end of the week.

2019 - We know our customers are furious over our face plant of a release. So we've decided to make a completely new game, one patch at a time over the next 2 years. Don't expect your save games (or hopes) to last longer than one month.

 

[JarlFrank]

I mean considering Paradox's last 5 games or so, one should've gotten used to their patch and DLC policy and realized it's not worth buying a Paradox game until at least two years after its initial release.

 

[fantadomat]

I mean considering Paradox's last 5 games or so, one should've gotten used to their patch and DLC policy and realized it's not worth buying a Paradox game until at least two years after its initial release.

Meh i never bought anything paradox,once my nephew hacked some steam account and gifted himself a EU4 and i made the biggest mistake in my life.....made a paradox account

 

[Goliath]

 

[Aemar]

Spoiler

Reading that with Caligula's voice in mind.

 

[Straight elf]

Typical Paradox, release something bare-bones and fill it out with DLC that should have been base features. Might be fine in a couple of years after the Punic Wars DLC, Gallic Wars DLC, and Triumvirate/Civil War DLC.

Sad yet all too likely, when these should have at the very least been alternative starting dates/conditions, if not an actual year-by-year slider to select exactly in which conditions (belligerents, territories, alliances...) you want to start with. This is such a historically packed period with a *lot* of things that would have had long-lasting impacts on the world (Caesar going East as was the fashion rather than in Gaul? Pompey winning the civil war?). As is, I doubt the AI allows for anything remotely like the historical conditions around those times. I can appreciate that it's unlikely they'll whip up an AI that good (and that actually might end up super boring too), but a set of historically meaningful starting conditions?

They didn't because of how much work is needed for the tribes to more or less accurate. Pinning the big empires of the times is not a hard thing to do,but the small and irrelevant ones are hard to research. There will always be some authist that goes insane because one of the tribes in his home country is not what it was in reality. Tho the whole thing could be fixed if you have thread or a forum where people could post historical information and sources to help the "devs" researchers.

Oh for sure the outrage would be real, but the foundation would be there, the world would mostly look like what it likely was then, and you'd expect mods to simply pop up over time to address some of those issues (meaning Paradox wouldn't even have to actually bother fixing it). From my cosy chair I see it as low-effort big-payoff but then, it's not my job so I might massively underestimate the issues. The only thing I can think of is that any starting date from Marius onwards would make for a short game, but meh, if it makes for an interesting short game, it has to be a worthwhile alternative to a map painting slog.

A CK2 style game with a focus on character interactions, with Vicky 2 style pop management shoved in, would have been perfect for this game. But they only implemented the CK2 and Vicky2 style features in a very barebones way. Barely even matters.

Playing as a provincial governor in the late Roman Republic would have been cool. You have to answer to the Senate, put down rebellions of local pops, try to settle Roman soldier pops in some of your provinces to offset the high rebelliousness of the native pops, etc.
As a barbarian you could make an alliance with Rome and send your sons and daughters to get educated in Rome. You could play as a Seleucid ruler and choose to adopt Persian culture and gods rather than Hellenic, cool stuff like that.

But noooo, they had to turn it into another map painter rather than the cool "do dumb shit with your character" game that CK2 is. And this era would be PERFECT for doing dumb shit with your character. Manage a Roman senatorial family with a long tradition and increase your prestige. Play as a barbarian lord who Romanizes in order to gain a powerful ally and Roman military knowledge. Play as a Celtic raider and sack Rome, the mechanics could work like CK2's viking raids.

CK2 and Vicky2 are the best Paradox games because while they also have map painting, it's not the focus. The focus is on doing fun cool shit with characters and pops. Imperator Rome is just EU4 in ancient times - map painting with little else to do.

EU: Rome had this exact problem (half-assed economy/pops + pointless characters). Except it came out before both V2 and CK2 - showing Paradox learned nothing.

EU: Rome was a dumb map painter, yes. But it was better than Imperator simply by being smaller in size. There was a few dozen countries, which differed in government form (tribes, monarchies, republics), location, resources and flavor. Imperator has 100s of countries, bust most of them are simply tribes that are not particularly different from each other. That's like artificially padding the length of an ARPG by adding tons of procedurally generated dungeons. While the core gameplay might be fun, doing the same thing (conquering shit tribes that all feel the same) becomes tiring. Also EU:R had pop promotion mechanic (albeit a very simple one) where pops slowly increased or decreased their social standing based on policies in place. Imperator instead has this ridiculous mana system, where I guess you send an Age of Ampires priest to a Galic tribesman, he goes WOLOLO WOLOLO WOLOLO and puf - the ex-barbarian is now a true citizen of Rome.

EU:Rome, while flawed, was a fun experience for a fan of the setting. Imperator is just boring.

 

[Preben]

Sounds like someone who hasn't heard the word "no" for decades. Typical for high executives, so used to being obeyed and flattered that they genuinely think that everything they touch turns into gold.

 

[ZeniBot]

Spoiler

Reading that with Caligula's voice in mind.

He's good but he's no Hedonism bot.

 

[Frusciante]

LoL the game is broken beyond believe!

How is this interesting? The guy discovered a bug and takes 30 minutes to explain it, so exciting!

 

[fantadomat]

How is this interesting? The guy discovered a bug and takes 30 minutes to explain it, so exciting!

I am not arguing that the guy is good or interesting,i am arguing that the game is broken and have such stupid bugs in it.

 

[Life of the Party]

 

[Alienman]

Someone is salty.

 

[Raghar]

What happened to have detailed economy and state system?

 

[Life of the Party]

 

[fantadomat]

Someone is salty.

The fact that the cuck decided to make the poll on twatter just shows how out of touch the faggot is. Lets just put the poll in place where almost no paradox players go and ask the game relevant question there. Certainly not putting it on the forum or the distribution platforms,what if somebody disagree with it?

 

[Preben]

I looks more and more like an ego issue. Jphan seems to be unable to accept that someone else's ideas are just better.

 

[coldcrow]

It's the "more" curse. For whatever reason, game designers are afraid to deal out negative factors and mechanics. Then they have to pile on more and more instances of "plus". But hat doesn't work that well with our mind. We derive a large amount of satisfaction in overcoming negative circumstances, even if they are just a modifier on some spreadsheet. On top of that the pdox way of piling out percentages instad of quantity -> quality, like a good marxist would know, is reinforcing the issue.
So as usual, decline all over.