Was I dreaming or did the devs give a approx release date in one of the DD's?
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[MOD] Imperator Invictus
- Thread starter Snowlet
- Start date
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It's confirmed that release date is 30th of June
Thanks, I thought so.
I wouldn't mind having the ability to play as an Argead. That's a very good idea.
With the lack of treasures outside the Hellenic world, it would be really nice to have an expensive option (gold and influence) for a ruler with high Zeal, to start a process of acquiring a new relic. We don't even receive a chance to get a new one during the deification, which btw is very bland.
It really hurts when you think how much content this game could already have if only events were added to existing mechanics.
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DD6: Q&A + Iberian setup + Punic puppet missions + Balance
DD6: For those too lazy to read, the Q&A info is at the bottom.
Salvete readers! Today we’ll be talking about Iberia, the Punic states of the Western Mediterranean, several balance changes and an upcoming Q&A.
To begin i’ll hand you over to Tudhaliya
Salvete! I’m @Tudhaliya the Hittite, the Iberian dev of the Invictus team and I have some things to show about the new Iberian setup.
New Turdetanian Setup
Firstly Turdetania, a region that's arguably poorly represented in the current version of the game. Here you can see the region in vanilla as reference:
What immediately struck me were the inclusion of three completely fictional tags and two ahistorical Turdetanian cities (Tartessos was fictional and Ocuri only enters the historical record under Roman administration). Missing from the game are the actual tribes and nations that composed these regions, which we have historical evidence for, thus I felt this region needed a rework. Studying the Turdetanian political situation of the time was quite difficult, but here you can see the new setup (Yes, Bardulia has been renamed Beturia):
To begin, the Massalian tag of Menesthei has been removed due to lack of archaeological and historical evidence. The two original Turdetanian tags have been divided into seven new tags: Hasta, Karmo, Onuba, Kartuba, Orippo, Acinippo and Lascuta. Karmo is the big guy here: the Karmoan army recently conquered the important cities of Astigi, Urso and Celti, creating a strong powerhouse to unify the Turdetanians. Hasta lies near the coast and shares close ties with Gadir. Also, the city-state of Lascuta begins the game as a vassal of Hasta. Onuba faces their own challenges: while they still control the Tharsis Mines, their productivity is down and the Punic settlers are numerous in their lands. Acinippo lies near some rich mines, but their independence is at risk with Carthaginians settlements to their East and South. Orippo and Kartuba are far from the dangers their neighbours face, but this tranquillity makes them easy targets for their more ambitious Iberian neighbours. An important thing to keep in mind is that the Turdetanian culture was an urban culture and, at the time of the Conquest, they were on the last steps to becoming proper states like the Phoenicians or the Greeks. To better represent this increased centralization and administrative capabilities, they will start as Federated Tribes with more Centralization than any other vanilla tribe.
But the most urgent problem for Turdetanian tribes common for all of them, was the Carthaginian menace. At game start, the Turdetanians are divided into two Defensive Leagues: the League of Hasta (Hasta, Gadir and Onuba) and the League of Karmo (Karmo and Acinippo), representing the rivalry between the disparate Turdetanians states.
Each of these new tags will have a unique heritage, some shown below. For the Turdetanian state that can manage to unify the region under one banner, you will be able to form the Tier 2 tag of Tartessia via new decision:
Cultural changes and Art to Iberia and a City that Hannibal hates (and it’s not Rome)
Outside Turdetania, there are more changes for the wider Iberian arena. When reworking the cultures of Iberia, we noticed that the Celt-Iberian culture group was utterly massive, so we found a solution; Vasconians and Aquitani are in the Occidental Group with the Nuragics and Talaiotics, simply because they were Pre-Indo-Europeans with little else to tie them to one another. Well, the Iberians were Pre-Indo-Europeans too, so we thought 'why not add the Vasconian and Aquinani cultures to the Iberian Culture Group?'. Historically, Vasconians and Aquitani shared a main tree with the Iberians. The inclusion of this cultures into the group would create a more unique and strong Culture Group, instead of having two weak Groups. The Occidental Group would then consist of the Nuragic, Talaiotic and Corsian cultures. Additionally, the Atlantic Turdulians have been split into a new culture called Oppidanian, as the Turduli Oppidani weren’t Turdulians, this is just a Phonetic coincidence. Here is the new Cultural map:
But don’t worry, Vasconians and Aquitani will maintain their differences with the rest of the Iberians thanks to the Marite Faith of the Iberian Flavour Mod, representing their Atlantic focus, as well as featuring different Emblems and Borders for their Coat of Arms:
Here some examples of the game generating CoAs with some of the new emblems:
Do you think this was the end? There is even more to show! Here you can see the new Iberian Deity icons:
And last but not least, we have given some love to Saguntum, the city that played a key role at the start of the Second Punic War. To start, Saguntum was the Latin name, so the city has been renamed with the native name: Arse. As with the Turdetanians, Arse will start with more centralization that the rest of the surrounding Iberians, a new CoA based on their famous coins and will enjoy a unique heritage:
Now I’ll hand you over to Ben to talk about the new Punic mission tree he’s been working on.
New Punic Mission Tree
Hello everyone! You may remember me from doing heritages in the first dev diary. That’s not all that I’ve been working on, and I’ll be adding a new mission tree to the Punic minor states.
They start the game small, isolated, and totally under control of Carthage. At first glance - not the most fun start. But I see them as a challenge and I want to add flavour to the region to make them a more viable choice to play. Want to build a Punic empire without those pesky Carthaginians? Well now you can.
The mission tree is divided into two main branches: the diplomatic tree and the more aggressive tree. Since the Punic cities start off so small, they have to leverage any advantage they can get in order to not be swallowed up by Carthage.
The more aggressive, warlike tree starts by trying to seek out new allies among either the Numdians of North Africa or the other Punic cities under Carthage’s domination.
Should you choose to appeal to Numidia, they will expect a return to the old ways - the Punic cities will have to pay tribute to them again - in exchange for their military support and their famous cavalry.
On the other hand, appealing to your sister cities will naturally bring with it the political squabbles that plague any league of cities. However, bringing them all into line will bring its own rewards as you have a near-unstoppable force from all the individual cities’ contributions.
Once you have decided where to place your limited diplomatic resources, you can then begin to prepare for the inevitable war. After this point, it’s only up to you as to when to strike - the Punic Revolt task will be available immediately and indefinitely once Prepare for War is done.
It may be worth it to wait for the optimal time, as other powers fighting Carthage may even be willing to offer support in exchange for a well-timed revolt.
On the other hand, you can try and gain favour with Carthage diplomatically, eventually convincing them to grant you autonomy.
This tree starts off with you offering additional tribute in exchange for more diplomatic autonomy and power. You may then proceed to the more interesting and dynamic parts of the tree - leveraging your fleets and naval abilities for land and favour.
With the Shipyards of Carthage task complete, Carthage will expect to be able to call on you for ships in the future in exchange for payment - but should you fail to provide these vessels, you may drop out of favour with the government in Carthago.
Alternatively, you could simply proceed with Protectors of Africa. This is a powerful mission, as it will grant you additional naval bases from Carthaginian territory, allowing you to expand your naval range to encompass all of Africa. However, Carthage will be giving this in exchange for your fleet’s service in defending her shores - the more enemy armies land in Africa, the less they will trust you, and Carthage may eventually decide to seize control of the ports they had given you.
At this point, you are probably fairly powerful. You now have the strength to become independent and survive the process without the backing of Carthage. Naturally they will expect you to remain their allies, but the Senate will probably allow you independence if you’ve shown good service to Carthage thus far.
Finally, the New City task will allow you to build up your capital city to rival Carthage itself, attracting more and more merchants and wealth to you (naturally at the expense of the Carthaginians). At this point, you will have become the dominant power in North Africa, and are now ready to look to the wider world.
That’s all for the Punics for now.
Now back to Snowlet.
Us devs have been working together with the lovely folk in the Molon Labe MP community to tweak several buildings and modifiers to make them more useful and balanced.
To begin we have changed it so you no longer get an extra free resource from Cities. This is both done to balance the City Meta and to be a general nerf to commerce income as less goods are available on the map.
Furthermore, we have applied a -2 civilisation malus to each aqueduct building to end the absurdity of cities being dominated by such buildings, as if they were ancient waterslide parks. The other urban building that has been changed is the earthworks building, whose defensive bonus will be changed from +30% to +60%.
Rural buildings are undergoing even more changes, as the connection between civilisation and output has been a little hard on the countryside since the Marius patch. Therefore, we have raised the civilisation value of the slave estate from 5 to 15, mines and farms from 5 to 10 and tribal settlements and provincial legations from 5 to 25. Provincial legations now also have an increased migration attraction effect but a lower assimilation effect.
In line with this boost to migration, we have also strengthened the effects of the governor’s policies devoted to centralisation and decentralisation, so hopefully these tweaks will help to keep your population moving. Harsh treatment has also been changed now providing slave unhappiness. Finally we have changed the Governor priorities a bit so it will be better at selecting governor policies.
Now for a final announcement, we will be doing a Q&A on the weekend of the 26th of June at 6PM CEST. We will be answering live questions during the twitch stream hosted on DaFoogle's twitch.tv/dafoogle
but we do provide everyone with the chance to send us questions beforehand which we will be sure to provide more detailed answers for, you can presubmit these questions in the Q&A-questions channel on our Discord (https://discord.gg/PfNmH5mAKX) and we will be sure to answer them, no matter what. We won’t be hiding anything during this Q&A so if you ask the right questions, you will be able to find out everything we’re working on.
(Also ignore the twitch warning for adult content, the stream won't be 18+)
Here is a vague teaser for our next DD:
Salvete readers! Today we’ll be talking about Iberia, the Punic states of the Western Mediterranean, several balance changes and an upcoming Q&A.
To begin i’ll hand you over to Tudhaliya
Salvete! I’m @Tudhaliya the Hittite, the Iberian dev of the Invictus team and I have some things to show about the new Iberian setup.
New Turdetanian Setup
Firstly Turdetania, a region that's arguably poorly represented in the current version of the game. Here you can see the region in vanilla as reference:
What immediately struck me were the inclusion of three completely fictional tags and two ahistorical Turdetanian cities (Tartessos was fictional and Ocuri only enters the historical record under Roman administration). Missing from the game are the actual tribes and nations that composed these regions, which we have historical evidence for, thus I felt this region needed a rework. Studying the Turdetanian political situation of the time was quite difficult, but here you can see the new setup (Yes, Bardulia has been renamed Beturia):
To begin, the Massalian tag of Menesthei has been removed due to lack of archaeological and historical evidence. The two original Turdetanian tags have been divided into seven new tags: Hasta, Karmo, Onuba, Kartuba, Orippo, Acinippo and Lascuta. Karmo is the big guy here: the Karmoan army recently conquered the important cities of Astigi, Urso and Celti, creating a strong powerhouse to unify the Turdetanians. Hasta lies near the coast and shares close ties with Gadir. Also, the city-state of Lascuta begins the game as a vassal of Hasta. Onuba faces their own challenges: while they still control the Tharsis Mines, their productivity is down and the Punic settlers are numerous in their lands. Acinippo lies near some rich mines, but their independence is at risk with Carthaginians settlements to their East and South. Orippo and Kartuba are far from the dangers their neighbours face, but this tranquillity makes them easy targets for their more ambitious Iberian neighbours. An important thing to keep in mind is that the Turdetanian culture was an urban culture and, at the time of the Conquest, they were on the last steps to becoming proper states like the Phoenicians or the Greeks. To better represent this increased centralization and administrative capabilities, they will start as Federated Tribes with more Centralization than any other vanilla tribe.
But the most urgent problem for Turdetanian tribes common for all of them, was the Carthaginian menace. At game start, the Turdetanians are divided into two Defensive Leagues: the League of Hasta (Hasta, Gadir and Onuba) and the League of Karmo (Karmo and Acinippo), representing the rivalry between the disparate Turdetanians states.
Each of these new tags will have a unique heritage, some shown below. For the Turdetanian state that can manage to unify the region under one banner, you will be able to form the Tier 2 tag of Tartessia via new decision:
Cultural changes and Art to Iberia and a City that Hannibal hates (and it’s not Rome)
Outside Turdetania, there are more changes for the wider Iberian arena. When reworking the cultures of Iberia, we noticed that the Celt-Iberian culture group was utterly massive, so we found a solution; Vasconians and Aquitani are in the Occidental Group with the Nuragics and Talaiotics, simply because they were Pre-Indo-Europeans with little else to tie them to one another. Well, the Iberians were Pre-Indo-Europeans too, so we thought 'why not add the Vasconian and Aquinani cultures to the Iberian Culture Group?'. Historically, Vasconians and Aquitani shared a main tree with the Iberians. The inclusion of this cultures into the group would create a more unique and strong Culture Group, instead of having two weak Groups. The Occidental Group would then consist of the Nuragic, Talaiotic and Corsian cultures. Additionally, the Atlantic Turdulians have been split into a new culture called Oppidanian, as the Turduli Oppidani weren’t Turdulians, this is just a Phonetic coincidence. Here is the new Cultural map:
But don’t worry, Vasconians and Aquitani will maintain their differences with the rest of the Iberians thanks to the Marite Faith of the Iberian Flavour Mod, representing their Atlantic focus, as well as featuring different Emblems and Borders for their Coat of Arms:
Here some examples of the game generating CoAs with some of the new emblems:
Do you think this was the end? There is even more to show! Here you can see the new Iberian Deity icons:
And last but not least, we have given some love to Saguntum, the city that played a key role at the start of the Second Punic War. To start, Saguntum was the Latin name, so the city has been renamed with the native name: Arse. As with the Turdetanians, Arse will start with more centralization that the rest of the surrounding Iberians, a new CoA based on their famous coins and will enjoy a unique heritage:
Now I’ll hand you over to Ben to talk about the new Punic mission tree he’s been working on.
New Punic Mission Tree
Hello everyone! You may remember me from doing heritages in the first dev diary. That’s not all that I’ve been working on, and I’ll be adding a new mission tree to the Punic minor states.
They start the game small, isolated, and totally under control of Carthage. At first glance - not the most fun start. But I see them as a challenge and I want to add flavour to the region to make them a more viable choice to play. Want to build a Punic empire without those pesky Carthaginians? Well now you can.
The mission tree is divided into two main branches: the diplomatic tree and the more aggressive tree. Since the Punic cities start off so small, they have to leverage any advantage they can get in order to not be swallowed up by Carthage.
The more aggressive, warlike tree starts by trying to seek out new allies among either the Numdians of North Africa or the other Punic cities under Carthage’s domination.
Should you choose to appeal to Numidia, they will expect a return to the old ways - the Punic cities will have to pay tribute to them again - in exchange for their military support and their famous cavalry.
On the other hand, appealing to your sister cities will naturally bring with it the political squabbles that plague any league of cities. However, bringing them all into line will bring its own rewards as you have a near-unstoppable force from all the individual cities’ contributions.
Once you have decided where to place your limited diplomatic resources, you can then begin to prepare for the inevitable war. After this point, it’s only up to you as to when to strike - the Punic Revolt task will be available immediately and indefinitely once Prepare for War is done.
It may be worth it to wait for the optimal time, as other powers fighting Carthage may even be willing to offer support in exchange for a well-timed revolt.
On the other hand, you can try and gain favour with Carthage diplomatically, eventually convincing them to grant you autonomy.
This tree starts off with you offering additional tribute in exchange for more diplomatic autonomy and power. You may then proceed to the more interesting and dynamic parts of the tree - leveraging your fleets and naval abilities for land and favour.
With the Shipyards of Carthage task complete, Carthage will expect to be able to call on you for ships in the future in exchange for payment - but should you fail to provide these vessels, you may drop out of favour with the government in Carthago.
Alternatively, you could simply proceed with Protectors of Africa. This is a powerful mission, as it will grant you additional naval bases from Carthaginian territory, allowing you to expand your naval range to encompass all of Africa. However, Carthage will be giving this in exchange for your fleet’s service in defending her shores - the more enemy armies land in Africa, the less they will trust you, and Carthage may eventually decide to seize control of the ports they had given you.
At this point, you are probably fairly powerful. You now have the strength to become independent and survive the process without the backing of Carthage. Naturally they will expect you to remain their allies, but the Senate will probably allow you independence if you’ve shown good service to Carthage thus far.
Finally, the New City task will allow you to build up your capital city to rival Carthage itself, attracting more and more merchants and wealth to you (naturally at the expense of the Carthaginians). At this point, you will have become the dominant power in North Africa, and are now ready to look to the wider world.
That’s all for the Punics for now.
Now back to Snowlet.
Us devs have been working together with the lovely folk in the Molon Labe MP community to tweak several buildings and modifiers to make them more useful and balanced.
To begin we have changed it so you no longer get an extra free resource from Cities. This is both done to balance the City Meta and to be a general nerf to commerce income as less goods are available on the map.
Furthermore, we have applied a -2 civilisation malus to each aqueduct building to end the absurdity of cities being dominated by such buildings, as if they were ancient waterslide parks. The other urban building that has been changed is the earthworks building, whose defensive bonus will be changed from +30% to +60%.
Rural buildings are undergoing even more changes, as the connection between civilisation and output has been a little hard on the countryside since the Marius patch. Therefore, we have raised the civilisation value of the slave estate from 5 to 15, mines and farms from 5 to 10 and tribal settlements and provincial legations from 5 to 25. Provincial legations now also have an increased migration attraction effect but a lower assimilation effect.
In line with this boost to migration, we have also strengthened the effects of the governor’s policies devoted to centralisation and decentralisation, so hopefully these tweaks will help to keep your population moving. Harsh treatment has also been changed now providing slave unhappiness. Finally we have changed the Governor priorities a bit so it will be better at selecting governor policies.
Now for a final announcement, we will be doing a Q&A on the weekend of the 26th of June at 6PM CEST. We will be answering live questions during the twitch stream hosted on DaFoogle's twitch.tv/dafoogle
(Also ignore the twitch warning for adult content, the stream won't be 18+)
Here is a vague teaser for our next DD:
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Finally a reason to keep legations, Now only Tribal Settlements and Barracks will be instantly destroyed after conquest. ^^
No more 90% of Provinces having Borderlands?
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Yeah! Seasonal output for wheat, will this make food shortages in winter? Or only a small dent unnoticeable for the elephant armies moving through winter?Here is a vague teaser for our next DD:
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Looking good, there seems to be a lot going on considering the proposed release date was June 30th? Though I'm sure it's all in hand everything has been very professional so far.
Is Carthage white yet'?
Is Carthage white yet'?
This alone will be a massive change, curious as to how it will play out.
Will we see diplomatic reputation be more important to be able to trade goods from AIs? Will there now be a slave meta, in which you prevent slaves from upgrading to keep enough people to produce goods? This will be interesting!
Wow how did you even script this? This will be a fun and different gameplay for sure!
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I really loved this DD, I'm glad Iberia is getting some love.
Would you guys consider working in the Iberian map itself? Imho it should have more impassable terrain and choke points in the Sierras and overall make it harder to maneuver in.
Would you guys consider working in the Iberian map itself? Imho it should have more impassable terrain and choke points in the Sierras and overall make it harder to maneuver in.
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I have to say, I'm quite iffy about the civ malus on aqueducts. It feels like a roundabout way of nerfing the damned thing. Can't it just have a hard cap and balance it around cost and output?
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If we could make food the real hard cap for population, then population capacity wouldn’t matter anymore. You could build as many aqueducts as you wanted. But without food your people won’t stay at your city.
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Yes, I agree. I understand the reason for nerfing them but a civ malus is completely counter intuitive. Maybe remove civ bonus and increase cost? Or have alternative and similarly efficient ways to increase pop cap?.
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Originally the idea was to rename aqueducts to slums or housing, in which case the civ malus is very much on point and not counter immersive. I hope that will end up happening still.
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Yeah, that'd be the dream, having food be so important that it actually matters for your provinces, making you actually think about it outside of wars in a border province with not a lot of it.
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There have been several ongoing discussions related to the aqueduct changes. The goal is to realistically-reduce unrealistic-megacities. There's a couple of items to balance. One is that larger cities will indeed have the resources for greater infrastructure and greater population capacity. The other is that there are diminishing returns for these buildings and increasingly larger problems due to overcrowding, sanitation, disease, etc. Without revealing too much (IsaacCat may be on to something above), we have some exciting features planned which add realistic and immersive problems to megacities.
As Lambert's comments indicate, there is ongoing discussions about how to characterize pop capacity and infrastructure. On the one hand, there is an obvious need for an urban housing-type building (hopefully, not many Roman inhabitants lived under the aqueducts). These low-cost units would allow for greater pop capacity but to the detriment of the city's quality (see Arheo's comments above from the DD explaining civ value). However, with the addition of a housing building, where does that leave aqueducts? We now have two pop cap buildings? Well, we could just delete the aqueducts! But removing such an iconic structures would also diminish some immersion. We do have other potential purposes in mind for aqueducts as I mentioned above. However, it's still in development and a topic of discussion (I would add that many of the viewpoints listed here come from an assortment of comments from Invictus devs, content creators, and multi-player testers).
Until we get to that patch in the development cycle, consider this malleable compromise to balance the tension between advantages and associated problems of increasing city size.
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I cant wait to finally play Imperator Rome again with this fantastic mod.
Huge thanks espacially for the addition of other languages than English, normally I dont have a problem playing in English but it truly helps with immersion when you are able to play in your main language.
Coming to the discussion about the aqueducts.
I assume their are many who have a way bigger problem with them than I personally do. I only play single player and dont abuse them that much. (Normally my capital has about 500 pops in the end game and it seems reasonably as its the biggest city of the biggest empire on earth)
What I try to say is that I dont really like the addition of the civ malus when you build an aqueduct. But I agree that the increasing of pop capacity has to be way harder than it is now such as the maintaing of a huge population has to be harder or more costly.
Nevertheless a hard cap for pop capacity would be a thing I personally would not like to see. It should always be possible to increase it but in a different and more costly way than just building aqueducts.
Huge thanks espacially for the addition of other languages than English, normally I dont have a problem playing in English but it truly helps with immersion when you are able to play in your main language.
Coming to the discussion about the aqueducts.
I assume their are many who have a way bigger problem with them than I personally do. I only play single player and dont abuse them that much. (Normally my capital has about 500 pops in the end game and it seems reasonably as its the biggest city of the biggest empire on earth)
What I try to say is that I dont really like the addition of the civ malus when you build an aqueduct. But I agree that the increasing of pop capacity has to be way harder than it is now such as the maintaing of a huge population has to be harder or more costly.
Nevertheless a hard cap for pop capacity would be a thing I personally would not like to see. It should always be possible to increase it but in a different and more costly way than just building aqueducts.
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Hello there everyone, we will be doing the Q&A on the 26th of June, 6pm CEST on DaFoogle's twitch as the mod releases on the 30th.
Most developers of the mod will be there as long with some guests, we will be answering any question in #submit-questions-for-q-and-a in detail, we will not hold back anything.
Once every scheduled question is answered, we will switch to answering live questions, a VOD will be made available for the stream for those who miss it.
We will also be talking about the future of Imperator: Rome in general all the while we will have Invictus open so we can directly show you all the content.
Most developers of the mod will be there as long with some guests, we will be answering any question in #submit-questions-for-q-and-a in detail, we will not hold back anything.
Once every scheduled question is answered, we will switch to answering live questions, a VOD will be made available for the stream for those who miss it.
We will also be talking about the future of Imperator: Rome in general all the while we will have Invictus open so we can directly show you all the content.
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