Ironically v2 has far simpler and cruder mechanics than imperator.
I coded both.. the politics/pop system for v2 is something that i wrote in a week..
I don't even... Honestly? This sounds like you're trying to oversell Imperator qualities more than anything... Don't get me wrong, I really like what you did with I:R pops and the way you can fine tune the whole thing with buildings and cities and all. It's great. But you can't compare pops in both games and tell me with a straight face that V2 pops are simpler, because it's simply untrue. V2 at large is indeed a pretty crude game as far as gameplay goes, that can feel a bit too
hands-off at times, but the underlying systems are, at the very least, some of the most elegant (if not the most
complex, yes) you've ever designed. Don't try to pretend otherwise, please.
First, V2 has a living, dynamic economy, which is admittedly quite wonky and prone to sudden crashes, but it's still miles ahead of what I:R has, which is not an economy at all, only an abstraction of one. Meanwhile, in V2 it's the pops that harvest, extract and produce goods, and then buy them, because they've got savings, money, a job, a
life. They grow and die by the thousands every passing day. And V2 economy doesn't need inputs from the player and the nations AI to exist and evolve. That's elegant, as I said.
Also, let's take, for instance, opinions. In I:R pops have happiness and that's it. They're happy or they're not, and all it does is affecting they're productivity, the amount of secondary ressources you can get from them (money, manpower, research points). It's a binary system that does not even lead to anything on the political scale of things, since even slave revolts are driven by events, and revolts/politics at large are character driven. So what about V2? Pops have Militancy and Consciousness, the latter representing their level of political awareness, and the former standing for their will to enforce those political beliefs, violently if needed - and I love this distinction. And it ties into revolts dynamically and of course, political opinions, ever shifting, when pops have specific societal concerns and belong to specific ideologies, affecting their votes etc... and in return what you can do as a player, being restricted by the ideologies of the ruling party... If that's not complex and "deep" and "realistic", in a way, hell, I don't know what is.
All in all, V2 has by far the most elegant, fascinating and "believable" pop system of the two, and of any game in the history of gaming, I do believe. If only its economy could be fixed and made more... I don't know,
better... And of course, one would need to improve the gameplay loops around that system, and make more ways to interact with it. Because, yeah, V2 is mainly lacking in player agency, in solid and more varied gameplay, indeed. But the core systems are awesome, especially the pops.
Finally, when you say that you wrote the whole thing in a week, well, maybe, but let me tell you something. In France, we have a saying that goes:
le temps ne fait rien à l'affaire (roughly translated:
time has nothing to do with it.) Which means that the time you take to do something doesn't matter so much and is not necessarily representative of the quality of your work (or the lack thereof, by the way.) Sometimes inspiration means way more than actual labor, when everything clicks in a flash. Maybe you were very much inspired then.