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Imperator Dev Diary 20/04/2020 : Dev Diaries

Greetings all!


It’s been a little while since our last dev diary due to a combination of public holidays and schedule, but we’re back again, and I’ve a few changes to mention regarding the way you’ll be getting information from us in future.


Firstly though, I’d like to thank you all for the great feedback on 1.4 Archimedes, I’ve particularly enjoyed seeing the various stories and playthroughs that you’ve all been posting here and on our other social media platforms.


As I mentioned back at the beginning of the year, Imperator has been aiming at a faster frequency of smaller releases compared to some of our other studio titles. One thing that has been becoming apparent here, is that our old method of dev diaries on a weekly basis does not mesh well with this. Going forwards, we’re likely to have a couple of weeks of downtime after a major release such as Archimedes, before we launch into a more packed schedule of information filled diaries.


This achieves two things: it allows time to breathe and plan the workflow for our next release without having to make any snap decisions at an early date; and it ensures that there’s enough to talk about in dev diaries leading up to a release. There were reasonable criticisms that some of the DDs from the last release cycle didn’t contain enough ‘substance’. I think part of this is that it’s hard to see very focused feature-breakdowns in the context of the whole, so we’ll be aiming to look at features as they relate to game, and other parts of a release, going forwards.


Thus, since we’ve had a couple of weeks of down-time, we’ll start off our development diary cycle next week with a comprehensive overview of the subjects that will be covered in Menander, followed up by weekly, in-depth diaries on each one of those.


With all that said; this week I have a couple of teasers from 1.5 for you. Let me know what you think they might mean, and I’ll reveal all next Monday, as we dive into a full feature overview of the Menander update….


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With all that said; this week I have a couple of teasers from 1.5 for you. Let me know what you think they might mean, and I’ll reveal all next Monday, as we dive into a full feature overview of the Menander update….

Since Pyrgia is the overlord of those three at game start (although Commagene was not independent at this time and likely a part of the Orontid realm), and they have a similar colour... Some kind of new Subject-Overlord interactions? Something influence related?
 
@Arheo You are absolutely killing me here. You can’t drop such teasing teasers and make me wait for another weeeeeeeeeek. Spare our poor souls, I have been living with hype for 2 whole weeks trapped inside :eek:

Can we have a teaser for the teaser so we get a teaser of what the teaser is about? ;)
 
Since Pyrgia is the overlord of those three at game start (although Commagene was not independent at this time and likely a part of the Orontid realm), and they have a similar colour... Some kind of new Subject-Overlord interactions? Something influence related?

I think it's simpler than that. It's just that on the political map vassal states will inherit the color or the suzerain state. You can have this in HoI4 with mods, maybe they're changing it in Imperator:Rome to be the default or maybe as an option.
 
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Although I will miss looking forward to every Monday for these dev diaries, I can imagine having a smaller team and having to do these every Monday can be tough. Look forward to more updates and IR to get my teeth into!
 
I feel like you guys are going in circles.

You used dev diaries as marketing before. It lead to a whole bunch of devs telling us about the importance of early feedback. About how important it is to inform us at the beginning of the dev cycle, because it's impossible to change course at a later point in development. And so on.

Now you are going for shorter releases AND later dev diaries. Because you don't want us to be involved in the early decision making process.

Did I misunderstand something, is this a middle ground kind of thing or are we just going to be at telling us how important feedback is in a couple of month?
 
If it is not private information, i would like to know how the devs evaluate results of the last update and the "flavor pack" from a commercial point of view. I mean, how well the dlc was sold, how many new players bought I.R, etc.
I'm sure, exact numbers cannot be published, but approximate results like "sold well", "sold as expected" or "not too good" would be very cool to know.
 
I feel like you guys are going in circles.

You used dev diaries as marketing before. It lead to a whole bunch of devs telling us about the importance of early feedback. About how important it is to inform us at the beginning of the dev cycle, because it's impossible to change course at a later point in development. And so on.

Now you are going for shorter releases AND later dev diaries. Because you don't want us to be involved in the early decision making process.

Did I misunderstand something, is this a middle ground kind of thing or are we just going to be at telling us how important feedback is in a couple of month?

In reality, the difference is not so much 'when' but 'how'. A lot of our time post-release is spent on support for the preceding release - it's difficult to also commit to planning and features for the next update while that is going on.
 
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If it is not private information, i would like to know how the devs evaluate results of the last update and the "flavor pack" from a commercial point of view. I mean, how well the dlc was sold, how many new players bought I.R, etc.
I'm sure, exact numbers cannot be published, but approximate results like "sold well", "sold as expected" or "not too good" would be very cool to know.

a corporation wouldn't delve those information...especially if it's bad news.
 
If it is not private information, i would like to know how the devs evaluate results of the last update and the "flavor pack" from a commercial point of view. I mean, how well the dlc was sold, how many new players bought I.R, etc.
I'm sure, exact numbers cannot be published, but approximate results like "sold well", "sold as expected" or "not too good" would be very cool to know.
Well, we at least have this chart:
https://steamcharts.com/cmp/859580,203770,236850,394360#3m
 
I'm guessing armies will be made up of different classes now with this particular army composing of 4 freemen.
that'd be a huge rework and we're currently on the Summer of Culture. I'd expect something like this in Autumn, for warfare, if that's really what they want to do.