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jobosno commented on jobosno's review of Imperator: Rome
the game for people who play the total war campaign map but simulate all the battles

6 days ago


jobosno reviewed Imperator: Rome
Paradox is especially interesting as a developer because they essentially make the same game over and over, adjusting mechanics to suit the setting, and it means that playing these games in release order you'll see more and more cross-pollination as systems and mechanics that work well in one series are placed into a new game from a sister series. Probably the best example of this is the "pops" system that is best known as being part of the Victoria series, initially designed to help simulate both economic and cultural changes that occurred during the Second Industrial Revolution by bundling people with the same culture, religion, and job into a single demographic block. Paradox seems to think this was a hit, because they're putting it in everything now - they kept it for the release of Victoria 3 in 2022, they're putting them into their currently under-development "Definitely Not Europa Universalis 5", and they exist here in Imperator as well.

Imperator is most fascinating as a mishmash of interesting systems from Paradox's other series - after 2 years of tweaks turning this into a completely different game, it's fascinating to look at the final product and see what systems remained part of the developers' core vision for this game. It uses Victoria's pop system to represent the tendencies of the masses, it uses a stripped-back form of Crusader Kings' characters to represent the most influential nobles, its statecraft and military options are a mixture of so many other Paradox games that it'd be painful for both of us if I spelled it out. The result is a game that - for returning players - has a ton of familiar, easy-to-grasp elements that affect a truly absurd number of statistics and variables for states, provinces, and individual actors, some of which are more opaque than others.

It's not helped by Imperator's map, which is more granular than ever. Victoria 3's map divides territory into "states" and that's effectively all you have to worry about unless a state is split between two or more countries - even then, most modifers will only apply to the portion of the state that's under your control. States are large, they are chunky, and while the populations in them might be diverse, you almost never have to worry about fractions of a state. Imperator's map is broken into Territories (individual settlements), Provinces/Areas (collections of 10-15 territories), and Regions (groups of provinces that are generally of a similar cultural background). Buildings are built in a territory, provinces have loyalty separate from that of the person governing them, and when you unlock the ability to maintain a standing army then you typically are limited to one per region - so claiming a single village from a new region will be far less useful than consolidating your power within an area.

Provinces have local trade, loyalty, unrest, food, "civilization", infrastructure, taxes, and separate happiness values per population. Influential characters belong to families (with relationships and family trees) and have character traits, jobs, dynamic party affiliations, statesmanship, loyalty, popularity, prominence, corruption, personal income, and a powerbase that includes soldiers that may have loyalty to them over the state. The state has at least 9 core stats that can change or disappear entirely based on your forms of government. There's more I could mention, but I think I've driven the point home.

The point is that there's a LOT of moving parts and it can be tough to grasp even for longtime Paradox players. If you make someone play this as their first grand strategy game they will likely swear off the genre entirely. The reward for learning it, though, is a simulation that really nails the experience of holding together a vast, ancient empire with hope and duct tape, forced to use the stability of the entire country as a resource to keep the richest man in the empire from getting too ambitious. All of these mechanics let you roleplay through a vast variety of actions that few games would support: you can view the accomplishments of individual legions in a historical log, you can build up a tiny border town into a metropolis, you can award different cultural groups with increased status or expanded rights, you can play favorites among the influential families and use your leader's status to accrue as much personal wealth as possible. This game only received 2 years of post-launch support but it has depth comparable to Paradox's other games that have been in development for over a decade. The systems take time to learn but they weave together naturally, where the decision to remove a provincial governor involves smaller decisions on the relative value of his talents vs. his corruption and provincial loyalty, the happiness of his family vs. the happiness of the people in the province, and the relative costs of each approach you could use to solve the problem.

There are some valid criticisms, though, going beyond just the complexity. First is that the game's quite easy once you wrap your head around the systems - there are a lot of ways for factions of moderate starting power to get ahead and the game heavily rewards you for keeping your foot on the gas, so it's entirely possible (especially if you're playing Rome) that you crush a couple early factions and never look back. The game also has some obvious seams as a result of its reinvention over 2 years: it does a decent job of explaining most of its mechanics, but there will be a handful of times where you have to resort to googling something that doesn't have a tooltip, because the game has a lot of icons and not all of them are explained well. What are the effects of "prominence"? Where is this "divine sacrifice" button that I keep getting modifiers for? The law system also feels abnormally weak when compared to all the other systems, since changing a law typically means swapping one minor buff for another in a game where you're constantly racking up stat increases via research (Rome's military tech tree alone has 84 techs that all provide meaningful buffs).

All that being said, I'm pleasantly surprised with how much I like this game - I picked it up on release and played 15 hours or so before dropping it like a hot brick and refusing to touch it until this year. Even ignoring the complaints above it's hard to recommend, because I think it's a lot easier for players to hop into a game as "France" and pass "Agrarianism" than it is to play as Scordiscia and learn what it means to click "lex Caecilia de vectigalibus" but I think those who are passionate about the era or the genre could find this really rewarding. There's a surprising amount of room to "play tall" despite naming this game after a famously expansionist empire and it does a good job of making you think about the people and places you conquer, even after the deed is done. Far from perfect, but it's deeply interesting and I'm super interested to see what mechanics and systems they're going to use in their future games - they're already using a similarly granular map in EU5, and I think a lot of what's present here could be polished to a mirror shine in future games.

6 days ago



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