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Greetings all!

As promised, today marks the return of developer diaries for Imperator: Rome. Today is a little special, as we are also announcing the release of the 1.5 Menander update coming tomorrow, as well as the augmented re-release of the Epirus content pack.

The Epirus pack was previously released as a pre-order bonus, but many of you have been asking for a way to acquire the content. As such, we decided to augment the pack with a new set of missions and a bloodline trait, which will be automatically applied for owners of the pre-order DLC.

What you've all been waiting for, however, is the collected patch notes for 1.5, which alongside the suite of new features we covered in previous dev diaries includes a large than usual collection of bugfixes, adjustments, and minor content.

As usual, we provide these for you a day early, so you can go wild and speculate!

###################
# Expansion Features
###################
  • A new set of missions has been added to the Epirus pack.
  • Pyrrhus now possesses a bloodline trait, for owners of the Epirus pack.
  • Any added content will be applied retrospectively for those who pre-ordered the game.
  • The Epirus pack is made available for purchase.
  • If Epirus dlc is active, Prove Legitimacy may acquire Pyrrhus’ bloodline

###################
# Free Features
###################
  • Cultural Integration: Added cultural integration feature, allowing you to grant or remove citizenship (or other poptype) rights for individual cultures within your borders.
  • Cultural Integration: Added Culture UI, giving you an overview of the cultural situation in your nation.
  • Cultural Integration: Added cultural decisions feature, letting you make important decisions on your treatment of individual cultures.
  • Cultural Integration: Added historically integrated cultures for Seleukid Empire, Antigonid Kingdom, Egypt, Thrace, Macedon, Bactria, Maurya, Cappadocia, Parthia and Syracuse.
  • Pops: Nobles poptype added. Nobles generate research and traderoutes, and have a high political weight
  • Pops: Political weight added. This simulates the influence of pops when generating unrestlow numbers of nobles with a high weight will generate more unrest than large numbers of slaves with a low political weight.
  • Rebellion Rework: Provinces can now rebel separately when their provincial loyalty reaches 0. Neighboring provinces will join in a rebellion if their loyalty reaches 0 while a revolt is ongoing.
  • Rebellion Rework: Provinces that rebel will declare their rebellion war using a new offensive wargoal that sets their own capital as the target.
  • Rebellion Rework: Subjects can now declare an independence war against their overlord without incurring a vast penalty.
  • Senate rework: characters now exercise their influence by controlling votes.
  • Senate rework: Nations now have 3 main senate factions, as opposed to 5. 3 unique factions are added for Rome, as well as a set for other republics.
  • Senate rework: senate approval now applies to most actions you may wish to take. Keeping the senate happy will reward you with more absolute power, but displeasing them will cause your rule to be ineffectual.
  • Senate Rework: Approval is now a global statistic, not balanced for each individual action.
  • Senate rework: Faction issues feature added. Fulfilling a faction's agenda will please them, however if they are elected they may attempt to push their agenda without your consent.
  • Trade rework: Trade goods now have a route-price, depending on the goods type. This is modified by whether a trade route is domestic, import, or export, and will generate commerce income for both parties.
  • Trade rework: Citizens and Nobles now generate trade routes for the Provinces in which they reside.
  • Trade rework: Tradegoods have been entirely rebalanced, reducing modifier quantity to a more manageable level, as well as now focusing on poptype modifiers.
  • Added ‘seek spouse’ character interaction.
  • Cross store multiplayer enabled for all our currently supported stores (Steam, Gog, Plaza, and MS Store)

###################
# Game Balance
###################
#Characters
  • Added new faction impact to character interactions
  • Increased disloyalty modifier of pretenders in Succession Crisis event from -10 to -25 and increased threshold for removing the Popular Successor character modifier from +33 to +40 loyalty
  • Influence a Character interaction now correctly requires the target to have at least 50 prominence
  • Plotting Quietly loyalty modifier is now correctly removed if the scheme is aborted
  • In order to attend a Triumph a commander will leave his army if one is held for them. A Triumph now requires that a character has at least 20 loyalty.
  • Adoptions are now restricted to primary state culture characters unless the cultural decision "Ease Restrictions on Citizenship" has been enacted.
# Economy
  • Slaves happiness no longer affects their output.
  • Slave output reduced marginally to account for the above.
  • Slave default happiness drastically reduced.
  • Slave political weight reduced.
  • Flat commerce income removed from all poptypes
# Governments
  • Revolts of Maurya, Seleukids and Antigonids will no longer be given generic empire names
# Religion
  • Added new apotheosis effect for converting pops to Nobles.
#Other
  • All characters that arrive in your country due to you annexing their homeland will now have a loyalty penalty for 5 years.
  • Country ranks Regional power, Major Power and Great Power now gives -5%, -10% and -15% War Score Reduction respectively.
  • Forming Persia is now possible for Anatolian and Caucasian culture countries, but requires that Persian culture is integrated.
  • Important foreign families that are taken in after annexation will now try to bring female members as well.
  • Reduced assimilation for all pop types.
  • Rome now have a unique invention that removes some of the requirements to intervene in wars
  • The Invention Career Negotiators now Gives War Score Cost Reduction.
  • The Invention Diplomatic Immunity now gives increased Subject Opinions.
  • The Invention Humane Conduct now gives War Score Cost reduction.
  • The Invention Noble Envoys now gives +1 Diplomatic relations.
  • The Invention Open Negotiations now gives +2 Diplomatic Reputation instead of +1.
  • The National Idea "Casus Belli" now gives War Score Cost reduction.
  • Deified rulers giving free investments will now never give more than 1.
  • Triumphs now give a more substantial loyalty boost, for 20 years, and their price is 30 Political Influence. A character being given a Triumph will gain either Victorious or Conqueror traits if they do not have a Status trait already, which will increase their Senate influence.
  • Added new culture map mode functionality. Cultures can be selected individually.
  • Added province selection secondary mode for culture and religion map modes
  • Stability, Tyranny, and Aggressive Expansion have now all been rebalanced. The primary effect of AE is now on internal stability.

###################
# AI
###################
# Diplomacy
  • Fixed huge AI budget reservation for opinion_diplomacy and removed it and army and navy_construction maximums from hardcode and put into script.
# Economy
  • AI now decides where to build forts partially decided on the economic value of its states
# War
  • AI armies will now prefer to deep strike less.
  • AI calculation for target number of generals and admirals have been made independent, helping nations with lots of fleets (e.g. Carthage).
  • AI invasions should be a bit more conservative selecting armies that could walk to goal
  • AI is a bit better at gathering its armies together into fewer stacks to match leader count.
  • AI may now decide to use its navies to blockade enemy fleets and ports if it doesn't have anything better to do and thinks it is safe.
  • AI will now achieve donkey
  • Fixed AI declaring war with non-adjacent claim somewhere far away when they could get a much closer claim by fabricating.
  • Fixed big AI countries like Maurya and Seleucids scheduling lots of naval invasions on land.
  • Made sure big AI countries are more keen to fight each other (WAR_POWER_FACTOR in defines).


###################
# Interface
###################
  • Added culture UI to track all cultures in a nation
  • Senate UI updated with new changes
  • Senate approval now tracked in top bar for republics

###################
# Script
###################
# Events
  • Added a backup solution if Pyrrhos decided to stay at home in the pre-order event chain.
  • Added a handful of flavour events for specific deities.
  • Added minor events on completion of provincial investments
# Setup
  • Added new barbarians for the two new culture groups that were split from Gallic
  • Added new Scythian cultures: Sakan, Thyssegetian, Legian, and Agathyrsian.
  • Added new Odrysian culture for Odrysia as well as parts of Thrace.
  • Renamed Celto-Pannonian, and split it into Scordiscian and Eraviscian.
  • Split the Gallic culture group into Gallic, Belgae, and Pannonian.
  • Split the old Belgae culture into several smaller cultures.
  • Split up Dacian culture.
  • Added Atavi culture for the tribal forest peoples in north eastern india.
  • Added Dardic culture for the north western Aryan areas.
  • Added a port to Naupaktos in Aetolia
  • Blemmyan culture is now part of the Meroitic group
  • Changed culture of Elis to Aetolian
  • Messenia now starts in the Mantineian defensive league, this should help their survivability against Sparta
  • Moved Rosmerta holy site from Cunetio in Britain to Scarponna in Gaul
  • Renamed Nilotic Culture Group to Egyptian. Moved Garamantic culture to the Numidian culture group.
  • Split Aryan into two culture groups. A new eastern group called Pracyan now represents the north eastern Indian cultures where Magadhi was the dominant court dialect.
  • Split Egyptian culture into Boharic, Sahidic and Faiyumic.
  • Changed Phthia Menid's culture to Thessalian
  • Ambrakia now starts as an OPM tag in Epirus
# Other
  • Added 4th Diadochi war events for Thrace
  • Added event to introduce Jewish minority characters in some cases.
  • Introduced tribal tattoos to some Egyptians out in the desert. They are now considered Tribesmen rather than Citizens.
  • Added historically integrated cultures for Seleukid Empire, Antigonid Kingdom, Egypt, Thrace, Macedon, Bactria, Maurya, Cappadocia, Parthia and Syracuse.
  • Added some characters in Dardania and Paeonia
  • Added tooltips to some 4th diadochi war events for clarity
  • Diadochi ultimatum events will now only release tributary subjects
  • Generic conquest missions are now disabled when a country has specific content for that region
  • If Cappadocia accepts Ariarathes back on the throne this will now make them independent of Phrygia. Phrygia will be able to go to war with Cappadocia to stop this if they are at peace when it happens.
  • Making Carthage a tributary as Rome will no longer transfer their subjects to Rome
  • Opened up road building in subject land.
  • Reduced price of granary and prospecting in generic infrastructure mission
  • Roman Colonia now take two years to become cities if not already
  • Seleukids now gain a temporary siege assault modifier for abandoning the Indus
  • Simplified tooltips of Seleukid-Mauryan starting event
  • The Armenian events relating to their Cappadocian pretender now has a chance to fire any year rather than always after 3 years.
  • The Diadochi war between Macedon and Antigonids will now include Antigonid's subjects
  • The Epigoni event will no longer fire for successor kingdoms who manage to reunify the Argead empire before their second ruler's death
  • added on_reign_ending onaction
  • added party: has_agenda = agenda_key trigger
  • added population_happiness, local_population_happiness
  • Changed party support entries to be party approval
  • Changed some script to fix an issue

###################
# Bugfixes
###################
  • Improved daily and monthly tick performance compared to version 1.4
  • Fixed AI Setting CallToArms affecting other nations joining you in the war instead of the other way around
  • Fixed Become Great Warrior 'finished_when' tooltip
  • Fixed civil war resolution not giving occupied provinces to their occupier
  • Fixed crash in the mission view related to mouse movement around GUI animations
  • Fixed culture of Mutasiva Vijaya to be Lankan just like his country and people.
  • Fixed destroyed subunits not reinforcing combat ( naval battles )
  • Fixed is_unit_locked trigger
  • Fixed isolated provinces being calculated properly now. It wasn't working in some edge cases
  • Fixed isolated provinces being calculated properly now. It wasn't...
  • Fixed the issue where recruited ex-Mercenary Rulers would not be able to befriend other characters using the 'Make Friend' Character Interaction.
  • Made Aleuadae, Philaidae, and Aiakidai names consistent with other Greek families names (Aleuadid, Philaid, Aiakid)
  • Revolts, etc, now copy military traditions alongside with tech
  • alliance now properly removes guarantees
  • fixed add_morale effect not working
  • fixed appearance of 'damage_unit_x_percent' effect
  • fixed appearance of 'damage_unit_x_percent' effect descriptions
  • fixed food shortage caused by units to flip-flop every monthly tick
  • fixed governor troops sacking the wrong city
  • fixed randomly generated rulers having a duplicate entry in the Our Rulers ledger category
  • fixed country claims not updating when conquering, releasing nations or selling provinces
  • mercs now get full food when hired
  • revolts no longer bring entire governorships
  • single-province countries now more likely to generate valid civil wars.
  • stopped rooting out pirates from deleting land mercs
  • tech progress now overflows instead of being reset to zero
  • unit action modifiers now factored into maintenance cost. Drill Army is no longer free
  • Added adulthood checks to the candidates chosen in Rising from Obscurity event, so no more infants rising to glory
  • Added bypass for Sicilian Champion mission if no Siceliote countries exist in Sicily
  • Added civil_war check to missions to stop revolt tags from selecting them
  • Added custom tooltip making Desecrate conditions clear
  • Added more limits to Hades hunger - the world is safe again
  • Added ping for Aeolia losing land in 4th Diadochi deal with Thrace
  • Changed pop setup so no province would start over pop capacity
  • Changed some misplaced islands off the coast of Italy
  • Fixed minor_character leaders of civil wars being executed immediately if the war ends quickly
  • Fixed references to Phrygia left over from 1.4
  • Fixed the issues with the first Athenian mission occasionally showing "null_family".
  • Hera will no longer give Citizen Happiness as both passive and active effects.
  • Removed loser portraits from civil war pings. Losers.
  • Tweaked Roman Assembly laws to better reflect historic party approval
  • Fixed clan chiefs spawning into enemy units
  • Added highlighting to the Magna Graecia development decisions
  • Ariarathes will now correctly lose the Foreign Citizen modifier on returning to Cappadocia
  • Child rulers can no longer start schemes through character interactions, no matter how ruthless that 8 year old things he is
  • Dismissing a Governor who was given free hands will now remove their loyalty benefit from it
  • Eagle Falls event for Rome disabled for naval battles
  • Event choosing capital after reunifying the Argead empire will no longer remove state investments
  • Fixed consort not dying in Eager Consort events. Death comes for us all.
  • Fixed swapped name and description for Matrist deities Perkunas and Mother Goddess
  • Roman deity Venus now grants passive modifier to population growth instead of population capacity
  • Term extension from Appoint Dictator is no longer removed after a year included in the original term
  • Characters will no longer seek underage patrons
  • Fix issue where minor characters created from script could end up as major characters by inheriting one of their parents' family
  • Fixed the issue with the mission task 'Securing the Coast of Africa' not having a proper count of provinces you held, if some of the provinces were held by subjects.
  • Make hordes have a 50% chance of female leaders when playing with mixed gender rules
  • Merging regular army units with migrants will no longer yield them migrant access.
  • You can no longer reassign leaders before the one year minimum by moving around cohorts to another unit.
  • Tweaks made to character marriage targeting. The first family in a country should no longer be preferred when doing marriage calculations.
  • Various engine level fixes and improvements

EDIT:

I appear to have missed a couple of things! I'll collate these here for those of you who don't want to trawl through the notes again:

  • Population capacity has received a total rebalance. It will be significantly harder to sustain high population cities.
  • Provincial investments have been rebalanced accordingly. Civic investment now grants 2.5% pop capacity, with extra building slots being moved to the religious investment. Oratory investment retains +1 trade route.
  • Libraries are now a Noble poptype building, granting noble happiness and desired ratio (at a lesser rate than other poptype buildings).
  • Academies now grant research points and noble ratio.
  • Marketplaces now grant 2.5% Local Base Trade Routes (from pops).
  • Road networks now grant 5% local base trade routes modifier instead of commerce income
  • Ports now grant 10% local base trade routes modifier to their entire Province, instead of +1 flat route
  • Forts have been made significantly more expensive to build and operate, but will now reduce local unrest in their Province by -0.25 per level.
  • Naval morale damage has been increased by approximately 25%
 
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Tribesmen: Low Tax and Low Manpower
Slaves: Tax
Freemen: Low Tax and High Manpower
Citizens: Low Manpower, Low Research and Low Traderoutes
Nobles: High research and High traderoutes
So what's the point of Citizens now?
like if they gave a moderate amount of all stuff then sure, but now they just sound useless.
 
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So what's the point of Citizens now?
like if they gave a moderate amount of all stuff then sure, but now they just sound useless.

That's where the new cultural rights system comes in. Nobles will give you a larger penalty to overall happiness than citizens; you'll have to make choices wisely.
 
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4- They had already asked but do provincial investments change anything?

Population capacity has received a total rebalance. It will be significantly harder to sustain high population cities.
Provincial investments have been rebalanced accordingly. Civic investment now grants 2.5% pop capacity, with extra building slots being moved to the religious investment. Oratory investment retains +1 trade route.


am I missing any fix for naval battles mentioned?

Listed as fixed; I quoted the exact line in an earlier post in this thread.


---


Some loose "2nd thoughts" on a few of the changes/fixes:


Influence a Character interaction now correctly requires the target to have at least 50 prominence

That will make "milking your popularity for PI" a bit less of a no-brainer. Not bad, but PI is already one of the scarcer ressources...


Adoptions are now restricted to primary state culture characters unless the cultural decision "Ease Restrictions on Citizenship" has been enacted.

Adding a price tag to the very cheesy strategy of adopting "conquered" characters left and right (further penalized by the loyalty penalty those people will have in the first 5 years) - like that!


Slaves happiness no longer affects their output.
Slave output reduced marginally to account for the above.
Slave default happiness drastically reduced.

I think we will see a lot more slave revolts now - great :)


The Invention Noble Envoys now gives +1 Diplomatic relations.
The Invention Open Negotiations now gives +2 Diplomatic Reputation instead of +1.
Fixed the issue where recruited ex-Mercenary Rulers would not be able to befriend other characters using the 'Make Friend' Character Interaction.

My recommendation for any MG owner, who hasn't touched Syracuse yet - give it a try. Two more merc states possible and using the merc king feature no longer kills befriending...


Deified rulers giving free investments will now never give more than 1.

One of the few things I'm not entirely happy about. I appreciate that at least the 2-free-PI-case was slashed, but 1 free PI is still overpowered for my taste - and leader stats are now completely irrelevant for that effect. Wished this would have been replaced with a simple politicial influence gain (which is easier to balance and can scale with the Finesse stat)


Added a handful of flavour events for specific deities.
Added minor events on completion of provincial investments

More events are always a cool thing :)


Reduced price of granary and prospecting in generic infrastructure mission

Hope to see generic missions getting more love and variation in future, but that is already a tiny step forward here. Appreciated.


mercs now get full food when hired

Good in general and even better for the merc-happy AI.


unit action modifiers now factored into maintenance cost. Drill Army is no longer free

Never noticed this bug, but good see it gone. Spartanizing your empire should cost...


Fixed the issues with the first Athenian mission occasionally showing "null_family".

Only here? I still hope I will find no more "null families" in 1.5 at all...


You can no longer reassign leaders before the one year minimum by moving around cohorts to another unit.

Ok, that feels like something I have intuitivly done all the time...just to be sure: This effectively means that once I assign a general to an army, I cannot take any of the initial cohorts away from him for 12 months - correct ?


Tweaks made to character marriage targeting. The first family in a country should no longer be preferred when doing marriage calculations.

Might solve -together with restricting adoptions - the problem of ruler familes outgrowing the rest in monarchies.


Population capacity has received a total rebalance. It will be significantly harder to sustain high population cities.
Provincial investments have been rebalanced accordingly. Civic investment now grants 2.5% pop capacity, with extra building slots being moved to the religious investment. Oratory investment retains +1 trade route.

Really curious how hard it will be with 1.5 to create mega-cities. Have horses with their pop-capacity effect been touched?
 
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So what's the point of Citizens now?
like if they gave a moderate amount of all stuff then sure, but now they just sound useless.

Its not that they have a point. There were upper richer classes in real life, it doesnt have to have a point. But if you took them out you'd have to rebalance it all and take away flavour, since its one pop less producing precious trade routes and research, trade would be worse as well, and the new social strata and citizenship thing would feel more boring too.

Because of the same reasoning you could say whats the point of freemen? Citizen produce already manpower and slaves produce tax. But thats not the point, the pops are not there to be each a source of something different but to simulate social stratification and hierarchy. Citizens will be much more common than nobles. If you take citizens away, what do you fill that massive gap with? Nobles? Then nobles would be citizens and we'd be back to square one :p Its all about adding depth and diversity.
 
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am I missing any fix for naval battles mentioned?

yeah, there is a bugfix in there for broken reinforcment afterships got sunk.

(i looked out for this cuz i remember reporting & documenting the bug)
 
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Really curious how hard it will be with 1.5 to create mega-cities. Have horses with their pop-capacity effect been touched?

Well in theory most of the effects have been removed, and now the mostly affect pop happiness, unless they've made changes since the dev diary. So yes probably horses now just give access to units and maybe some other effect on food or pop related? Horses giving pop capacity was pretty random. Well, as most trade goods effects really, so I'm glad they've done away with it.
 
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Cultural Integration: Added historically integrated cultures for Seleukid Empire, Antigonid Kingdom, Egypt, Thrace, Macedon, Bactria, Maurya, Cappadocia, Parthia and Syracuse.

If its of use, these are the integrated cultures for Armenia:

Median: Lived in and around the Soducene, Vaspurakan, Parsatunik and Parskahayk areas, as well as adjacent areas. They were an important element of the Armenian state and historically those areas were never assimilated, even though they were close to the Armenian heartland.
Albanian: The Albanians living in north-western Armenia were also a part of the Armenian state, though to a lesser degree then the Medians. Their assimilation only really started in the Christian period.
 
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In this case, triumph is now intended to be used as a political tool to reward a troublesome or beloved general. Consider Pompey's great triumph, or Caesar demanding his own (or else). You're giving a significant amount of wealth and prestige to one individual, in exchange for standing down without provoking a civil war.
@Arheo will ambitious Generals demand triumphs themselves (e.g. via Event)? Would be a nice touch ;)
And what about Dictatorships? How will they work now, with the overhauled Senate mechanics?
 
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Slaves: Tax
Freemen: Low Tax and High Manpower

Until the Marian reforms when slaves do manpower?

Citizens: Low Manpower, Low Research and Low Traderoutes

Seems like a setup for an equestrian class. Freemen - infantry, citizens - cavalry.
 
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@Arheo will naval blockades have any affect on trade routes?

im just guessing here, but maybe blockades increase migration speed / reduce migration attraction, and maybe nobles pops are extra sensitive to migration? If nobles start leaving, traderoutes will move with them...
 
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So if I'm seeing this correctly there are no new heritages and other small flavour things? Come on guys there are so many nations for which it would have been awesome and not too much work to add them.

Overall though, even though I wished we had it earlier, seems like a super solid patch, wil definitely do a new playthrough tomorrow.
 
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Is this the dev diary? Patch notes?
I thought we'd see more, like when the vassal system rework will be added back or what is coming afterwards. :rolleyes:

At least 1.5 is coming tomorrow, so that's a good thing.

Ah the classic getting downvoted for being disappointed that we get no news after the last real news was announced two month ago.
I agree with you, we already knew all this stuff, and we are already a week late on a dev diary compared to what could reasonably have been expected (people can say whatever they want but we've already had a monday in August before this one).
 
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Is every new, big update going to break saves going forward? I tend to play saves in short bursts over a very long period of RL time and I don't want to start a game if the save will just be broken in a few months.
 
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I didn't see it in the patch notes, but I was wondering if the early game crash issue on Macs has been resolved? A number of people have reported it (and I myself have observed it in two separate games), and obviously it makes the game fairly unplayable if it reliably crashes to desktop in the first ten years...
 
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