Imperator Development Diary 31st of December 2018

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Johan

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Hello everyone and welcome to another development diary for Imperator. Today you are sadly stuck with me, as Trin Tragula has the day off for New Years Eve. We’re busy working towards the beta milestone, improving interfaces, fixing bugs and teaching the AI new tricks.

In todays diary we’ll take a look at some interface & mechanics changes that have happened in the last month, before we get back to our regularly scheduled diaries when Trin Tragula will talk about Mercenaries and delve into the Ethiopia and Arabia.

Regional Governors
With the evolvement of the game design, the fact of having one governor per province turned to be less fun than expected. The management and interaction with a large amount of governors in a medium-sized empire forced them to become too irrelevant.

Now the map is divided into regions, where each region have 7-8 different provinces in them, and each province have 10-12 cities in them.

Each region, unless its your home capital region will have a governor assigned to them, while each province have its own possible governor policy.

Changing policies no longer impact the loyalty of the governor, as it turned it into a non-choice in most cases, but instead have a oratory power cost that is the same whether its a governor or your rulers directly controlled provinces.

Units can now be assigned to cover an entire region by giving control over to the local governor, reducing unrest in the cities, and helping the loyalty of the governor.

governors.png


Not Just a Name
A lot of the times, you get messages about characters in our games, you go, who was that Naughtius Maximus anyway? So, we’ve decided to rework how we refer to characters in messages and in the UI, by referring to them by their titles, relationships to titleholders, or other statuses. So now, you’ll be able to see that the character attempting to befriend your ruler is the brother of the commander of the 24th Legion, and you can more easily ignore him.

Importance of Families
Another thing that became more obvious during playtesting was that just having characters, really did not give them the life they needed to create a living country. We had the concept of characters belonging to families in the game already, but it was merely a name and a prestige value, and nobody paid any attention to which family a character belonged to, so we made the following changes and additions.

Each country have a list of official families that characters belong to. The amount of official families in a country depends on the size of the country. Not every character in an official family has a direct close blood relation, but they are all considered to belong to the same family. All members of the same family contribute to the family prestige, and reap the benefits and drawback of the reputation of that prestige.

Characters may be in your country, but belong to a foreign family, and those characters will not marry on their own, or be entirely trusted.

There is also a new Family View tab in the characters view, where you can view all families in your country, and their members.

Finally, when conquering and annexing another nation, you now have choices of how to handle the families of that country, even allowing them to become families of your nation on a family by family basis if you so choose.

families.png



Diplomatic Action Pending
One of the main problems we’ve had in our games is the constant need to check the tooltip of greyed out diplomatic actions, so you can see when you can send a diplomat again.

In Imperator, we now tell you the date, above the list of actions, if there is a diplomat enroute. Also, primarily for multiplayer, you will see which diplomatic offer you have sent, if it has not been replied to yet.

diplomacy.png


Instant AI Diplomacy
Another thing that we discovered during playtesting was how awkward it was with setting up trade-routes with foreign countries compared to internal trade, when you had to wait a day for the AI to reply, while trade internally was instant.

So we changed how AI responds to all diplomatic deals, by no longer having them reply the next day, but instead checking it immediately, so you get instant feedback. This had the side-effect of estimated AI replies being more accurate since the state of the world have not changed between pressing the button and them replying.


Loyalty Gain on Troops
One of the main problems with the original EU:Rome was that a lot of the mechanics were hidden, and you did not really see what was happening. Now we have made it so you can see how likely a general is to gain the loyalty of a cohort each month.

This is primarily based on the characters Charisma, but traits and laws are also important.

loyalty.png


Attrition for Units
One interesting aspect of our units was the problem that when you had enough money and access to certain goods, some types of units where always superior. One of the primary reasons for that was there was no difference between units when it came to how much attrition they would take in an area. So marching 20,000 men with War-Elephants through a low supply area meant they lost the same manpower as 20,000 Light Infantry.

This have now been changed, so that Light Infantry costs 50% of a normal unit supply, Heavy Infantry & Heavy Cavalry cost about 50% more supply, while War-Elephants costs 500% of normal supply.

The impact of this is that 10,000 Light Infantry will require a Supply Limit of 5 to not take attrition in a non-desert province, while 10,000 War Elephants require a Supply Limit of 50 to not take attrition, and 10,000 Heavy Infantry would require a Supply Limit of 15.

This means that different terrain and areas have needs of different types of armies for efficient warfare.

attrition.png


Trade
Most of the times when you have a nice capital surplus bonus of a specific Trade Goods you do not want to lose that bonus. That is why we have added a checkbox at the Trade View, where you can set it to auto-decline all trade proposals where you would lose your capital surplus bonus.

The National Overview
The main information page in Imperator, is what we call the country overview screen. That one has been evolving constantly during development, and will continue to evolve as we work on the game. Since the last time we showed this screen in the middle of November, we’ve now added some nice pie-charts so you can depict the distribution of your population when it comes to type, religion and culture.

You can now also directly set the governor policies of every province from this sortable list of provinces.

Since the popularity and corruption of your current ruler is important for your country, it is also displayed prominently at the the national overview.

Your Ruler Popularity reduces your tyranny, and in a republic, increases the senate influence of the rulers party. Monarchies and Tribes get other benefits of a rulers popularity, or lack thereof while corruption of a ruler has a few different drawbacks.

national_overview.png


Improvements to the User Interface
First of all, most screens, including the character view have a “back” button, so you can easily get back to the previous one.

Secondly, we’ve added automatic “shortcut-icons” to tooltips to tell you which button can be used from the keyboard for that action.

Finally, we’ve added filter and sorting buttons to most screens with long lists of characters, countries or provinces.


ux.png


We’ve done far more of course, but there’s lots of development diaries left for you until we release the game. Happy New Year everyone!
 
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Amazing, what a dedication; a dev diary today of all days! :eek: Thank you @Johan ! :)

I see you are soft-introducing dynasties in a way that suits the era. very happy to see this! Can new families emerge if an old family dies out?
 
Is there also the possibility for a mechanic wherein certain units gain supply bonuses or debuffs based on terrain? For instance cavalry and horse arches consume less supply in grasslands and steppes, camels in desert?
 
while 10,000 War Elephants require a Supply Limit of 50 to not take attrition

10.000 War Elephants? Well, that's a herd. Seriously, I do not get why War Elephants are to be presented in the same type of quantity as regular soldiers. Same case as with EU4 artillery (1 cannon is technically 100 people, and nobody knows why, which is slightly misleading and heavily immersion-breaking). Please change that somehow. I do not know how. Maybe with just some interface adjustments, but in a better world, we would have a separate pool for elephants (and maybe even for camels or horses), different from regular (i.e. human) manpower.
 
Glad to see that i'm not the only one working today :p

And hope to see Naughtius Maximus in-game as well! Alongside with Bickus Diccus, please!
 
Is there also the possibility for a mechanic wherein certain units gain supply bonuses or debuffs based on terrain? For instance cavalry and horse arches consume less supply in grasslands and steppes, camels in desert?

In theory yes, but it would end up a fair bit more confusing from an UX perspective.
 
This game looks amazing. I am looking forward to getting my hands on it as soon as it is available. The character system looks very promising, and I think it will add some exciting moment to moment gameplay to the overall campaign. I really hope this type of system makes it into future PDS games, because this type of moment to moment gameplay adds a lot of depth and immersion that a GSG may otherwise lack. Happy New Year guys!
 
10.000 War Elephants? Well, that's a herd. Seriously, I do not get why War Elephants are to be presented in the same type of quantity as regular soldiers. Same case as with EU4 artillery (1 cannon is technically 100 people, and nobody knows why, which is slightly misleading and heavily immersion-breaking). Please change that somehow. I do not know how. Maybe with just some interface adjustments, but in a better world, we would have a separate pool for elephants (and maybe even for camels or horses), different from regular (i.e. human) manpower.

They are represented in the same number range for consistency and clarity for the player.

We assume that the 50 men is about 1 War Elephant.
 
Today you are sadly stuck with me,

On the contrary, you're a welcome sight to a lot of us still!

This dev diary though, nice! Thanks for giving some insight into the development process and the changes made. I would like to echo Le Petit General's idea for supply bonuses/maluses depending on terrain for some units. Otherwise I really like the what looks like massively increased clarity the game will have compared to its predecessor.
 
Neat improvements overall. Perhaps you could consider having oratory cost for changing a policy be determined by that governor's loyalty?
 
Nice DD!, You guys are making QoL improvements before we even play the game, I love it!

The unit supply thing have me questioning what a regular supply limit would be, I for one, hate the supply limit in ck2, where if you go to pagan lands, suddenly your 10k stack is walking in 2k supply limit land, and you loose your army because of attrition instead of battle.

Nevertheless I trust it will be all good.

Happy NY Everyone.
 
how is military access supposed to work? hopefully it's Total War style, where going without gives diplomatic penalties and lack of doesn't just set up invisibile walls, especially in this age
 
They are represented in the same number range for consistency and clarity for the player.

We assume that the 50 men is about 1 War Elephant.

What about displaying the number of 'units'? Then 1 unit of inf would be 1000 soldiers, but a unit of war elephants only 20 elephants. In stead of showing 1020 or 2000, which, agreeably, are both confusing, just display 2. Then display the percentage of capacity filled, or use a weighted total, I.e. 750 men + 15 elephants displays 2 units (75%) or 1,5 units. Then upon opening the army, the real numbers are displayed!

For the romans, you could even use the term 'cohort' (500 soldiers for convenience), I.e., we would see: Army X: 4 cohorts (75%)
 
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Changing policies no longer impact the loyalty of the governor, as it turned it into a non-choice in most cases, but instead have a oratory power cost that is the same whether its a governor or your rulers directly controlled provinces.
Have you changed the policies, it would no longer make much sense to use the enrich yourself policy as that one was just bad.
 
What about displaying the number of 'units'? Then 1 unit of inf would be 1000 soldiers, but a unit of war elephants only 20 elephants. In stead of showing 1020 or 2000, which, agreeably, are both confusing, just display 2. Then display the percentage of capacity filled, or use a weighted total, I.e. 750 men + 15 elephants displays 2 units (75%) or 1,5 units. Then upon opening the army, the real numbers are displayed!

For the romans, you could even use the term 'cohort' (500 soldiers for convenience), I.e., we would see: Army X: 4 cohorts (75%)
Please, no. :p
 
Changing policies no longer impact the loyalty of the governor, as it turned it into a non-choice in most cases, but instead have a oratory power cost that is the same whether its a governor or your rulers directly controlled provinces

I must admit that despite loving everything else youve added, I dont like this change one bit. Does this mean that you can just have no governors and rule everything yourself? Thats too OP. Also, I loved that if you overruled a governor on its policy, he would get angry. It made a lot of sense. Now it feels like they dont really have policies of their own, and you are the one to choose them, making governor even less important and makes policies like enriching yourself uslese as you can essily change it. I mean why wouldnt you change it now? Its a bad policy for everyone except homself. Before you left it because character loyalty is much more important but now you kust spend some damn mana. I hope this gets changed back, although I guess you can always mod it.

By the way, senators should have a say on electing governors since that was one of their roles, approval of governor appointments.

As I said though, I love the rest of the changes. Great improvements. I hope to see more dev diaries on changes as development continues.

Keep up the gooe work.
 
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