Hello and welcome to another Development Diary for
Imperator: Rome! Today we will be talking about a number of Quality of Life improvements that are coming with the
Pompey Patch.
Road Building
While Roads are a great way to create highways through your country, allowing your armies to quickly move from one end of your empire to another, they can also be cumbersome to construct due to requiring a new order to be given for every new connected city. In Pompey patch you will be able to select a destination for a road and have the army tasked with the job continue until the road is done.
Release Subject
One of the changes coming in the Pompey patch is the ability to grant autonomy to a local dynasty in a conquered land. This allows you to better handle big areas of foreign culture and it was a modus operandi often chosen by the Romans themselves in their wars of expansion.
Any owned Province can be made into a Client State from the country overview screen and the new country will take the state culture and religion from what is dominant in that province.
The new subject will inherit the government, technology and inventions of its old owner and it will be ruled by a native character.
View Foreign Characters
A number of character interactions (such as subverting enemy governors or, supporting pretenders, assassinations) exist that lets you further your designs on foreign countries but it can often be hard to identify a proper foreign target. In Pompey Patch we have added a button in the diplomacy view where the character lists for another country can be accessed, with the same possibilities for sorting and filtering that you would have in your own country.
Macro Builder Improvements
One of the things that was sorely missed by many when coming to Imperator: Rome from our older released games was the ability to see what effects buildings, pop promotion, and religious conversion of pops would have when using the Macro Builder.
In the Pompey patch when you click on the Macro Builder tabs for Buildings and Pops a sortable list will be shown of all places where you can take the selected action, with information about what benefits this would bring. By hovering the location itself you will see a full tooltip of all affected values.
Full effects of promoting a pop in Myos Hormos to a Freeman.
Ledger
Another often requested quality of life feature has been to have a Ledger, with details on the current happenings in the world, easily organized and sortable. In the Pompey update a ledger has been added with the following pages:
- Overview: This is a page that has comparative information for all countries in the entire game. This is the same information that you would normally find in the Diplomacy view for each individual country, but here it is organized for easy comparisons.
- Rulers: This is a page with all the currently living rulers in the entire world at any given time.
- Provinces: An overview of all provinces currently under your control, with information about pops, trade routes, loyalty, commerce and tax.
- Inventions: A list of all inventions purchased up until now, and their effects.
- Our Rulers: A list of all characters who have ruled your country from the start of the game up until the present date.
Ledger page for Inventions.
Alerts
Apart from adding Alerts on the top of the screen for new features such as being outside of Naval Range we have also added alerts for when you have a decision available and when you have not yet picked National Ideas for all of your possible Idea slots.
Province Interface
The fact that the province interface was covering the center of the screen is something we were never quite happy with. With the addition of new features to the province interface we took the opportunity to address some of these problems.
In Pompey the Province interface is more clearly divided into a city and Province part. With the Province portion of the interface being retractable for when you are only interested in the city itself.
The Province portion of the interface now shows circle diagrams based on the population in the province as a whole as well as the income from tax and commerce for the entire province.
The city list is no longer shown at all times, but can be extended from the side. The reason for this is that we found that while not many used it we still wanted to keep the information for those that did.
Government
One change we have made to office holders in 1.1 Pompey is that the effect of the benefit they provide is now scaled on how loyal they are. This means that we have to show their loyalty in the government view and together with the addition of dual rulers and the government interactions we have had to revamp the government interface. In doing so we have broken it up into 3 tabs:
- Show Government: This screen shows your ruler and co-ruler or Consort. It also contains your clan leaders, heirs and party leaders, depending on government type.
- Show Offices: Shows all currently employed officers, what benefit you get from them as well as their loyalty.
- Show Laws: Now displays all 8 categories of laws in one window, instead of only 4.
Another very minor but hopefully helpful change in Pompey is that characters shown in the event window will now have their full name displayed, rather than just their family name.
That was all for today’s diary on quality of life changes. I will be back next week with a diary on
Pirates,
Storms and things that go
kaboom.
