Avance sobre el próximo parche

[nachinus]

No se si lo habéis leido, porque que yo sepa no ha sido puesto como dev diary en la página de inicio del foro, pero el lunes el director del juego posteó este sobre el próximo parche:

Imperator - Menander Reveal 20/04/27

Salvete Omnes! As promised, today’s dev diary will give you the broad strokes on what you might expect from the Menander update. As you know, the Menander update makes up the ‘culture’ portion of the season of religion and culture. The...

forum.paradoxplaza.com

Me parece muy interesante. Todo cambios que me gustan y precisamente en campos que me interesan.

 

[ashandresash]

No se si lo habéis leido, porque que yo sepa no ha sido puesto como dev diary en la página de inicio del foro, pero el lunes el director del juego posteó este sobre el próximo parche:

Imperator - Menander Reveal 20/04/27

Salvete Omnes! As promised, today’s dev diary will give you the broad strokes on what you might expect from the Menander update. As you know, the Menander update makes up the ‘culture’ portion of the season of religion and culture. The...

forum.paradoxplaza.com

Me parece muy interesante. Todo cambios que me gustan y precisamente en campos que me interesan.

No están todos los cambios que son importantes (economía, diplomacia) pero lo son todos los que están .

Que las facciones políticas tengan agenda, y que el Senado esté relacionado con los personajes, era algo necesario. Este comentario del game designer es especialmente jugoso, ante la pregunta de por qué no simplemente hacer que las familias sustituyan a las facciones políticas:

First of all because factions means we can do neat things (like having the aforementioned Populares and Optimates enter the scene for Rome).
Second: In Republics Minor characters also matter, and can even be consuls.
Third: It also means we can tie their approval to actions that make sense (like a party approving of doing something like confiscating land from great families and wanting certain political goals as objectives).
Fourth: Most of all though, since we are now tying faction votes to the characters that are members of the party we now open up for things like characters swapping party, mattering. Which would not be the case for families. That said, in the new system it may well be the case that some characters (especially weak willed or impressionable ones) will have a tendency to side with their head of family.

Another nice side effect of tying voting to characters is that murder and sending people away, etc will have an impact on how the senate votes

También tiene todo el sentido del mundo hacer de los derechos de ciudadanía una mecánica importante en el juego.

Respecto al funcionamiento del Senado (aunque habrá algún diario específico):

Approval determines if a party votes for or against an issue.
Votes determine how much that decision of theirs matter to you.

So:
You still need a senate majority to do things, but the parties will now vote based on their past impressions of you and the number of votes they wield will be tied to the characters that are their members.

En principio este parche viene sin DLC y está anunciado como el de "verano" (entiendo que para ser lanzado en el mes de junio, pues los suecos en julio cierran el país).

 

[nachinus]

En diplomacia también comenta que van a tocar las relaciones con tributarios.

Pero lo más importante en esta actualización será efectivamente la gestión interior, que es lo que más interés me genera.

El parche de otoño irá sobre guerra, que ya me interesa menos. No se cuanto podrán innovar, pero la parte militar de los juegos de paradox es siempre similar (excepto los hoi, claro) y la tengo muy trillada como para que me excite.

 

[ashandresash]

En cuanto a la parte militar, ya estuvo bien que introdujeran los alimentos en un sistema que no deja de ser el del EU. Una de las cosas que me parecen más interesantes del juego es la relativa autonomía de los generales, y su relación con las tropas. Si ampliaran esa mecánica, y las reformas militares tuvieran algo más de chicha que simplemente elegir "ideas"...

Pero sí, yo preferiría que desarrollaran otros aspectos.

 

[ashandresash]

Nuevo diario, con bastante chicha...

Hello and welcome to another Development Diary for Imperator: Rome and the features of the upcoming Menander update. Today I will be talking about some of the changes we are bringing to cultures and how it interacts with countries, pops and characters.

Before that however I would like to introduce the new Pop Type that the Menander update will bring.

Meet the Nobles
View attachment 573768
In the Menander Update we will be adding a new Pop Type at the top of the societal hierarchy. In Rome these would be the Patrician class, but Nobles are by no means unique to Roman society.
We will likely expand on what Nobles do in the future but for now each Noble will produce the same amount of Commerce as a great number of Citizens, meaning that if they are happy they could bring in quite a bit of gold.

Nobles will however, be very hard to please, with a base pop happiness of -10%, and rare with a base desired ratio of 0 in all territories except country capitals.

View attachment 573769

The happiness of a Noble pop also impacts unrest much more than that of the other pop types, meaning that you may want to consider importing expensive luxuries like gems or precious metals to keep them happy. The Court building will also now increase the desired ratio and happiness of Nobles.

View attachment 573770

On start not many Nobles exist in the world , the ones that do will be spread out in capitals and to some extent in the former Persian & Argead Empire.

Cultural Happiness & Cultural Integration

Up until now the only way for a country in Imperator to rule a large and diverse empire has been to culturally assimilate the vast majority of pops under your control. This is in stark contrast to most empires in the real world (perhaps with the notable exception of Rome itself) where multi-ethnic empires where often the norm and instead chose to integrate the various conquered groups into the power structures in their society.

In the Menander update a system for integrating cultures will be added, as well as a system of bestowing Civic rights on the pops of a culture - regulating how high pops of that culture can promote. If civic rights are at ‘Citizen’, or ‘Noble’ level, all pops of that culture will be treated as a part of your own state culture. The price for this in the short term will be destabilizing the state, and the long term cost a permanently lower happiness for all state culture and integrated culture pops.

View attachment 573812
While this feature is in the process of implementation we can still offer this mockup of what we want the future interface to look like.

Civic Rights & Cultural Happiness

In the Menander each culture inside your country will have an individual Civic Right set. This right can be set to any of the pop types in the game (Slave, Tribesman, Freeman, Citizen or Noble) and will control the highest level a pop of the given culture is allowed to promote.
Default right (ie the rights of newly acquired cultures) will start set at freemen level but can be set to either Freemen, Slaves or Tribesmen by the player. Existing pops that are above their allowed status will in time demote to the highest pop type allowed for their culture.

Changing civic rights of a culture will have a one time cost of Political Influence but more importantly it will impact the Cultural Happiness of that culture.

Cultural Happiness

Together with the re-imagining of Integrated Cultures in the Archimedes update we will remove the concept of blanket wrong culture happiness and wrong culture group happiness.
Instead, every country will have a happiness value for each culture in the game, and will have to manage the happiness of its subjects as a group.

Cultural Happiness will start out similar to the old system but over time through your actions these this will change on an individual culture basis, and will also be affected by the Civic Right that a culture is given in your country.

While you will be able to interact with the happiness of the cultures in your country through events and by granting them privileges through decisions and the like the most significant impact on cultural happiness will be the Civic Rights of a culture both in itself, as pops promote or demote (since pops have different base happiness ratings) but also as the pops and characters of the culture as a whole reacts to the rights it is given (or has taken away).

Integrated Cultures
Cultural Happiness is not the only thing in the Menander update that will regulate the happiness of the cultures in your country. The game will also make a distinction between those cultures that are “integrated” and those that are not.
An Integrated culture is a culture that has the civic rights to promote to Citizens or Nobles, this makes that culture part of the elite in your country.
Each integrated culture will reduce the State Culture Happiness by 5% and exempt all Pops of that culture from cultural assimilation completely.

Since they are considered part of your State Culture, Pops from Integrated Cultures will also get the Happiness modifier that your State Culture pops get - this means that for each culture you integrate you dilute the extra happiness that your state culture enjoys.

Gaining new Integrated Cultures
In order for a culture to be granted Citizen or Noble Rights it needs to first make up a sizable part of the total population in your country. Unlike the effect of changing civic rights for a culture normally integration is not instant. Instead progress will build up over time (with the total time being dependent on the number of pops in your country of the culture) and as long as integration is in progress you will suffer a negative stability penalty.

On the road to integration you will also run into events that pose you with choices relating to the integration of the new culture. You could be asked to take in a new Great family from this culture, to adopt one of their deities, or to make concessions of some sort.

Integrated cultures can also be lost - at a very high cost to cultural happiness.

Related Changes
In order to accommodate the changes we are doing to how happiness works in regards to cultures we will be making some related changes. Base assimilation of culture will be reduced sharply (similar to how we did the same for religious conversion in the Archimedes update), and we will also be splitting up some cultures and culture groups in the world.

These are the biggest changes to the culture setup in the update:

The Celtic culture group has been broken into a Gallic and a Panonian group.
View attachment 573772

Persian Culture Group will be split into 3 new groups: Iranian, Anatolian and Caucasian.
View attachment 573773

The Nilotic Culture Group has been renamed to Egyptian, with 3 subcultures in it.
View attachment 573774

Scythian culture has been split up.
View attachment 573775

Lastly a new Pracyan group has been broken out of the eastern part of the Aryan culture group in India based around the countries using the eastern indo-aryan court dialects. A new Atavi culture has also been added for the tribal peoples in the east-central inland.

View attachment 573776

That was all for today. We hope that these changes taken together will let you interact with the people of your country in a more interesting and believable way, and that the Menander update will bring an end to the rule that all great empires must be mono-cultural ones in Imperator. This is however just the first of the diaries on this new update, more will follow in the coming weeks.

Resumiendo: tenemos nuevo POP, representando a la nobleza (patricios en Roma), se explica con profusión cómo se gestionarán ahora las culturas (que nivel de ciudadanía se les concede, cuáles se integran en el régimen, cómo variará la "felicidad" de cada una de ellas según tus acciones), y los cambios en los grupos de culturas.

No decepciona .

 

[nachinus]

Tendrían que haberse centrado en esto antes que en la religión. Esto si que añade material jugable.

 

[Marirosa]

Pues si la nobleza son los pop nuevos, ¿que representaban antes los ciudadanos? ¿clases medias? jajajaja

 

[nachinus]

Los ciudadanos son los oligarcas locales, no necesariamente patricios, pues están en toda clase de provincias y no son una micro minoría reducida a un puñado de familias.

 

[Toniyoan]

Los ciudadanos son los oligarcas locales, no necesariamente patricios, pues están en toda clase de provincias y no son una micro minoría reducida a un puñado de familias.

El sistema pólitico de la antigüa Roma era bastante extraño, No era familiar, y menos en sentido amplio, era un sistema clientelar, puede compararse al organigrama de las mafias, y luego están los "partidos políticos", optimates y Popularis, Los Patricios son las familias fundadoras de Roma, los nobles son plebeyos (Emigrantes), que han echo fortuna y han sido elegidos Consules,. En la guerra civil de sila ( Cornelio), a la muerte de Mario su sucesor fué Cinna tambien Cornelio

 

[nachinus]

Hablo en terminos del juego. La nueva pop que van a introducir se llama nobles, y tal como explican en el dd, se trataría de una pop muy reducida, solo presente en grandes capitales, y que representa a patricios o alta nobleza en otras culturas.

 

[ashandresash]

El diario de esta semana, monográfico sobre las rebeliones. Como ya adelantaron, se trata de que sean distintas de la mecánica de las guerras civiles. Si a estas llegas por los enfrentamientos con personajes/familias y tienen un carácter global, aquellas se producen por tu relación con las culturas y las provincias, teniendo por tanto una base local (aunque pueda extenderse).

Hello and welcome to another Development Diary for Imperator: Rome
Today I am here to talk about Rebellions in the Hellenistic and Republican era, as well as some changes that we are making to the game to accommodate a more historical outcome.

Rebellions in the era of Imperator: Rome

View attachment 576227
The aftermath of a great deal of Rebellions?

In many ways the era in which our game is set is as much associated with the crumbling of Empires as it is the rise of Rome. Not long prior the Achaemenid Empire was crushed by Alexander the Great, and only a few decades ago his empire then broke apart into pieces, with small regional rulers carving out their own countries from within the empire.
Likewise Rome itself faced local rebellions in various parts of the Empire, both while it was growing and in regions that had been under Roman rule for some time.

Rebellions are something we consider separate from the grand Civil Wars, where the goal was not to carve out a new realm but for Roman politicians and generals to further their ambitions against the Republic itself. Such wars, in which every citizen was supposed to pick a side, we have the Civil War mechanic in the game.
While there is perhaps room for improvement here it does in our opinion reasonably well portray things like the Civil Wars of Sulla or the Dynastic Wars in the Seleucid Empire.

Rebellions in the game on the other hand we have been less happy with. Up until now the rules for a Rebellion have been that once you have a high enough number of people living in disloyal provinces, all such provinces revolt at the same time, in one huge war.
This does perhaps seem to capture the way Alexander’s empire broke apart all at once after his death, but perhaps not for the right reasons. While monarchies are famously unstable on succession, with many rulers spending the first time in power ensuring the loyalty of the provinces they inherited, it is doubtful that all the unhappy people would revolt in a coordinated way throughout your empire. There are very few such grand revolts to find in this era, or even other historical eras.

The gameplay implications were also odd. It meant that expansion in itself was a good way to lower the risk of revolt, since the more land you owned, the more provinces would need to be disloyal before the rebels would dare try their luck.
Rather than a number of small fires that can grow into big ones unless you put them out across a huge realm rebellions are currently either nonexistent or giant wars of independence for all the oppressed peoples in your entire empire.

Changes Rebellions in the Menander Update

View attachment 576206

With the changes coming to how you handle cultures in the Menander update. With each culture in your empire having its own happiness rating within your country, making all of its pops more or less happy with your rule we are now able to offload more of the rebellion mechanic unto pops, but we don't want to do this by having entire cultures revolt together. This simply does not match the historical reality most of the time, and it is also not very enjoyable to play.
Instead we want rebellions to be affected by things like cultural happiness, but ultimately depend on the happiness of your pops, as they exist in your provinces. When the people of a province has had enough they should rebel, with the possibility of said rebellion growing if more nearby provinces join the independence war.

In the Menander Update Rebellions have been reworked to this end. The national rebellion progress bar has been removed completely and instead the loyalty of each province, dependent on the happiness of the pops living there, is what determines when a rebellion breaks out. The rebels will not wait for a better time to strike, once their patience is up they will declare independence and take their chances.

View attachment 576204
(Campania declares independence)

Just as before the main contributing factor for province loyalty is unrest, and unrest still comes from the unhappy pops you have in the territories within each your provinces. Together with the cultural happiness changes described in last week's diary this means that if you treat a culture wrong you may well still see the pops of that culture coming out in Rebellion, but it also means that province that is being particularly harshly taxed will have a much shorter patience, and may well rebel from that alone.

When a province revolts it will form a new country, with the local culture and religion that was dominant in the province as its new state culture and state religion. This new country will immediately be thrown into an independence war, with the goal of securing its future independence. Should more provinces in your empire rebel, they will join the ongoing war if they are of the same culture, or start new individual ones if they are not.

While an independence war as a rule starts as a small revolt it can still grow into a bigger rebellion with more and more provinces throwing off the yoke and joining the ongoing war. This is especially likely if the reasons for the unhappiness that caused the revolt was tied to the low cultural happiness of a culture, rather than something more local.

View attachment 576205
(another province joins the independence war)

Lastly the independence war itself has been updated, instead of a supremacy war, where the way to get a ticking war score over time is to defeat as many as possible of the opponents troops, an independence war now uses a new war goal specific to rebellions.
The rebels are still the aggressors, but they war goal of the independence war is now capturing and holding the rebel capital (consequently it is the capital of the original rebel country that must be defended if more countries join a rebellion). Overall what this means is that in order to put down a rebellion the old owner must bring the fight to the rebels, and the rebels themselves will be able to succeed by just defending themselves, rather than by annihilating all forces of their old oppressors.

View attachment 576208
(An independence war in action)

What about the problems of monarchs on succession? Since I used it as an example above I will add that in monarchies provinces now take a small one time hit to loyalty whenever succession occurs.

Unrest

Another problem with the old rebellion system is that unrest plays too many roles. Unrest mainly comes from unhappy pops living in a territory, and its main effect is to reduce the loyalty of the province that territory is in. This much is something we like.
But unrest also has a number of other effects such as reducing manpower, taxes, etc, often the very things that the low happiness of your pops have already caused.

In the Menander update we have streamlined unrest a bit. It will now almost only come from one source: Unhappy pops.
Unrest will also no longer have any effect on the economy of a territory in itself at all. When you see unrest in a province what you see is how rebellious it is. Currently it does still have an effect on things like assimilation, migration and conversion however, this is subject to change still.

View attachment 576207
(unrest as it currently stands in the internal build)

Existing things that affected unrest directly have now all been converted either to something that affects happiness or other things when that makes sense.

What about subject countries?

We will get back to subject countries in a future diary. For now I will say that when a rebellion breaks out a subject country of the right culture can join the independence war just like rebellious provinces can, given the right circumstances. The new independence war goal is also available for all subject countries against their overlord, with its focus on the aggressor surviving by defending themselves, rather than by defeating all armies of their former overlord.

That was it for today!
I hope that you will enjoy these changes, which we are now busy trying out and balancing. As usual any numbers you see in the text or in screenshots are to be considered work in progress.

 

[ashandresash]

Más información sobre 1.5 en el diario de desarrollo de hoy.

En primer lugar, recortes: para llegar en las fechas previstas (antes de verano), finalmente no se incluirán los cambios anunciados respecto a los vasallos.

Subject progression, the system of evolving relationships between overlord and subject that we announced in the first overview of Menander, is cut from 1.5.

Respecto a aspectos que sí irán en el parche, hoy se han centrado en los cambios sobre el sistema comercial; todo muy interesante:

- El número de rutas comerciales dependerá fundamentalmente del número de ciudadanos y, sobre todo, nobles, de una provincia.
- La riqueza comercial no la generarán ciertos POPs como hasta ahora, sino las mismas rutas comerciales. Las de exportación generarán más ingresos, frente a las de importación y las domésticas.
- Cada producto tendrá su propio valor, abandonando la "tarifa plana" actual.
- Seguirán existiendo las bonificaciones por los superávits de productos en la capital, pero desaparece el de exportación, y el local se unifica (ya no habrá uno para la provincia y otro "acumulable" para la capital de la aquella: los efectos serán para todos los territorios). La mayoría de los productos ahora supondrán una mejora de la felicidad de una categoría de POPs.

Lo que me genera más dudas es que la mayor parte de la investigación dependerá de los nobles, mientras que parece que a los ciudadanos les dan el papel de generar la mayoría del manpower. Habrá que ver cómo queda el esquema general de los POPs (ha habido bastante debate al respecto en el foro guiri). pero a priori creo que debería haber conflicto entre nobles y ciudadanos.

Aquí el diario (la primera parte explica por qué se "recorta" lo de los vasallos y el papel del productor en los juegos de Paradox):

Disclaimer: the first bit of this DD talks about the internal nuts and bolts operation of a dev team itself, not game features. If that doesn't interest you, you can safely skip to the second portion with the gameplay screenshots.

Hi all. Jamor here with this week's Imperator dev diary. Some of you may be wondering, "who's this dude, he's not Arheo or Trin Tragula?". Well, I could never step in to those inimitable shoes, but I am in fact the producer of Imperator: Rome.

Now what does that mean, exactly? Often I see people mixing up the roles of Game Director,Technical Lead,and Producer when talking about our teams. This is entirely understandable since in the old days, when PDS was a lot smaller, the roles were often combined in one person. However, when a game and the company as a whole gets to a certain size and complexity, it pays to get specialization of effort. Here's what Arheo (GD), Egladil (Tech Lead), and I do:

Game Director: the owner of the creative vision for the project. Head of Design. Decides 'what' we are going to try to do.

Tech Lead: runs the technical implementation of the game, all its features and under the hood systems. Leads and organizes the work of the programmers. Master of the innumerable builds and branches we maintain, figuring out when to merge branches in to the main trunk, all that stuff. Figures out the 'how' part of carrying out the goals set by the GD.

Producer: in charge of time and budget. Making sure we put all the pieces of the puzzle together, programming, design, art, writing, script, localization, audio, backend and store pages for all the various places our game is sold, so we can get a video game product out the door and in to your hands. The slave of time, the one resource that once spent, can never be got back. Decides on the 'how much, and when'.

We have a lot of autonomy within the dev teams at PDS compared to other parts of the industry. This triumvirate makes most of the tactical decisions about the project, where we settle on a scope that's deliverable with the time and resources we have. My colleague Shams Jorjani likes to say that "ideas are cheap", and he's 100% right: good ideas are the absolute easiest part. Everyone has them. The mind freed from any practical constraints and operating purely in the realm of unfettered imagination is an incredibly creative thing. When we get back to reality though, we have to have the self-discipline to temper our exuberant dreams in to something that is shippable with the team and time slots we actually have, in the real world where deadlines and interdependencies and team bandwidth exist. If we said “yes” to everything, we might ship a perfect, world-changing video game in 2058, but the lights would be off a lot sooner than that. That's where I come in.

So what does all this mean and why is this guy taking up a DD slot?

First answer is, Arheo, Egladil and the rest of the team are working on finishing up 1.5 Menander, and I want them to have maximum focus on that right now. But also -

The big reason:

Subject progression, the system of evolving relationships between overlord and subject that we announced in the first overview of Menander, is cut from 1.5.

In my role, I have to keep on top of project scope. What that means is, do we have the people, time, and capacity from our supporting teams (like DevOps, Product Launch, QA, Art, Audio, Localization), and general ability to ship this update with this feature set? Can we hit a date that has to be agreed with external partners like the digital stores we're on, months in advance?

If upon digging in to implementation and finding out that we were too ambitious with our desired content for the release, the answer becomes plainly "no", I have to step in and reduce scope. Sometimes, sadly, that means cutting a feature. We always try to do this before it is announced to you, the fans, but there's a constant conflict between wanting to avoid building false expectations versus wanting to meet the demand for news about future content. In this case, we announced the feature, then when we got in to implementation found out the 1.5 update was going to be heavier than we thought. So, unfortunately, something had to come out. That's when duty obliges me to put on the black hat and get the chopping hatchet out. It's disappointing for us as much as you, but now at least you know who to be cranky at. It's not my game director, tech lead, or anyone else on the dev team, nor on the biz side of the company. Odd fate decreed it would be me, an old QA guy and fan of more than a decade. But as we say, "it is what it is".

As a long time Paradox fan who moved halfway around the world after playing our games since HOI2, I gotta tell you, cutting sucks. I'm a gamer too, and I want the cool thing in as much as anyone. But if that cool thing puts us over capacity, to the point where I'd have to ship it with terrible quality or at too harsh a cost on my team's well being, I gotta cut it. There's a saying in the games industry, that you have to be ready to kill your babies: what they mean by that is, working in this creative field that is ruled by practical limitations of time and resources, you have to be prepared to delay, shrink, or cut your features sometimes. It's just like any other thing in life where hopes meet reality.

What does this mean? Is subject progression gone forever? Probably not, in fact. As you might know, Imperator is trying out a new mode of releases for PDS. We aim to do smaller but more frequent updates compared to the massive once or twice a year things our other games have traditionally done. I'll tell you the same thing I told my guys, when I ran the numbers and things didn't fit: this feature is very cool, and it deserves better than to be rushed out with poor quality. We'll pause it for now, and come back to it in a future release when we have the time and resources to do it justice, and make something the fans deserve. With this new style of more frequent updates, that might not be too far off in the future, wherever we can make it fit. For now, our focus will be on getting 1.5 fun, stable, and playable by all of you in time for the summer vacation period.

So. I know this has been a bit of a departure from the normal DD, but I hope this glimpse in to the reality of production has been illuminating for you. I'll try to answer the questions I can in the thread.

If you want to hear more about my mindset and techniques in production, the delicate art of balancing creativity and reality, here’s a talk I did at PDXCon 2018:

Applying Military Principles to Game Development

Also, to soften the blow a bit, here's a message from our Game Director about some cool stuff that is going in to 1.5 Menander:

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

This week will not be lacking any feature reveal however, as I show you a small project I’ve been working on in response to many of the comments about pops and pop-classes, that I read following the reveal of the nobles poptype and cultural integration.

The trade module of the game is something that I believe has the potential to augment the pops system considerably, and should be vital to a functioning empire. In its current form, however, trade can be hard to get into, difficult to rationalize, and fails to accurately portray the sheer economic power behind goods such as dyes and spices.

What this is -not-, however, is a full trade rework. Though there may be a time to cover trade in such a manner, the purpose of this small redesign is to both integrate trade to the pops system in a more rational way, and to add some variety to tradegoods while culling some of the modifier duplication.

As you can see here, nobles (and citizens) will now be responsible for flexing their buying power, contributing to the number of trade routes present in a province. This value will directly correlate to the number of citizens and nobles, and will not take pop happiness into account.

Commerce generation has been removed from pops, with the aim being to use trade routes to generate wealth and to keep pops happy. Nobles currently produce a significant amount of research, and play an important part in the tech system; with a moderate number of nobles doing the lion’s share of the work in contributing to state research. Their happiness however, will still be a significant hurdle to overcome.

Old buildings have been slightly repurposed to augment the number of trade routes that you’ll get from pops in a city, and work is ongoing to redefine how provincial investments will apply to the trade module.

Is that it? Certainly not.

What about trade goods themselves? Well, most goods will now contribute a small amount to the happiness of a poptype, and will be categorized as such:

This ‘local’ bonus will now stack in the entire province, effectively rolling the provincial capital bonus and the province bonus that used to be present, into one.

Capital surplus has remained untouched, as this was always a pretty cool way of contributing to the uniqueness of your nation, choosing which goods to ‘spec’ your country with.

Export bonus has been entirely removed, as this was something that was the hardest for me personally to rationalize, and added another layer of decision-making to every trade offer or deal with a foreign nation.

What the eagle-eyed amongst you will notice, is that it has been replaced with a Base Value. This base value is related to the value of the good itself - Papyrus commands a hefty price of 0.4 gold per month, whereas Leather is valued at 0.15 gold per month.

Importing a tradegood will earn you only 35% of the value of the good, and internal trade even less. Exporting is where the true value lies, with 100% of the trade taxes flowing directly to your coffers. It’s important to remember here, that as the government of your nation, you aren’t purchasing the import of a trade good; you’re encouraging the creation of private trade in that material from A to B. There is no reason you’d be paying to import material, although the taxes you earn will be less to simulate the amount being spent to keep the route running at your behest.

That’s about the extents of the tradegood rework I had planned. Let me know what you think in the comments below, and as usual, everything you see is WIP; especially numbers!

/Arheo

 

[ashandresash]

Muy bueno el diario de esta semana (todos lo han sido hasta ahora, en realidad). Centrado en los cambios en la política interna de las repúblicas:

- El nuevo sistema de partidos (serán tres en lugar de cinco: en Roma, optimates, populares y boni).
- La agenda de los partidos. Cada uno tendrá sus "objetivos" (leyes que deberían estar vigentes, declaraciones de guerra, obras en ciertas provincias, acciones a favor o en contra de alguna familia...) que complicarán la vida de los cónsules (la facción "gobernante" esperará que su programa se cumpla).
- El nuevo cálculo de los votos en el Senado, que dependerá de los personajes de la república. Habrá personajes más influyentes que otros, "militarán" en un partido (podrán cambiar, alterando los equilibrios políticos) y permitirá por tanto más interacción con los partidos (a través de lo que hagas con los personajes con más peso en el Senado).
- Cada partido dará un nivel de aprobación a tu gobierno, en función de tus acciones, que pueden ser valoradas de forma contraria por los distintos partidos.

Hello all!

Today @Arheo and I will be covering the upcoming rework of republic government mechanics.

First up is Arheo:

To begin with, I’d like to explain a bit about the process that led to the changes you’ll hear about.
The republican senate mechanics began their life as a ‘catch-all’ government type that was intended to represent all democratic nations on the map. During development, we realised we wanted to be able to have the senate able to act as a core consideration in a republic player’s game loop, by adding the ability for our Content Designers to add weights to individual actions, so that each faction could simulate an ‘opinion’, depending what you wanted to do.

It succeeded in part; the senate could be manipulated if you knew where to look, yet it was often very unclear why the senate voted any given way, without scrolling through a yard of tooltips and numbers. Perhaps even more importantly, it became such a huge task to consider every time we wanted to add new character or diplomatic actions, that ultimately it had to go.

So we went back to the drawing board. I had several primary goals in mind for the faction rework:

• That it should more accurately represent the political make-up of the roman senate
• That the senate still had the ability to get in your way and be an important, distinctive part of republic gameplay
• That we bring characters and votes more closely together
• That factions are much more dynamic, and can, in future, be expanded upon to add all manner of new content to nations

I’ll hand over to @Trin Tragula here, who’ll explain quite how we went about fulfilling these aims.

The Republican Senate

In a Republic the citizens of a state exercise power through an assembly and the most well known such assembly in our game is probably the Roman Senate.The historical senate did not have parties as such, but at any given time there would often be factions gathering senators around them. While all senators had the right to vote it was also not always the case that everyone made the choice of how to exercise that vote for themselves.

Just as often a senator would vote to satisfy obligations that he might have to one of the more politically active members of the senate, or along friendship lines. Likewise any assembly made out of people will feature some that are more impressionable than others.

In the Roman Senate those who voted without speaking were often referred to as “Pedarii” since voting was often conducted by Senators moving from one side of the assembly to the other to show their support or disagreement with the current speaker, and any politically ambitious Senator would have to have earned the trust of a number of such pedarii. Senate politics was often as much about how many others you could mobilize around you as it was about high ideas and ideologies.
Which is not to say that ideals were unimportant in politics, no senate relies only on favors to function, but the system that has been in the game up until now has been relying on parties always voting exactly along the lines of an imagined ideology on every issue, when in reality this influence is less direct and influential politicians could most of the time get support for their ideas based on a combination of trust and individual merit.

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In the Menander update we have revamped the party system altogether. Gone is the large number of generic parties that corresponded to vague ideas and instead we have gone with parties that correspond to political groupings of the era. This also means that we now have 3 parties at any given time for you to balance, with their membership and influence more in flux. Rather than trying to map the parties to issues you care about we have also tried to make the issues the parties care about matter to you (more on that below).

Parties

The Roman Parties are based on the political groupings that existed in the later part of the life of the Republic though they do not mimic them exactly:

Optimates
This party represents primarily aristocrats of ancient pedigree. They oppose the rise of New Men and the influence of common people on the senate. The Optimates believe that the populares are a destructive force that will wreck the ancient privileges and traditions of the republic.

Boni
The Boni try to strike a balance between looking to the needs and wants of the poor masses, while still preserving stability and acting through gradual reform. They believe that the way forward is through the senate, and using the existing rules, rather than radical reform and empowering popular movements. The boni believe they are looking out for the best of the country as a whole instead of supporting any particular group in society. Their opponents believe they will favor the status quo at any cost.
In Roman historiography the Boni and Optimates are often used as synonyms. Here we use them to separate those that seek to protect and preserve the ideals of the old Republic, such as Cicero, from those that more purely seek power on the behalf of those already privileged.

Populares:
The “men of the people”, claim to act in the interest of the common people such as indebted farmers, poor aristocrats and veterans that could not adapt to life after war. The Populares oppose the Optimates in almost every way. They are happy to overthrow old traditions and the privileges of the few, to empower and enrich the many and those who can sway them.

Votes & Party Membership

In the Menander update the votes that the parties of the Senate wield are no longer dependent on discrete modifiers, instead they come from the characters that are part of its membership.
Every character in a country will now have a Senate Influence rating, and when added together for all characters in a party this determines how many votes a party has.

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How much Senate Influence each character has can vary greatly. With some being good for many more votes than others. This means that it will now be possible to handle a particularly troublesome party by trying to get rid of their influential members. Should such a character abandon one party for another it will also now have a much more deeply felt effect.

The Senate influence of a character is based on their power base. But it is also modified by a number of factors, such as traits (an Orator will have increased influence, as will characters with high popularity) or jobs.
A character being made governor or general will see their influence sharply reduced, despite their now increased power base as it is hard (if not impossible) to exert influence over the Senate when you are not in the capital.

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Likewise the factors that contribute to a character changing their party membership have been revisited, with their personality traits and social standing now playing a much bigger role in where their loyalties lie. Some further examples to illustrate this are is that some characters that are less independent minded will tend towards supporting the party of their Head of Family, while others would shun the party of their Head of Family for exactly that reason.


Party Approval & Abuse of Power

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Just as before the parties of the Senate will be able to vote on many of the actions you take, and will be able to obstruct the rule of a weak consul. As seen above their power to support or obstruct your actions hinges on the influence of their members. Their willingness to support you however is no longer dependent on the action being taken. Instead every party will now have an approval value, reflecting the favor you have gathered with this party through your actions as a ruler. If you give land to heads of families the Optimates will approve, but if you hold triumphs for Minor Characters they will lose approval. Members of the Boni will applaud upholding the ideals of the Republic, while Populares and Optimates will both favor curtailing them in various ways.
Ideas and political intrests thus remain very important to the functioning of the Senate, but you can also reliably muster support for your actions by ensuring that all parties get to do at least some of what it is they want.

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Approval is useful since it determines how parties will vote. As long as you have sufficient approval from the parties in your Senate you can do _almost_ anything (the current Support you have in the Senate is something you can always see in the top bar).
Should you abuse this power however it may come back to harm you, the parties have opinions on everything you do and if you use their votes to do things they do not approve of they are unlikely to support you in the future.
This is especially true if you stop them from pushing through their Party Agendas...

Party Agendas & The Consular Veto

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At any given time every party in your Senate will have an Agenda that they wish to see fulfilled. These are always visible in the government screen and can range from quite reasonable things like improving the infrastructure in some province to far less easily accommodate things such as the changing the laws, or confiscating land from Heads of Family.
Sometimes the parties will even propagate for the declaration of war on other countries.

Should you at any time fulfill the Agenda of a party you will have their gratitude, in the form of a nice boost to their approval in the Senate.

You cannot however rely on the parties staying silent about their Agendas. If one of their members holds the consulship they will expect to be able to fulfill their Agenda. As long as there is sufficient approval you can be sure that the party in power will try to push its Agenda through the Senate. When this happens you will be presented with a choice of either allowing it or using the Consular Veto, which will stop the agenda from being pushed through during this term.

Opposing the ruling faction can be costly however. Using the veto against the ruling faction will see their approval plummet, in a way that may be hard to recover in a timely manner.

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More Republics, More Parties

This Diary has focused on the Roman parties but we are revamping the system for all Republics in the game. Menander will also feature 3 new parties for other Republics, which are more inspired by the world of Greek Politics, but also more general since they need to work in many parts of the world.

These parties are:

The Oligarchs
This party represents the richest members of your society, as well as the ancient noble families. They seek to increase their wealth and power and are less afraid of making use of the masses to reach their goals than the Roman Optimates are.

The Democrats
Democrats seek to preserve the freedoms of the citizens in their society, they are less focused on personal honor than the Roman populares but just as intent on acting against the interests of the Oligarchs.

The Traditionalists
The traditionalists are focused on avoiding disturbing the gods and preserving the privileges of the priesthood. They are no pacifists but they will oppose the sacking of holy sites of your religion and will in general take a conservative position on many things. Where the Boni yearn for the old Roman virtues and the founding principles of the Republic the Traditionalists are far less concerned with such political ideals.

Since we want to take the time to make them special we have for now focused on making the Roman parties perform as we want, and adding a reasonable general setup for the other (largely but not only Greek) Republics. It was important to us that even these generic parties should model real life social struggles and interest groups, since that was in our opinion one of the major failings of the old system.
In the future however we want to add more country or culture specific parties to Republics around the world. Something this new system should lend itself well to support.

As usual anything you see here is subject to change to some degree even if the underlying mechanics described are accurate for the current state in development.

Whether you are playing with the Roman parties or the more general ones we think these changes significantly change how Republics play and we hope you will enjoy it

Cambios muy interesantes, que junto a los ya anunciados (interacción con las diferentes culturas y rebeliones) deja una política interna muy aparente, además de los cambios en el comercio. Y con este diario habrían abordado ya todos los temas principales que anunciaron (ya dijeron que la relación con estados vasallos queda para otro parche), de modo que... el lanzamiento debe de estar cercano.

 

[nachinus]

Creo que dijeron antes del verano. Y estamos ya casi en junio....

 

[ashandresash]

Espero que salga antes del 15 de junio y les dé tiempo a pulirlo antes de irse de vacaciones, que para los suecos julio es sagrado. Si no se sacan nada de la manga, quedarían un par de diarios (el de los cambios "menores" —equilibrio del juego, interfaz, etc— y el listado completo del parche).

La verdad es que, al menos sobre el papel, con este parche lograrían entrelazar bien las piezas que habían incluido para representar el sistema político romano (familias, personalidades, partidos, Senado). Echaría en falta en esta dimensión del juego integrar los POPs, que ahora mismo son un poco "cajón de sastre", y que podrían tener su protagonismo en la conformación de movimientos sociales, sobre todo hacia el late game (representando las crisis que atravesó la república).

 

[ashandresash]

En esta ocasión el diario es más light. Abunda en la integración cultural (lo fundamental ya lo presentaron anteriormente), mostrando los cambios en la interfaz y en los modos del mapa para gestionar esta nueva mecánica, y, lo más novedoso, las "decisiones culturales". Según el estatus de cada cultura podrás tomar ciertas decisiones que influirán sobre su felicidad, producción, asimilación, distribución territorial..., y que estarán conectadas con el sistema político (los partidos valorarán de forma diferente esas decisiones).

Además, anuncian que pondrán a la venta el DLC que regalaban con la preorden de compra (Epiro), añadiéndole misiones propias a ese país que explicarán en el próximo diario (¿penúltimo?). Evidentemente, a quienes ya tengan ese DLC se les actualizará.

Greetings all!

Before @Trin Tragula continues with a further look at the Cultural Integration feature, I’d like to inform you of the accompanying release to the 1.5 Menander update - the Epirus Content Pack.

Now, for those of you with long memories, you’ll remember that the Epirus pack was something we offered as a pre-order bonus to those eager to get their hands on the game. There’s been noticeable demand from those of you who missed the opportunity to purchase this post-launch, so we’ve decided to make this available for purchase.

Given the progress development over the last year or so, we’ve ended up with a lot more interesting things we can add to content packs, so I decided that we’d augment the Epirus pack with a series of new mission chains.

@Chopmist has been secreted away in his laboratory creating these for you, and will lead you through them in detail next week!

As a final note, I’ll confirm that those of you who pre-ordered the game and received the Epirus pack last April, will receive the new missions without having to purchase any new content.

Now back to @Trin Tragula and Culture!

So since we last wrote about the upcoming overhaul for culture in the Menander Update we have been hard at work implementing our ideas. Today I can show you more on how things have been shaping up and what you can expect from some of the things mentioned only in passing in the last diary.

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As we talked about in the first Diary about our rework of the Cultural relationship you have with your pops the most important thing that the Menander update brings is that a culture will now have an associated Civic Right - regulating what pop type the pops of that culture can at most promote to. Pops can exist above their allowed level but in these cases they can only demote.
Additionally the number of pops that demote when land changes hands, and the speed of assimilation have both been reduced.

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Additionally, if a culture has the Civic Right that allows promotion to Citizens or Nobels, it is considered an integrated culture and will make use of the same Happiness as your country’s main culture does.
Changing Civic Right is normally instant (but the promotion or demotion of pops to match their new right can take quite some time) but when integrating a culture it takes a longer period of time your stability decreases. Integration will also prevent you with some choices (events) for choices and challenges that the integration process itself entails.
Each integrated culture reduces the total happiness for all integrated cultures (including your own primary culture) this means that you may want to limit yourself in how many cultures you give equal rights as Nobles or Citizens.

Cultural Decisions:
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What are Cultural Decisions?
Cultural Decisions are essentially Rights and Privileges that you can grant to individual cultures in your country. As a rule these cost stability to enact and will change the happiness, output or individual pop happiness for pops of a specific culture. There will also be an associated negative national modifier for a limited time, during which your society is adjusting to the newly granted right or privilege. During this adjustment period you cannot grant the same right to another culture.

There are 3 groups of decisions, depending on if they selected culture is your own primary culture, an integrated culture or if it is a non-integrated culture.
Which decisions make sense to take for each culture will depend on the circumstances in your campaign. You may find that granting privileges is mostly worth doing for the larger and more influential cultures in your country, while some others only make sense for the smaller ones.

As always numbers should be taken with a grain of salt since balancing is an ongoing process while we play with the new features.

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Non-Integrated cultures will be the vast majority of peoples you control for any country of reasonable size.
Cultural rights was not a binary thing in the era covered by the game. Some peoples would often have different rights than others. The decisions for non-integrated cultures range from some that let you regulate what you get out of their pops (Right to Enter Legal Contracts) to those that increase their happiness (Right of Inheritance).
There are also some that can be useful for actually assimilating another culture, such as founding a settlement in their lands or granting rights of intermarriage.

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Integrated cultures are those that have risen to almost the same status as your country’s primary culture. These are part of the ruling classes but rather than having a long history in your country they have been integrated through the process described earlier.
Since integrated cultures are rarer, and more closely tied to your state, the decisions they have access to are a bit more powerful in what they do.

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Examples of decisions for integrated cultures range from idealizing their culture, or employing them as administrators to rule other cultures in their group (reducing their efficiency but also increasing the happiness for those they help you rule), you can also grant one of their communities self rule as a Client City State (or feudatory).

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The Primary culture is the one that your country’s ruling class all came from originally. For most countries this is the culture that is the most numerous at start, though there are some notable exceptions among the great empires, especially among the Greek Successor Kingdoms.
Primary culture decisions tend to have a wider effect than those for other cultures. Here you can decide to do things like Abolish the Census Tax for all Citizens and Nobles, permanently increasing Primary and Integrated Culture Happiness while also reducing the output of your elite.
Some decisions also have a secondary effect that affects the characters in your country, such as making trials more likely to succeed against characters that are not of your primary culture, or allowing adoption and the rise of families from outside of your primary culture (this is now off by default).

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As you have likely seen in the prior screenshots, the culture interface itself which was just a mockup in the last diary has now been worked on quite a bit. It aims to give a good overview of all you need to know to handle the cultures within your country.
It allows sorting and filtering all cultures, shows the current pop type right as well as the current pop type distribution within any culture in your country.
You can also see and enact cultural decisions, or change pop type right.

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Being able to see where each culture or religion is dominant has been possible since release via their respective map modes. But seeing exactly where one culture starts and the other stops, or where there are large minorities of a culture is something that the map mode up until now has not supported very well.
In the Menander Update we have added functionality to show only one selected culture, highlighting all places where pops of that culture exists in minority as well as where they are dominant.
This will allow you to better see where pops of a culture or religion exists and can help guide your decisions for how to deal with that culture in terms of Cultural Decisions, as well as for planning military expansion, appointment of governors, etc.
In the culture interface there is also a button on each culture in your country open this map mode with that culture selected. This way you can even see the location of minority cultures that are not dominant in any part of the map

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Apart from its gameplay use I find the culture interface and map mode useful because it shows all the minorities that exist around the world at any point in time for various historical reasons. We have also taken this opportunity to once again update minorities worldwide, and make the starting map a more interesting place.

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Here is what Carthage looks like with different cultures select in the culture map mode.

That was all I had to talk about today about the changes coming to cultures and how you deal with them. The system is still being tweaked and worked upon, but to us the world already feels more alive.

 

[Alaursu]

Espero que salga antes del 15 de junio (...)

¿Entiendo que no hay fecha de salida? Tenía ganas de volver al juego después de un par de meses sin abrirlo, pero igual me espero al parche.

 

[ashandresash]

¿Entiendo que no hay fecha de salida? Tenía ganas de volver al juego después de un par de meses sin abrirlo, pero igual me espero al parche.

No, no hay anuncio. Era mera especulación, basada en lo que apuntaron en un diario anterior: que eliminaron una mecánica anunciada para cumplir con el plazo interno. Y éste supongo que estará condicionado por que los suecos cierran el país por vacaciones en julio, y por las ofertas de verano de Steam, que empiezan el 25 de junio... Quizás lo hagan coincidir, para animar las ventas.

Yo de hecho empecé hace unos días partida con una monarquía (Siracusa) porque el parche afectará sobre todo a las repúblicas.

 

[nachinus]

El parche trae cambios tan gordos que no creo que los saves sean compatibles. Si no eres de los que acaban una partida en dos semanas yo me esperaría, porque lo que trae es muy jugoso y creo que va a mejorar bastante el juego.

 

[ashandresash]

Como era previsible, esta semana el diario se ha centrado en la revisión que han hecho del contenido sobre Epiro que incluyeron en la preorder, y que ahora será un DLC.

Muy centrado en las andazas de Pirro, hay tres árboles de misiones: el habitual de "consolidación" del país y dos de expansión, hacia el oeste (que puede llevar a la anexión o avasallamiento de Magna Grecia, y el enfrentamiento con Roma y Cartago) y hacia el este, buscando la "restauración" de la Macedonia de Alejandro.

Greetings fellow Epirotes, I hope you're ready for a long be-screenshotted dev diary.

That's right, today I will be talking a little (!) about the three new mission trees included in the re-release of the Epirus Pre-Order Pack, and the history that inspired them. ‘Only three?’ I hear you say? Fear not, they are chock-full of flavor and tasks.

The decades preceding our start date were rather turbulent for Epirus, with the two main branches of the ruling Aeacid dynasty - supposedly direct descendents of the hero Achilles and named for his grandfather Aeacus - fighting each other for the throne, and being picked off by wars in Italy and Macedon.

Pyrrhus was himself forced to flee to neighboring Taulantia as an infant when his father Aeacides was deposed by the dominant Molossian tribe - under encouragement from Cassander in Macedon - who installed Aeacides’ older brother Alcetas II in his place along with a Macedonian governor. While his son was living in exile, Aeacides was killed fighting the forces of Cassander in support of the claims of his ill-fated cousin Olympias’ descendants.

Molossian Consolidation
By 304 BC, Pyrrhus had been re-installed on the throne by the Taulantian king, Glaukias, after Alcetas II was deposed and killed (you may see a trend developing). His main rival is his second cousin Neoptolemus who is arguably a more deserving claimant, being the son of Alexander I of Epirus and daughter of Cleopatra of Macedon - Alexander the Great's only full sibling - thereby making him both an Argead and an Aeacid.

Historically, Pyrrhus was deposed once again and replaced by Neoptolemus in an event chain which owners of the pre-order DLC will already be familiar with, sending him to the diadochi courts where he seeks support for his claim on Epirus’ throne. Historically, he went to the Antigonids - as Demetrius Poliorcetes had recently married his sister Deidamia - and fought with their military, before ending up in the Ptolemaic court as part of hostage negotiations after the battle of Issus.

The new missions allow you to organize a royal marriage with any of the successor kingdoms, thereby guiding which court Pyrrhus flees to if he is deposed and thus the marriage and support he may acquire while away.

The old event arranging an Antigonid-Aeacid marriage will still fire as usual for non-DLC owners.

Pyrrhus’ return to Epirus works much as before, though some new events will detail the continued rivalry between Neoptolemus - or whoever is the most eligible pretender - and Pyrrhus, leading to a violent resolution and the ascendance of the favoured prince.

The first mission tree, 'Molossian Consolidation', is centered around the politics, development, and minor expansions of the realm under Neoptolemus and earlier on in Pyrrhus’ time on the throne. The king-making power of the Molossians will need to be checked by the new monarch, and there are plenty of opportunities for expanding the pantheon, developing Epirus' core territories, and deciding how to deal with your northern, western, and southern neighbors.

As the eagle-eyed have already spotted, Epirus no longer owns Ambrakia from the start, which is now an OPM and tributary of Macedon alongside Akarnia - other victims of Cassander’s garrisons. But you need not fret, Epirus is no weaker than it was before, and there will be an opportunity to claim the territory without bloodshed as your campaign develops.

The above is part of one of a number of free minor DHEs (dynamic historical events) coming with the 1.5 patch to add a bit more historical flavor to Macedon and the fraught Antipatrids. There are also a few extra flavor events for Pyrrhus outside of the missions that feature some of the events of his life and those who affected it, which can have some ahistoric outcomes.

Alexandrine Ambition
Now, Pyrrhus is of course most famous for his campaigns in Italy, inspired by those of his cousin Alexander I of Epirus who died fighting the Bruttians and Lucanians and was himself attempting to emulate his nephew Alexander the Great’s eastern conquests in the west. However, Pyrrhus was famously akratic, changing his objectives on a whim and pursuing many simultaneous opportunities. To reflect this, Epirus will be able change between the two other mission trees - ‘Alexandrine Ambition’ and ‘Hellenic Contender’ - without a cooldown or loss of progress while Pyrrhus is their ruler, though at a cost to the court's confidence in their leader.

The 'Alexandrine Ambition' mission tree offers opportunities to involve yourself in the wars of Magna Graecia by aiding the Greek city states against Italic aggressors, seek revenge for the defeats of your dynasty, and perhaps even achieve glorious victory over the Romans and Carthaginians - thereby cementing your position as the hegemon of the west.

Historically, Pyrrhus used his reputation as a great warrior, the threat of the Italic and Punic powers, and the renowned skills of his diplomat Cineas to win over the Greek city states and be appointed to lead their forces. This tree will allow you to gain Italiote and Siceliote subjects and alliances in a similar manner, though - as Pyrrhus found - failing to live up to your ambitions in a timely manner may undermine your diplomatic efforts.

In seeking dominance over Magna Graecia Epirus will undoubtedly come into conflict with one of the nascent Italian powers, be it Rome or some other, and may attempt to negotiate a truce, an offer the Romans famously turned down after the condemnation of the Appius Claudius Caecus, or simply triumph over the barbarians as Pyrrhus so Pyrrhicly failed to do.

It will be possible to create two large vassals - one in Magna Graecia and one is Sicily - once dominance is achieved in either. Of course this is optional, and Epirus may wish to rule the region more directly.

All of these tasks will acquire their targets dynamically and do not depend on the survival of any specific tags, e.g. Rome.

Of course historically, Pyrrhus failed to hold on to his holdings in Greece despite a wide coalition of Greeks and Italics aiding against him the Romans, and he ultimately gave up his holdings in the face of defeat and turned his attention to Macedon and Greece with his characteristic determined impatience.

Hellenic Contender
As relatives of Alexander the Great, the Aeacidae may attempt to claim the throne of Macedon and supplant the northerners as the hegemons of Greece - using the argument that the Macedonians greatest conqueror owed his qualities to his Epirote mother as much as his Argead father.

The pursuit of power over Greece will call for the removal of foreign and diadochi overlords, the subjugation of the Aetolians, and total dominance over the old city states.

Epirus may attempt, as Pyrrhus did historically with Lysimachus of Thrace, to form a pact of expedience with one of the diadochi against Macedon, and thereby surround them on both sides.

Epirus will be able to liberate the subjugated Thessalians - whose general Menon of Pharsalus was the father of Pyrrhus’ mother Phthia and fell fighting Polyperchon and Antipater for the Thessalians freedom after Alexander the Great’s death - thereby making use of their famed cavalry as his companions.

The Aeacidae may also turn the shrine of Achilles at Troy into a major cult center by taking control of the city, thereby bringing the hero of the Iliad and the dynasty into Epirus’ state pantheon.

Ultimately, Pyrrhus was killed after a campaign in Greece that began with an invasion of Sparta by which he sought to install a puppet claimant on their throne - a gambit which Epirus can attempt against any monarchy in Greece - for which the Spartan defence is remembered for its bravery in the face of overwhelming odds.

Most importantly, there are two new loading screen quotes related to Pyrrhus, so keep your eyes peeled come release day!

Despite his ultimate defeat and death during his siege of Argos, Pyrrhus' exploits had a great impact on the world, only narrowly being cheated out of the dominion of Magna Graecia and Macedon by fortune and the fates. With a little more prudence, Pyrrhus - legendary even in defeat - can outshine even the glory of Alexander.

That’s all from me, and I hope you enjoy the Epirus content!

Imperator: Rome Developer Diary - June 8th 2020

Greetings fellow Epirotes, I hope you're ready for a long be-screenshotted dev diary. That's right, today I will be talking a little (!) about the three new mission trees included in the re-release of the Epirus Pre-Order Pack, and the history...

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