Imperator - Development Diary #5 - 25th of June 2018

[PanzerCorps]

Sounds similar to Stellaris. I don't mind

 

[Lavsky]

So there will not be different cultures in a given province at a given moment?

 

[Thure]

So there will not be different cultures in a given province at a given moment?

There will.

 

[mechl]

Guess we'll have to hope for some good overhaul mods to actually give a game that will properly portray this time period and make it more than a boring map painter. I guess that's to be expected though as I can't stand playing the base game of CK2 or EU4 either instead of HIP and M&T.

 

[Calahir]

If you permanently want to increase a pops happiness, you can always spend some religious power to convert them to the state religion.

This is wrong, polytheistic ancient cultures, like Romans or Greeks, tended to tolerate foreign cults as long as they did not meddle in the state's affairs. Religion should have less revelant impact on game than in medieval or modern timeframe (CK or EU). We do not know yet what does 'happiness' exactly do but I suppose it is some sort of a mechanic that prevents state from exploiting slaves too much. In such a case low happiness would increase the risk of slaves or other groups to take up arms and rebel. Something like this is needed but preferably not through religion which was not a distinctive feature of ancient Roman identity. People should rebel because they are mistreated, not merely because the official religion of the state is different than the one they publicly worship.

 

[Arbus]

What happens if the last pop in a city dies?
So there's no way to simulate how e.g. Hispania assimilated to Latin culture?

The game runs until the end of the Roman Republic, sort of, and by that time you can argue that full blown latinization didn't even occur in Italy proper. I think that, in the case of Hispania, Gaul and other barbarian regions, the civilization level will tend to be low, and pop growth will be capped by that. Once Rome arrives, their civ power and technologies allow for faster growth, and as new pops are born with latin culture, in the end you'll get a 50/50 mix of natives and latins. In other more civilized parts of the world, like Greece and Egypt, the pop growth will already be higher, so even after Rome arrives, the new pops will never replace the natives, so maybe you get a 80/20 mix in favour of the natives. And that seems about right, since the barbarian west was latinized but the east remained largelly hellenic. I guess this is where the devs are going.

However, since you can spend mana to change religion, I don't see why you shouldn't be able to spend mana to change culture. You would never get so many points to culturally convert the entire Roman Empire, even converting Greece alone would most likely be a waste of points, but on a smaller scale, if you are a regional power playing tall, why wouldn't you want homogenous culture/religion pops? Without purging them all that is...

 

[Thure]

Guess we'll have to hope for some good overhaul mods to actually give a game that will properly portray this time period and make it more than a boring map painter. I guess that's to be expected though as I can't stand playing the base game of CK2 or EU4 either instead of HIP and M&T.

If I hear the term 'map painter' ever again... People should stop using this word. We still know enough about the map and the characters that we can say it's more than that. Johan is even calling Victoria 2 a map painter. And conquer stuff isn't even wrong for a era like this.

 

[Riekopo]

I was very exiting when it's announced that IR will return to the pop mechanics. But after reading the latest dev diary on pop I'm disillusioned.

I discussed a lot with other pdx game fans and reached the same conclusion that, Johan doesn't understand why people are excited about POPs and what people want from a pop system. Speaking for myself, I love POPs because Vicky2 experience in which pops are fluid, dynamic and detailed. They have thoughts, production, needs and social mobility, and nearly everything happens gradually just like real life, all achieved in an outdated version of Clausewitz engine.

So when IR is announced, i naturally hoped for something similar. Some aspect can be simplified, like pop issue isnt that much important in this time period, but at least there has to be dynamic promotion/demotion since that's how it worked in classical time. As a slave, you can buy your freedom with saving and advanced into the freedman class. As a citizen, you may be sold into slavery due to debt bondage and bankruptcy. In Rome, freeman could serve in auxiliary unit to obtain citizenship. All this happens as a gradual progress, like "this month X promoted into freeman" in vicky2. Laws in this era were often introduced to control the social mobility - check Augustus' law of limiting slave emancipation, the Athenian law of abolishing emancipation and debt slavery - and i expected players able to do so, as a mean to indirectly affect the promotion/demotion process.

But what have Johan presented to us? a dead, static world, POP have no real income and expanse, happiness determination by arbitrary factors , and absolute nothing would happen without player/AI governmental direct interaction, that is to say, mana investment. POPs wont promote or demote by themselves, they can only be promoted with 10 mana per pop. They wont be gradually assimilated into the dominant culture (despite that's the exact definition of Romanization), but instead, spend some religious mana to convert pops to your state religion. Does it mean even the traditional conversion rate mechanic is ditched as well? I'm not sure but it's heavily implied so.

I'm fully aware that i cant speak for everyone, however many would agree that Johan doesnt understand what made POPs great. He presented his vision of POPs, which is disappointing to me and many people I talked to. People wanted a return to POPs (so many EU4 mods made a POP system, with real dynamic promote/demote mechanics), so Pdx say they reintroduced it in IR, which generated so much hype. But it turns out it's a mana-driven static system, instead of a living dynamic system many people hyped for.

 

[qer]

Some things that worry me:
- The way mana points growth with new territories will probably be a non linear relation, whith new territories not grating more MP per se. So again we would need to maximize MP gains like in Eu4, and expanding too quickly will probably leave you at a disadvantage. However what it is imply here, that bigger empires are worse at conversion (as we can suppose that religious powers have other use)is simply ridiculous
- manual promotion seems to be a micro hell. Dynamic ways of population promotion should be introduced, with slaves leaving slavery becoming an important tension in the Roman empire as slavery wasn't sustainable on the long run. The same with religion, the ruler of the nation shouldn't need to use his magic spells to brainwash people. I'm not saying that manual control should be removed, but that it should be complemented.
-instantaneous conversion will probably lead to cheesy strategies, and removes a lot of feeling of the game. Good luck having the Jewish wars when you convert all of Judea in a few clicks (well probably a lot of clicks)

 

[Samitte]

Of course, any modder can define how many pop-types they want and what they are used for freely. Here is an example of the freemen poptype.

@Johan

Does this mean adding pop types will not require modding the UI, but rather just generate another entry on a scrollable list? (Like with the cities list in province UI?)

 

[otaman1]

Is there a policy to outlaw slavery?

 

[Dmitrius]

But @Johan , one of the most well documented reasons for Roman success and eventually superiority was their ability to assimilate other cultures. I realise that this should be a difficult exercise and progressively more so later on, but surely there must be a mechanic for adopting other cultures or romanizing them?

 

[Daniel the Finlander]

Seems like the EU: Rome system except with more depth and player involvement, good. I like the mechanic that turns the citizens of conquered cities into freemen etc., that discourages rapid expansion.

Also i love how easy it is to remove all mana costs haha, looking at all the complaints I can see why that was made easy to mod.

 

[Captain Frakas]

Of course, any modder can define how many pop-types they want and what they are used for freely. Here is an example of the freemen poptype.

freemen = {
    local_manpower = 0.05
    can_promote_to = citizen
    demotes_to = slaves
}

I am not sure to understand: does it mean that we might modify in new pop-types in addition to those already existing? Is there a limit beside the necessity to get them stand on the interface? Can there be a slide bar in the list of pops?

 

[Samitte]

Seems like the EU: Rome system except with more depth and player involvement, good.

Also i love how easy it is to remove all mana costs haha, looking at all the complaints I can see why that was made easy to mod.

Yes! Though too many people are still thinking Paradox is making Victoria:Rome. So far it looks like EU:Rome gets the second chance it deserved.

 

[Roxas15]

This is wrong, polytheistic ancient cultures, like Romans or Greeks, tended to tolerate foreign cults as long as they did not meddle in the state's affairs. Religion should have less revelant impact on game than in medieval or modern timeframe (CK or EU). We do not know yet what does 'happiness' exactly do but I suppose it is some sort of a mechanic that prevents state from exploiting slaves too much. In such a case low happiness would increase the risk of slaves or other groups to take up arms and rebel. Something like this is needed but preferably not through religion which was not a distinctive feature of ancient Roman identity. People should rebel because they are mistreated, not merely because the official religion of the state is different than the one they publicly worship.

yea religion only had an impact on how people thought and therefore behaved and acted, it had a huge impact on every culture. it was just very different to monotheistic religions. also romans tolerated other cults and religions as long as they didnt interfere or caused problems for roman politics. roman cults and religions were adopted by many assimilated celtic people who either wanted to be part of roman upper class society or who just thought that taking over roman gods would have a positive effect for their life (like farmers who needed good harvest and could use roman gods or some syncretic form of new gods etc).
i just hope that the game will get some nice dlc's which will focus on these things.

 

[Thure]

Is there a policy to outlaw slavery?

Any exemple which ancient society did this? You would basically destroy the base of your economy.

 

[Rubidium]

This is wrong, polytheistic ancient cultures, like Romans or Greeks, tended to tolerate foreign cults as long as they did not meddle in the state's affairs. Religion should have less revelant impact on game than in medieval or modern timeframe (CK or EU). We do not know yet what does 'happiness' exactly do but I suppose it is some sort of a mechanic that prevents state from exploiting slaves too much. In such a case low happiness would increase the risk of slaves or other groups to take up arms and rebel. Something like this is needed but preferably not through religion which was not a distinctive feature of ancient Roman identity. People should rebel because they are mistreated, not merely because the official religion of the state is different than the one they publicly worship.

It's a bit more complicated than that. There absolutely were religious-based revolt movements during this time frame (even among polytheists the druids were explicitly targeted by Romans as dangerous subversives, for example). More broadly, the Roman religion (both the traditional religion and later the imperial cult) was used as a tool to "civilize" conquered barbarian areas; part of that process was assimilating local religious traditions, but part of it was also building big fancy temples and holding ceremonies in them in the various colonies. Both of these can be represented in-game as using religion points to convert pops.

And we are of course ignoring the Jews, who famously did end up launching a massive religious revolt during this time period (and several more shortly after the game ends).

EDIT: I'm assuming happiness isn't just "revolt risk"; it also looks to have an impact on e.g. productivity. In which case, feeling that your religion is honored would seem to be important; you don't want to anger the gods.

 

[Denkt]

Is there a policy to outlaw slavery?

Convert your slaves to freemen.

 

[TheDungen]

Grouping patricians together with all citizens seems odd. Also all freemen of captured cities becoming slaves seem a bit steep.
Oh and shouldn't the promotion from Freeman to citizen be based on the size of your armies since military device is how you did that transition. Also from citizen to landholder (the land holding citizens are very different from the non lamdowning ones).
Also does not the game primarily take place before the marius reform if so only the land owning classes would be able to provide manpower. Would be cool of such reforms was really a thing.