Barebones Games
This is the feedback that I just do not understand. I took everything we had in Rome I, and made every mechanic deeper and more complex, while adding lots more new mechanics to make it into a game. This game was developed the same way we did EU4 and HOI2, the previous games I’ve been most satisfied with, where we used all the original gameplay code of the previous game, and just built upon that.
What was previously a niche game is now one of your (PDS's) flagships, and is being judged as it exists now compared to EU4 and CK2 with years of polish on them.
Looking through what is possible with modding this game, the base you have developed is
amazing. However, it isn't what people see, beyond the map which I think is universally loved. The world feels immense in a way that I can't look at CK2 or EU4 properly any longer. Even as I feel it needs still more provinces in places, your team did an excellent job with it.
EU4 has an enormous plethora of events to spice up a more peacetime game. CK2 has somewhat fleshed out characters. Stellaris has anomalies and various galactic threat events.
Imperator has... roadbuilding, a tedious trade system, and replacing dead leaders. Once you've turned your desired empire into a cultural and religious hegemon, there is no more threat of disruption. Once you know the tricks to stabilizing your empire, that is pretty much it. You have a fascinating system for tearing empires apart, but not everyone is going to grind through the game as it is to experience that.
Your civil war mechanic is also quite binary, at the moment, many civil wars are either way too weak or too strong. Something perhaps buff mass province revolts as you make the AI better capable of handling them, and perhaps some cohorts belonging to a pretender who has your entire army aren't that loyal to them, or something.
IMO, Imperator needs institutions, and not in the EU4 sense. Something to interact with to fill the peacetime void
Families should rise and fall, and feel like they are genuinely jockeying for power and influence over your empire. The same with religious cults. Right now the former serves as a source of octogenarian brides for those young lads hoping to further their line. Other than that, interaction with them is purely through event and to a lesser extent the legitimacy mechanic via religious unity. The Mouseion of Alexandria also functions as a permanent bonus, but again, other than the events, you don't meaningfully interact with it otherwise. Pretenders should work to setup an institution basically supporting their rule, etc.
I have said before launch that this is the best game I’ve made, and I stand by it still. 1.0 of Imperator is the best 1.0 we have ever made of a game.
Looking through the files, and at the map, I would agree in principle, but as a game I would disagree. I feel 'done' with your initial offering after forming Argead and getting the Perfidious Albion achievement... and a lot of it was genuinely not fun. The constant spam of trade requests for resources I don't care about was 90% of my interactions during the end of my Argead run... that was genuinely frustrating. Most of the active management I did involved tediously moving armies away from attrition.
Not that I should have cared, with active armies not subtracting from your total manpower, there's no reason not to build up as huge an army as your economy will permit.
Missing UI / Bad UX
I agree that there are things in the UI that is suboptimal. Some screens are bigger than they could be, like the province interface, and some do not have all the information you may need. We are all working on improving that. Some UI I deemed as optional as we ran lower on time, and I wanted to prioritise the gameplay experience, so those will come in patches.
The gameplay failings, I can understand, but you not seeing the UI/UX failings - calling it 'suboptimal' comes across as borderline facetious. Imperator is missing a lot of things previous Paradox titles had as standard.
Bad AI
Ironically, this is the game we spent the most resources in writing AI for, both in time and people. Instead of a basically reactive AI, that had no goal, and reusing old mechanics, we decided to write this AI as a new proactive system working with plans.
I understand that effort and intent is not the same as result, but AI was something we did focus a lot on.
Usually what is frustrating is stuff that we think should not be tough to work in. The AI should be reluctant to break a siege it is progressing on if it isn't under threat. When under 'independent operations', it shouldn't stack 2-4 armies onto the same city to siege it down, etc.
Overall though, Paradox games spoil in the AI department. You are getting held to a higher and higher standard because
nearly everyone else does such a horrific job in comparison.
Power / Abstracted Currencies
I understand that there is a part of the community that dislike abstracted currencies like prestige, monarch power, influence or political power, they do make it into games that are possible to balance and
In 1.1, with us adding stability, war exhaustion, aggressive expansion and tyranny to the price structure, you could make a really good mod, replacing all power costs with impacts on those attributes. Such a mod could also completely make the instant culture conversion of a pop cost tyranny instead, making it something you do not want to do in bulk, or you could make changing an idea cost 5 stability, which is not much in direct cost, but limits you in other ways.
I think 90% of this was the instant results, especially for assimilation and conversion, combined with the horrific UX for moving pops. You don't see many complaints about the road system, though 20 helmets per connection does feel like much.
The base game will continue to use these currencies, as they make for a better game, but I acknowledge that there is a group of people who dislike them, and prefer another experience, so we will improve the game, to be able to support it.
I'd love to see generified resources a la Stellaris. I can turn horses, camels, and elephants into pops, but there isn't such a thing as horsepower I could use as a currency. Maybe I could use pedigree instead? Dunno.
Lack of Flavor
...
Finally, we are adding something we call Heritages to countries. This is something they start with, which gives 2 bonuses and 1 drawback. There will be lots of “generic” heritages for countries, which depends on their geography, but we aim to add as many unique ones as possible in 1.1, and then keep adding them.
This is a start, but one thing you may want to look into is either putting a designer into the game, or perhaps farming out making some groups unique to the community. Several of us have made or commented on threads about the Rasna (Etruscans), for example.
Content
It is hard to compare content between various games, but Imperator shipped with the same amount of events as Victoria 2 with expansions, and more than any game had at release besides CK2.
We also had more character interactions than CK2 at release, and a similar amount of diplomatic actions and relations as EU4 had at release.
Of course, when you have been playing games that have 5-10k of events,dozens upon dozens of unique systems, any new game, no matter how much content they have, will feel light.
Thing is, in Stellaris, you can see a large chunk of the events in a playthrough. In EU4, the nations are already quite distinct. In Imperator, each religion has its own smattering of events, as do some countries and provinces. A player only sees a tiny fraction of them.
Accordingly, making your game depend on depth from events is a Sisyphean task. You need to provide players and the AI with the ability to make their piece of the world feel unique. It should probably be a mechanic of the game somehow - like structures and institutional investment where a given region would be lucky to have more than one. Or something.
