Imperator Overview

[Victor1234]

It seems the current state of Imperator is frozen, for the moment at least, so it seems a good time to ask some questions about the game, that have held me back from getting it. I had a physical copy of EU:Rome back in the day and even modded a savegame trimmer (longer games tended to bloat the save files with all the dead character histories, causing issues), although both are sadly lost, so I'm quite familiar with the earlier iteration.

1. Are the visuals (especially the map) still good? I know it was widely praised when it came out as the most beautiful game, but with the newer versions it seems like the UI is not as popular anymore, especially in comparison to CK3.

2. Does anyone play republics? They were a pain in the original game (even with mods) and lots of people avoided them, because of how arbitrarily they took control out of player hands. I gather they still take control out of the player's hands, but is there much to do about it besides take a tyranny hit and pray for the next election to come sooner?

3. Are civil wars still a good feature? In the original, civil war was one feature that was widely seen as the best feature over any other Paradox game, as it helped massively with late game blobbing. They were also somewhat difficult to avoid without a lot of cheesing, as inevitably your best commanders ended up being the prime candidates backed by loyal troops.

4. Judging from the wiki, there's been a lot of additional chrome put on the original (including territories, food supply, managing mercenaries to name a few). Do any of the new features stand out as being fun or notable? Does having territories/provinces/regions make a lot of difference in the game or is it basically the same as the original, where you have some territorial units under a governor and he gives bonuses/spawns events to build buildings in his unit?

5. Is diplomacy/religion fixed? In the original, if you were a different religion, your relations would go down over time with little way to reverse it, so Macedonia would never ally with Carthage and most of the diplomatic options were useless anyways because of the incredibly low success rate, even with highly skilled characters (Ah yes, populist guy I hate, please do try this assassination attempt with 1% chance of success!)

6. Mods added bloodlines in the original game (Epigoni for the win!) but otherwise the characters were fairly individualistic. I understand there are great families now to try and improve the character system. Did it improve it? Or is still just an endless pop up game of "your friend wants money, do you give him the money or lose your friend?"

Edit: Also, just out of curiosity, have any players here played EB1 or EB2 from the Total War series?

 

[Herennius]

It seems the current state of Imperator is frozen, for the moment at least, so it seems a good time to ask some questions about the game, that have held me back from getting it. I had a physical copy of EU:Rome back in the day and even modded a savegame trimmer (longer games tended to bloat the save files with all the dead character histories, causing issues), although both are sadly lost, so I'm quite familiar with the earlier iteration.

1. Are the visuals (especially the map) still good? I know it was widely praised when it came out as the most beautiful game, but with the newer versions it seems like the UI is not as popular anymore, especially in comparison to CK3.

2. Does anyone play republics? They were a pain in the original game (even with mods) and lots of people avoided them, because of how arbitrarily they took control out of player hands. I gather they still take control out of the player's hands, but is there much to do about it besides take a tyranny hit and pray for the next election to come sooner?

3. Are civil wars still a good feature? In the original, civil war was one feature that was widely seen as the best feature over any other Paradox game, as it helped massively with late game blobbing. They were also somewhat difficult to avoid without a lot of cheesing, as inevitably your best commanders ended up being the prime candidates backed by loyal troops.

4. Judging from the wiki, there's been a lot of additional chrome put on the original (including territories, food supply, managing mercenaries to name a few). Do any of the new features stand out as being fun or notable? Does having territories/provinces/regions make a lot of difference in the game or is it basically the same as the original, where you have some territorial units under a governor and he gives bonuses/spawns events to build buildings in his unit?

5. Is diplomacy/religion fixed? In the original, if you were a different religion, your relations would go down over time with little way to reverse it, so Macedonia would never ally with Carthage and most of the diplomatic options were useless anyways because of the incredibly low success rate, even with highly skilled characters (Ah yes, populist guy I hate, please do try this assassination attempt with 1% chance of success!)

6. Mods added bloodlines in the original game (Epigoni for the win!) but otherwise the characters were fairly individualistic. I understand there are great families now to try and improve the character system. Did it improve it? Or is still just an endless pop up game of "your friend wants money, do you give him the money or lose your friend?"

Edit: Also, just out of curiosity, have any players here played EB1 or EB2 from the Total War series?

1) The map is as great as it ever was, I would say unmatched. Visually, I was fan of the old marble interface, but I concede that the new UI is functionally better and accepted the new look.

2) Yes, I do. Not sure what you mean with "take control out of the players hand" - the election changes the ruling character you play and depending on, if (s)he is from a differnt faction you might have increased senate resistance initially, but in no way your ruling options are restricted (unless of course you have roleplay house.rules or something)

3) I can't compare them with the original game (never played it), but depsite some issues the have, they are a good thing. However, if you have mastered your character handling toolbox a bit (befriending, bribing, free hands and so on), you can avoid many of them. I got the warning in each playthrough dozends of times, but in most cases I'm able to fix things before the counter runs out. AI has more troubles with it and if you like crumbling AI blobs and should decide to play IR, don't forget to apply the "AI Empires Collapse" mode (which offsets an AI cheat with province loyalty in case they face a rebellion)

4) I would say they kind of stand all out, but the cultures/levy system (only integrated/assimilted pops give you levies and the culture determines unit type) is probaly the best one. Reading your description of the EU Rome system, I would say territories and governors are vastly improved. The governor e.g. runs a special policy for each province in his governorship (a region consisting out of multiple provinces), improving a certain aspect of the province (like conversion, trade, taxes, manpower)

5) Different religions gives still a relation penalty between countries, but its small and can be easily dealt with by multiple tools (improving relations actions, trading, befriending ruler,...); the odds for assasination attempts are largely ok - I'm sure there can be cases, where you might end up with a 1% chance, but thats not common.

6) I think that still a weakness. Certain (mostly unfriendly) actions affect happiness of a whole family (and particularly) its family head, but in day-by-day business and events, my impression is that "individual motivations" of characters overweight. So yes, an event like you describe is very common.

No, haven't played anything from the Total War series.

 

[Chaostrian]

In current state it's worth the money

 

[Nikolai II]

How is the mission system?

I had bought I:R and recently started playing it some, finding some enjoyment in it.

Until I started a mission tree about improving Nubia and the first step was to build a granary in every province producing food. Only the counter wouldn't tick up so the mission was an unplayable misery burden.
Finding that there was also no reasonably expedient way to work around it (neither savegame mod or console command) burned me quickly and I went on to play something else.

But since this thread is about encouragement I figured I should ask - is there any good (i.e. low effort) way to get around that mission tree bug?

 

[Victor1234]

1) The map is as great as it ever was, I would say unmatched. Visually, I was fan of the old marble interface, but I concede that the new UI is functionally better and accepted the new look.

2) Yes, I do. Not sure what you mean with "take control out of the players hand" - the election changes the ruling character you play and depending on, if (s)he is from a differnt faction you might have increased senate resistance initially, but in no way your ruling options are restricted (unless of course you have roleplay house.rules or something)

3) I can't compare them with the original game (never played it), but depsite some issues the have, they are a good thing. However, if you have mastered your character handling toolbox a bit (befriending, bribing, free hands and so on), you can avoid many of them. I got the warning in each playthrough dozends of times, but in most cases I'm able to fix things before the counter runs out. AI has more troubles with it and if you like crumbling AI blobs and should decide to play IR, don't forget to apply the "AI Empires Collapse" mode (which offsets an AI cheat with province loyalty in case they face a rebellion)

4) I would say they kind of stand all out, but the cultures/levy system (only integrated/assimilted pops give you levies and the culture determines unit type) is probaly the best one. Reading your description of the EU Rome system, I would say territories and governors are vastly improved. The governor e.g. runs a special policy for each province in his governorship (a region consisting out of multiple provinces), improving a certain aspect of the province (like conversion, trade, taxes, manpower)

5) Different religions gives still a relation penalty between countries, but its small and can be easily dealt with by multiple tools (improving relations actions, trading, befriending ruler,...); the odds for assasination attempts are largely ok - I'm sure there can be cases, where you might end up with a 1% chance, but thats not common.

6) I think that still a weakness. Certain (mostly unfriendly) actions affect happiness of a whole family (and particularly) its family head, but in day-by-day business and events, my impression is that "individual motivations" of characters overweight. So yes, an event like you describe is very common.

No, haven't played anything from the Total War series.

Great info, thanks!

2) In a republic, the ruling character and senate composition between the 5 factions (war guys, money guys, religion guys, builder guys and hate everything guys) changed with each election. Any army or navy commander had to be a former ruling character, which meant that in the beginning of the game, you literally had no ability to have commanders for some years, which was annoying if you had an early war. Eventually this was fixed with mods putting in some characters with former ruler trait and Paradox patched in an event where if you were at war and had an army that was bigger than some arbitrary limit (I think 5 units), the Senate would pick a random character and you could either get him as a commander or nobody.

The diplomacy system was also tied into this senate mechanism. You want to declare war, or ask for access or even set up a trade route? You needed Senate approval. If you had over 50%, good to go, the option turns green, no penalty. Something like 30-50, the option is yellow, go for it but you take a tyranny hit, lower than 30% and the option is red, can't do it at all. Many times the options were red because the Senate AI was pretty bad (you'd think the war guys would want war and the money guys want trade).

The worst part was, you couldn't do much about it, because the percentages of the factions would change mostly randomly (you'd think appointing war guys to every single office in your government would give the war guys a big boost at the election, but no. Having wars or a bigger army also didn't make the faction more powerful, just happier, which raised loyalty of guys in the faction but did nothing to swing Senate votes....)

For these reasons, some people (including me) just never played republics.

3) Interesting, I see some stuff on the forums about civil wars being either very easy to avoid or players cheesing civil wars (something about loyalty being reset, so they actually encourage their own civil wars as a gamey tactic). Also, did I read that right? The AI in the base game needs a mod to boost their risk of civil war? Does the AI not have civil wars without it or just not very often?

4) Ah yes, I saw a lot of stuff around the levies reinvigorating the game, a huge change from the original for sure.

For governors, that sounds mostly the same, I just probably didn't explain the original well. It was also appointing a guy to administer a governorship (which consisted of multiple provinces), but instead of a policy (do you set those?), it was mostly just events based on his traits and skills. Good governor causes popup events that increase taxes/civilization/build free building/improve manpower/convert religion or culture, bad/corrupt governor causes slave revolt, loss of money or building destroyed events.

The governorship boundaries were fixed though based on classic Roman provincia (ie, Crete and Cyrenaica were always one governorship), which felt quite rigid and often times, since you got a penalty for having no governor, you had a lot of guys being governor over tiny 1 province governorships (since other countries owned the other provinces of a classic Roman provincia...). Can you change the boundaries at all in this new one?

Edit: Also, does the food system add a lot of nuance or anything to the game or is it mostly ok to ignore?

 

[IsaacCAT]

1. Are the visuals (especially the map) still good? I know it was widely praised when it came out as the most beautiful game, but with the newer versions it seems like the UI is not as popular anymore, especially in comparison to CK3.

One of the best looking games to stare at the map, it is beautiful.

2. Does anyone play republics? They were a pain in the original game (even with mods) and lots of people avoided them, because of how arbitrarily they took control out of player hands. I gather they still take control out of the player's hands, but is there much to do about it besides take a tyranny hit and pray for the next election to come sooner?

I love playing Republics, but I know that they are not loved by the majority of players.

2) In a republic, the ruling character and senate composition between the 5 factions (war guys, money guys, religion guys, builder guys and hate everything guys) changed with each election. Any army or navy commander had to be a former ruling character, which meant that in the beginning of the game, you literally had no ability to have commanders for some years, which was annoying if you had an early war. Eventually this was fixed with mods putting in some characters with former ruler trait and Paradox patched in an event where if you were at war and had an army that was bigger than some arbitrary limit (I think 5 units), the Senate would pick a random character and you could either get him as a commander or nobody.

The diplomacy system was also tied into this senate mechanism. You want to declare war, or ask for access or even set up a trade route? You needed Senate approval. If you had over 50%, good to go, the option turns green, no penalty. Something like 30-50, the option is yellow, go for it but you take a tyranny hit, lower than 30% and the option is red, can't do it at all. Many times the options were red because the Senate AI was pretty bad (you'd think the war guys would want war and the money guys want trade).

The worst part was, you couldn't do much about it, because the percentages of the factions would change mostly randomly (you'd think appointing war guys to every single office in your government would give the war guys a big boost at the election, but no. Having wars or a bigger army also didn't make the faction more powerful, just happier, which raised loyalty of guys in the faction but did nothing to swing Senate votes....)

For these reasons, some people (including me) just never played republics.

Republics in I:R have changed from the first iteration when the game came out in 2019. I recommend reading the wiki about republics: https://imperator.paradoxwikis.com/Government#Republics

If you pay attention to each faction approval factors and the senate control, you can enjoy a lot Republics. The Wiki section do not explain faction approval in detail, for example, the Democrats (Populares in Rome) will loose party support if your nation is tyrannical but you can offset this having scorned families that will give you the party support. Traditionalists wants you to be in peace and have all deities of the state religion, etc...

When you know how to win the party support, it is a matter to appoint the people of the party to the offices that gives them more senatorial influence. This way, you can have in short time a Senate populated with Senators of your preferred party with a high approval.

Why do you want to have high approval? Less than 20% will make all your decisions blocked, and below 50% your decisions will cause tyranny. Causing tyranny is not a bad thing, as it is the easiest way to burn Aggressive Expansion and you can handle tyranny effects on the loyalty of your characters by bribing, giving free hands and making friends.

All in all, Republics are great for Role Playing and for me is the best way to play with all your characters. Monarchies are boring in comparison, they do not have the extra layer of Senate party politics.

3) Interesting, I see some stuff on the forums about civil wars being either very easy to avoid or players cheesing civil wars (something about loyalty being reset, so they actually encourage their own civil wars as a gamey tactic). Also, did I read that right? The AI in the base game needs a mod to boost their risk of civil war? Does the AI not have civil wars without it or just not very often?

The wiki civil war has been updated yesterday, it is worth having a look: https://imperator.paradoxwikis.com/Civil_war

The aftermath of a civil war is used by players to strengthen the loyalty of characters and provinces. This is feasible because civil wars are not powerful enough and you can engineer very small ones for the same effect. I think this has to be reviewed by PDS asap and make Civil Wars great again!

6. Mods added bloodlines in the original game (Epigoni for the win!) but otherwise the characters were fairly individualistic. I understand there are great families now to try and improve the character system. Did it improve it? Or is still just an endless pop up game of "your friend wants money, do you give him the money or lose your friend?"

Great families are mainly about the head of family. This character ends up having a lot of power base. As a player you have to appoint head of families in government offices to bribe/give free hand to keep them loyal if you do not want them to become disloyal due to their huge power base. However, this mechanism does not improve character system, does not make them more alive, as it is very easy to circumvent and does not make characters special.

However, characters traits and schemes are very interesting. It has a lot of potential to make the characters unique but the game struggles with this and most characters are forgettable tools. Some events linked to traits and the characters' government/army positions make them very interesting and memorable to the player.

Edit: Also, does the food system add a lot of nuance or anything to the game or is it mostly ok to ignore?

The food system is very important for army management. You should take food in consideration when moving the army around. The whole food system is very necessary but could be improved upon. There are many things that are not accounted (seasons, floods, etc...)

You could ignore food on your cities, unless you want to grow tall, then it is something to look at.

CAVEAT: I did not play EU:Rome nor the TW series on Rome.

 

[IsaacCAT]

How is the mission system?

I had bought I:R and recently started playing it some, finding some enjoyment in it.

Until I started a mission tree about improving Nubia and the first step was to build a granary in every province producing food. Only the counter wouldn't tick up so the mission was an unplayable misery burden.
Finding that there was also no reasonably expedient way to work around it (neither savegame mod or console command) burned me quickly and I went on to play something else.

But since this thread is about encouragement I figured I should ask - is there any good (i.e. low effort) way to get around that mission tree bug?

Abandon the improve X region/province missions. They are boring and not updated.

Only some nations have dedicated missions trees, look at the DLC's and the national missions in the wiki for the best missions possible:

Missions - Imperator Wiki

imperator.paradoxwikis.com

Imperator: Invictus mod is doing a great job creating missions for many other nations, you should try out that mod too:

[MOD] Imperator Invictus

Announcing the Imperator Invictus mod - A community made DLC for Imperator: Rome Welcome Mod's out! https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2532715348 Or for PDX store: https://mods.paradoxplaza.com/mods/27170/Any If you want to...

forum.paradoxplaza.com

 

[Herennius]

3) (...) Also, did I read that right? The AI in the base game needs a mod to boost their risk of civil war? Does the AI not have civil wars without it or just not very often?

No, my comment was directed to the other threat empires face - unhappy pops (mainly caused by different religion or unintegrated cultures) might revolt and try to gain independence. Technically it is superficially similar to a civil war (new tag appears, which is at war with you - your goal is to take their capital back, while they just have to "sit it out"), but usually the revolting part of your empire is much smaller - and the AI is even helped in that situation with the loyalty cheat I mentioned. The effect of it is that the AI almost never expierences multiple revolts at the same time or shortly after and becuse of that can easily crack down any of them. Said mod takes it away and the AI has to fight like a human player conquering left and right and not caring about pop happiness.

The mod has though no impact on how civil wars play out for the AI.

 

[omega20056]

I find republics easy to play, possibly too easy. The crises of the Roman Republic never occur. Governors never become too powerful, and senate support is easy to acquire. Once you unlock legions, you're laughing, when in reality, they should become dependent on their generals.

 

[DrZoidberg]

After mana was gone stats arent so important anymore so doesnt matter who you get in charge of your republic or monarchy. It is not game over like in ck if you dont get your guy in charge:
Before I realised that your ruler doesnt matter republics were annoying, because it is hard to keep your party and the person you want in power.
But now when I play republic just do their missions and all factions will be happy and you can do everything without tyranny.

I dont know if it is because I have gotten better but civil wars seem much easier to avoid now than when the game got out.
I think most people gave up the game and started to talk negative about it was because their countries collapsed due to civilwars.
Before they reminded me of rebells in victoria 2, which also happen too often and distracted from the fun parts of that game.