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Well, we're back after a hectic week of PDXCon and office relocation. Those that were able to attend PDXCon were able to play the Livy update in its current state, and there are a number of interviews and articles emerging that contain snippets of information on the various upcoming mechanics that will be appearing soon.

However, fear not! Dev Diaries shall continue, and I'll make sure you all get a detailed view of what is coming in the Livy update, as well as The Punic Wars; the free Content Pack accompanying Livy.

Today, we'll take a look at Statesmanship, and a few of the UX improvements associated with it.

The concept of statesmanship was borne out of a desire to add both a level of character progression to the political scene, and to add a new aspect to decision-making when appointing Officers.

Statesmanship itself represents the bureaucratic skills of a character, intentionally avoiding conflation with military prowess, as we felt this mechanic did not translate well to the military aspect of the game.

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As you can see here, Statesmanship dictates how much of a character's relevant attribute they are able to apply to their current role, scaling the effect of an office accordingly. We'll be taking a look at scaling the effects of offices to account for the slightly average top-end threshold for characters, and to ensure that highly skilled individuals have their abilities properly represented.

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Statesmanship grows at a different rate depending on which job a character currently holds, with 'lesser' jobs such as governorships and technology offices acting as lower-level training positions. The effect of tech officers will not be scaled by statesmanship for balance reasons, and characters holding one of these offices will plateau at roughly 25% statesmanship, over a period of time.

Higher offices will yield a higher statesmanship plateau, however, characters with certain traits may find themselves able to naturally attain higher statesmanship levels, as well as those of higher social status (more on this in a future diary!) being more likely to make capable officers.

The reason we wanted to make this change was to do away with the highly simplistic choice of officers; prior to 1.3, there was little reason not to fire someone and replace them with a higher stat character.

Lastly, characters holding high office (one of the eight primary offices) yet who have low statesmanship, may result in certain undesirable events being fired, and consequently, those characters who attain a particularly high level of statesmanship may be responsible for firing positive events. This leads me on to the next feature we're implementing in Livy - the Minor Event Queue.

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The minor event queue, shown above in the bottom right corner of the picture, is a first step towards delineating between content that we want to interrupt the player with, and content that we consider optional or of low importance.

Events spawned by characters, either due to statesmanship level or otherwise, all fall into the category of minor importance. We wanted to show these to the player, but we found that interrupting the experience with a popup demanding a choice, was often quite invasive to the gameplay experience. Instead, events categorized as 'minor', will be added to the event queue instead.

Here, they will time down to 0 days, before dismissing themselves by selecting the first, default option. If you choose to interact with them during this time, you will receive a popup event as you might expect, albeit with a slightly different visual style:

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We fully intend to iterate on this concept in future, perhaps allowing for additional functionality, and converting events that people find repetitive or unimportant to the minor category. The most important aspect of this change in my own opinion, is that we now have a way to bring out more of the character simulation that we previously deemed too minor to interrupt the player experience with; hopefully resulting in a more engaging world, for those who wish to engage with the content.

Now I shall hand over to @Trin Tragula , who'll bring you up to date with some of the map and content changes coming in 1.3, as well as another shiny new feature!

/Arheo

Hi all :) Today I will be going over some of the flavor additions in the Update as well as the new Map Mode Manager.

Regional Changes in the Livy Update

One objective that the Livy Update aims for is to increase the flavor in the world and one way that we hope to do so is by adding more regional flavor. The map has been updated with more territories and playable countries in a number of regions, and we have also added more local Omens and Heritages to countries in the game.


Additional Omens:

While Pompey added a great deal of variety in terms of Omens to the game it was often unclear why you had a particular Omen. In Livy Patch will add a clear indication as to why you have a certain Omen available to you.

omenpatron.png


As can be seen above the tooltip of an Omen will now always state what made it available to you, in this case Helios is available as he is the patron deity of Rhodes.

New Patron Deities (ie Omens that are available because of your capital location) :
  • Poseidon: Corinth, Chalcis
  • Herakles: Acragas, Kos, Thasos
  • Hephaeustus: Acragas, Athens, Lemnos
  • Asclepius: Acragas, Epidauros
  • Aphrodite: Athens, Aphrodisias, Corinth, Paphos
  • Eros: Thespiai
  • Hera: Argos, Samos, Olympia, Elis, Ionia
  • Artemis: Ephesos, Delos, Ionia, Nesiotic League
  • Helios: Corinth, Rhodes
  • Persephone: Locri
  • Dionysus: Amphipolis, Orchomenos, Naxos, Thebes, Boeotia, Nesiotic League
  • Pan: Arcadian Cities and Tags

We have also added a whole group of new Omens for Crete:

omencrete.png

  • Diktynna
  • Eleuthya
  • Velchanos
  • Rhea
  • Diktean Zeus
  • Ariadne
  • Amaya
  • Karmanor

Specific Omens for Hellenistic Pontus (Similarly to the Serapis cult omens getting these will entail reacting to flavor content):
  • Herakles
  • Zeus Stratios
  • Selene
  • Cybele
  • Mithra
  • Men
  • Aphrodite
  • Dionysus

Lastly while the main flavor focus of the update is related to missions we have added a number of historical flavor events for the following countries:

  • Massalia
  • Thrace
  • Iberia
  • Armenia
  • Phrygia, Pontus and Paphlagonia
  • Diadochi Coronations

Map Changes

No Flavor Update would be complete without map changes. The livy update brings an updated map and new countries in a number of areas.

Hibernia & Caledonia:
hibernia.png


Not much is known about the island today known as Ireland at Imperator’s start date. Nonetheless it is certain that the island was not devoid of political entities and @Snow Crystal has given it a second go through and added a number of playable tribes here. This increases the dynamics of politics and warfare, even if migration and colonization are still necessary to control the island. Modern Scotland has also been a facelift.


Baltics:
baltics.png


Another area revisited is the Baltic coastline of modern Lithuania and Poland, adding both more colonizable land and more tribes to the dynamics in northern Europe.


Sicily:
sicily.png


As the Free Content Pack coming along Livy will focus on Rome and Carthage it felt natural to focus on adding more detail to the island of Sicily, which was often at the frontline of Punic and Italic conflicts. The Livy update will greatly reduce the conglomerate country “Siculia” which previously represented all the central Sicilian states acting independently in the power vacuum after the Carthaginian-Syracusan wars. Instead there are now 3 such states (Siculia, Calactea, and Tyndaria) in a common defensive league.

The update also sees the addition of both Carthaginian client states (Selinous and Heraclea Minoa) and the subject state Gelas under Syracuse on the southern coastline next to the independent city state of Akragas.


Greece:
greece.png


While Greece is in many ways already one of the more interesting places in the game some historically important powers have up to now lacked the detail and strategic depth that they need to be accurately represented. The Livy update revisits Attica and Boeotia with more territories and impassables, as well as the seazones surrounding the mainland itself. The objective here has been to make the region more strategically interesting (in a similar way to Peleponesos) by adding in historical mountain passes and fortresses.

Navigable Rivers

The Pompey update added a number of Navigable rivers to the game and the effect these have had on both land and naval warfare is something we have found very beneficial to the game. The Livy update will therefore add navigable zones to a number of rivers that did not have them before:

danube.png


  • The Danube/Ister River is now navigable up to the Iron Gates
  • The Ganges now has additional arms to the Ganges Delta and its tributary, Brahmaputra, is navigable up to Balipura.
  • The Rhone/Rhodanus is now navigable up to Arelatis.
  • The Garonne/Garumna is now navigable to Praemiacum.
  • The Seine/Sequana is now navigable up to Avalocum.
  • The Loire/Liger is now navigable up to Turonorum.
  • The Elbe/Albis is now navigable to Aregellia.
  • The Dniestr/Tyras is now navigable up to Clepidava.
  • The Dniepr/Borysthenes is now navigable in the entirety of the portion before it enters impassable land.



Map Mode Manager

A common request for improving the UI of Imperator has been the addition of new Map Modes. We generally agree that map modes can be a very useful way to show information, the map is after all the main interface that our game is played on. At the same time Imperator had quite a few map modes already, too many to add more in the row that is constantly shown above the mini map.

In order to accommodate more Map Modes the Livy update comes with a map mode manager, which lets you open any map mode that exists in the game, and if you so wish, drag and drop it on the bar of map modes above the mini map for quick reference. The map mode keyboard shortcuts will now point to the slots in the map mode bar rather than to specific map modes.

dragdrop.png

Screenshot of the terrain map mode being dragged to the bar above the minimap.

The update itself will not come with any new map modes but now that we have a Map Mode manager we hope to add new ones in future updates when we see the need for it.

If you have suggestions for new map modes that you would like to see, we would love to hear them :)

That was all for today, next week we will be back on our usual Monday time and @Snow Crystal will tell you all about the Carthaginian Mission Trees that we are adding to the Punic Wars content pack :)
 
Looking great, the addition of minor events is a fantastic idea, both giving the ones who wanna delve deep into character stuff potentially much more events while also actually reducing the amount of popups for those who wanna focus on other areas. Brilliant!

Also seems like Lake Kopaida has been added to Boiotia, which is cool.

There are several mapmodes that probably should be added due to the new mechanics:
Cities, Food production, Food storage in provinces, available Population capacity, Migration Attraction, Migrations (red where Pops are leaving and green for where they are going), Amount of Trade Goods produced.
 
Also, because I named the Po and then I forgot. In old devdiaries, the delta coast looks like this:

northitaly.png


And, well, this is the modern coastline, which makes pretty much as much sense as depicting Flevoland in the same period. The entire delta structure wasn't there at all until the 17th Century or so, and in the Roman age in particular it looked something like these maps - probably in-between but closer to the first, as Comacchio was founded around the end of the game's timeframe:

Fig-8.jpg

ER_Eta-Romana.jpg


EDIT: also - and I'll edit this time, because I'll avoid a third post, I seem to notice the Comacchio Valleys being present between Hadriani and Spina. Those, too, are medieval - obviously enough, as the Hadriani province should probably be chopped off in its entirety - and formed around the 10th Century. Also, as you can see from the maps and tying to the navigable Padus proposal, the main river flowed far to the south of the modern riverbed, with the Reno being a tributary rather than an independent river.
 
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Statesmanship seems to be a good game mechanic. I'm a little dissatisfied with current numbers:

Someone with 10 attribute points:
0% = 1, 25% = 2,5 (2), 50% = 5, 75% = 7,5 (7), 100% = 10.

I think, this will works better:
0% = 5, 25% = 6,25 (6), 50% = 7,5 (7), 75% = 8,75 (8), 100% = 10.

Imagine if someone with 2 attribute points and 100% of statesmanship is better in doing job like someone with 10 attribute points and 0% statesmanship. A second option is more realistic and fair.
 
Now this was a CHUNKY dev diary, nice :D
 
Statesmanship seems to be a good game mechanic. I'm a little dissatisfied with current numbers:
It seems that they are too:
. We'll be taking a look at scaling the effects of offices to account for the slightly average top-end threshold for characters, and to ensure that highly skilled individuals have their abilities properly represented.
 
ugh I feel like I'm well past the point where I don't wanna start a new IR campaign until this comes out, I just need mission trees and a council I don't/can't completely ignore

I look forward to my government being something more interesting and difficult to manage, the current state feels very bare bones especially if you compare it to say the CK2 council system, which has so many different ways it can be used to work your will, either by bribery or packing the council with yes men or how it can cause you trouble limiting control and giving more power to already powerful vassals.
 
Can the map mode manager assign multiple map modes to the same slot?

It's in EU4 and it's an invaluable feature, especially if you plan to add more map modes to Imperator in the future.
 
Johan said in an interview that Paradox would be looking into perhaps doing a public Beta for 1.3. Is there any news on that? Such as if it's still being considered, and if so, when it may be available?
 
Great unexpected Dev diary.

Please help / sort.

Can it be made clear how to raise the populist faction support above 80 to then be able to change government to dictatorship? I am.at a loss of how to do it!!

Please help!
 
This is an awesome dev diary! Good job!
I've got only one question: does Statemanship decrease over time due to inactivity? I wish not. Or, at least, at a very low and flat rate.

As for me, the major problem to address for this game is a reason to go to war, other than for increased taxes: a better trading system would allow more scenarios.

Thank you again for your amazing job!
 
Imperator dev diaries are always so exciting to read. I do think it is the most innovative of paradox's games.

But heres an example of why people say it feels the same playing no matter where you are:
This statemanship mechanic feels like it fits well in a civilized empire like rome, or greece, or other civilized places like that. But it feels out of place with tribes in northern europe. While i'm sure experience makes for better leaders in tribes, too, something called "statesmanship" has feeling of an ill fit.

But other than that, it does seem like an exciting development :)

Hopefully Statemanship will be localized as, well, "Experience" for tribal tags.
 
in diplomacy map mode, please make a difference between countries that I have a truce with and countries that I have a truce with AND also a claim on.

the way that current diplomacy map works, you cannot see if you will be able to attack a certain country after your truce with them runs out or not.
 
This is amazing, a double dev-diary. Statesmanship, when combined with a proper senate-elected Cursus Honorum and term limits/restrictions, can create one of the best political systems in a Paradox game ever seen (alongside CK2). :)

Speaking of minor titles "researchers", have you considered giving them titles like in older EU-Rome game where they were proper offices? For example - in Rome they could be four Quaestors (Aediles could be in proper political office screen), in Athens they could be Proedroi or Epistates, in India they could be Amatya or Mahamatra, and then the rest could have a relevant generic culture-group based title. Much more immersive than simply called "religious researcher" or something.

I highly suggest doing that.
 
I just hope they will nerf mercs a bit and make replenishing units cost much more money. Right now you can have 300-400 territories and I have such big income that I could recruit 1000 cohorts. I wonder if land and naval force limits from EU4 could be good addition. You still could recruit more soldiers but each over the limit would cost much more.

Nerfing the mercs is needed, yes, but unit replenishment/upkeep costs are derived off the recruitment costs, so rather than increasing those I'd rather they raise the base gold price of recruitment in the first place. As is, armies are dirt cheap compared to the wages paid to the generals that lead them, and gold is way too abundant after the early game, because of city income buildings increasing the effective gold per pop exponentially.

So, rather than driving up the costs alone, it might be better to also nerf income in the first place, to avoid inflation where everything costs absurd amounts of gold. Mercenaries should definitely cost more than 125%, but when you make them cost much more proportionally, like the 500% that they would probably sensibly require to actually feel expensive with the lategame economy, then AI simply won't recruit them at all and it'd make wars even easier for the player.

You can of course give the AI a cheaper mercenary maintenance bonus on higher difficulties to alleviate the issue, but that doesn't fix the issue in the first place.

However, if you severely decrease cohort size, while simultanously increasing the cost of each unit type per cohort, and then only slightly raising merc upkeep but increasing the amount of gold you have to have up front to recruit them, and adding a multiplicative % increase to it per company hired, then you're making them a much costlier resource...

If units in general end up costlier, so do mercs because they scale off the base costs - yet AI would still use them because they still wouldn't be that much more expensive than regular troops proportionally - yet wouldn't spam them because of how their demand on treasury size would go up with each additional company hired. Smaller cohort sizes also mean much less exaggerated lategame army sizes, though that of course has to be combined with reducing manpower base and pop output proportionally (possibly even more so because manpower is unending as it is rn).

I personally prefer having it tied to War Exhaustion, by having it reduce manpower recovery by up to 100% at full. I have also increased WE gain from all sources in my personal mod, but especially from battles and attrition, though I have also added a decay ratio based on current WE, meaning countries in hard wars don't just end up capping it without invoke devotio, but instead settle at some level of WE, which still meaningfully limits their capability to replenish manpower and thus throw soldiers into the meatgrinder for years on end.
 
For governors, maybe Statemanship should increase at a different rate based on the population of the region they control compared to, maybe, the population of the capital region: it's weird to see the governor of NoWhereLand (maybe having only one or two cities in that region or just one single province) getting the same bureaucratic skills as the governor of Magna Graecia or Italy etc etc.
As I said, this would do the trick also for little countries like future Ireland's, or England's, as the factor is the quotient between the population of a certain region and the pop. of the capital region.
It should also consider (the Statemanship growth factor) the type of government you have: a Republic is much more complicated to control than a tribe.
 
Thanks for the update Johan,

For the character rework, you mentioned that we will see fewer characters and more great houses. I'd like to make a suggestion.

Can we have the characters and their interactions visualized somehow. The map doesn't really convey where characters are and what they are doing. Each country has a court or Senate, but it's essentially just a nebulous list of heads.

I never really get a sense of personalities or motivations like ck2.

So something that shows me how they fit together and who's with what where would be nice. The character models are gorgeous , but most of the time I'm dazed trying to figure out who I should be undermining or supporting. Whether this persons loyalty matters or not... it's a real struggle.

I know it's a big ask, but for this game to work characters need to feel real.

Also would it be possible to play as one great family. I know it seems like a departure into CK2, but right know I act without any real care towards any given ruler and it kind of spoils the character system overall, at least for me.

Using my power base as a non consul family would give me time to conquer and expand my power base abroad. Rome was expansionist because the only way to gain any real power was to go out and take new lands, using troops for war could be linked to a state loyalty that would see you ousted from Senate or worse if you failed to participate and make an effort during war time with family owned troops.

Anyway..probably terrible suggestions. Just saying what would add value for me. Thanks again.
 
My concern with minor events is this: I'm probably still going to pause the game and deal with them as soon as they pop up, since judging by the example given I really don't want to risk them timing out when I'm not paying attention. So, if that's the case, this system is just making me pay more attention to the ledger, and requires more clicks to deal with the event.