Imperator: Rome Developer Diary - 12th of October 2020

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Happy to hear this, the old invention system was the mechanic I really disliked
 
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Love the new system. It’s a vastly needed improvement to the tech system. Also I really hope the teaser is for trade lines.

On a small unrelated note, I have a question I’ve been meaning to ask, but is there any chance we might get a new bookmark in the update or in a future update? A new second bookmark I think could spice things up a bit.
 
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By Jvpiter Optimvs Maximvs, this looks frickin great!
Considering that today is all about Tech. All Hail Αθηνη Σωτειρα, or Athena Soteria :cool:

Love the new system. It’s a vastly needed improvement to the tech system. Also I really hope the teaser is for trade lines.

On a small unrelated note, I have a question I’ve been meaning to ask, but is there any chance we might get a new bookmark in the update or in a future update? A new second bookmark I think could spice things up a bit.
What start date would you go with?
 
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Yes! Indepth Trade routes!
 
Considering that today is all about Tech. All Hail Αθηνη Σωτειρα, or Athena Soteria :cool:


What start date would you go with?
404 BC or slightly later. Basically right smack dab after the end of the Peloponnesian War. Not only would that allow for fully independent Greek city states, and be pre-Alexander the Great, but 404 BC was when Egypt, under the Twenty-eighth Dynasty of Egypt, successfully rebelled against Persia, leaving them independent for around a hundred years.
 
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404 BC. Basically right smack dab at the end of the Peloponnesian War. Not only would that allow for fully independent Greek city states, and be pre-Alexander the Great, but 404 BC was when Egypt, under the Twenty-eighth Dynasty of Egypt, successfully rebelled against Persia, leaving them independent for around a hundred years.
Would you want to see a changeup in tribal lands too? We know basically nothing and any change in the starting situation there would be super arbitrary.
 
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Interesting to see everyone here begging for mana to come back. Gold costs make sense, no need to introduce other currencies.

Maybe you can do something other than pay gold or introduce a new type of mana.

Maybe something related to philosophical schools or something realistic of the time.

It seems to me that someone long ago had a very good idea based on these schools.


Here are very good ideas about philosophical schools, apart from to give more importance to the characters they could be used to investigate technologies
 
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On a small unrelated note, I have a question I’ve been meaning to ask, but is there any chance we might get a new bookmark in the update or in a future update? A new second bookmark I think could spice things up a bit.

My personal standing to this: Maybe in some distant future, but please not for 2.0 - all efforts should be put in getting right was is going to get reworked. Which is a lot. As putting stuff in is only one side of the medal - balancing and ironing out the bugs can easily be the same work on top. No use for me in diverting attention or delaying things by adding a 2nd start date.
 
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Nooooooooo... I was worried a tech tree was going to be the solution to the problems with the invention system. Really dissapointed. Now cultures and regions that have 'unlocked' certain techs for centuries or millenia will have to unlock them again at the Roman pace. CKIII and EUIV made some steps towards moving away from such silly systems, Innovations and Institutions could be improved upon, but are already far superior to a tech tree. (Not to mention how a lot of these things make little sense as 'Inventions', as they had already been 'invented' for a veeeery long time.)

Now that I have that out of my system:
The teaser does look very good! Hopefully next weeks DD can make this one less painful.

But inventions sjut the name for tech system in Imperator. Who cares what they call it. Point is how I see it, is that Tech itself is kinda like a measure of how advanced the nation is on itself, while invention are an actual implementation of those technologies in society. Hence the cost. I think only thing they gotta add is tech spread, kinda like Institutions in Eu4 and it'll make everything more organic. Just in my view. Obviously im not dev, just a consumer.
 
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I love this new tech tree, inventions were quite frustrating in the way you had to go through some of the higher levels, just to get the few you really wanted at level 0 i.e - property tax!! So this looks a lot better.
One idea that I thought could be cool, is tying some inventions to integrating culture, rather than nationality. Maybe once you integrated a particular culture and it hit a certain % threshold of your nobility pops for example, you unlock some unique inventions that otherwise would be tied to that nation. Maybe a Rome that conqured Greece could unlock Mega-Polyreme from their culture. Or a Carthage that integrates Roman culture could gain some unique Roman inventions. It could offer play styles that benefit multicultural runs at the cost of national identity/happiness.
Just an idea.
 
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Interesting to see everyone here begging for mana to come back. Gold costs make sense, no need to introduce other currencies.

Imo no one is begging for mana. Some people just ask for an alternative, no matter if this is even related to a currency and the only currency people demand would be research points, which is already in the game, has a somewhat authentical background and is already used to determine the speed of research, depending on how much of this "currency" you gain monthly. So it would only mean to collect this monthly income, which has to be spent on inventions, maybe even alongside some money. But money being the solely used currency is a bit weird. An invention isn't just something you buy with money. Money would just support the researcher, but knowledge, experience, researching and time is the key.
 
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I love this new tech tree, inventions were quite frustrating in the way you had to go through some of the higher levels, just to get the few you really wanted at level 0 i.e - property tax!! So this looks a lot better.
One idea that I thought could be cool, is tying some inventions to integrating culture, rather than nationality. Maybe once you integrated a particular culture and it hit a certain % threshold of your nobility pops for example, you unlock some unique inventions that otherwise would be tied to that nation. Maybe a Rome that conqured Greece could unlock Mega-Polyreme from their culture. Or a Carthage that integrates Roman culture could gain some unique Roman inventions. It could offer play styles that benefit multicultural runs at the cost of national identity/happiness.
Just an idea.

I really like this idea!
In my recent campaigns I have completely ignored integrating cultures and just went for full on assimilation.
This suggestion would actually entice me to integrate cultures to gain technological options/advantages.
 
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Interesting to see everyone here begging for mana to come back. Gold costs make sense, no need to introduce other currencies.

There's no need for any new currency. One could, for example, solve the problem by selecting the tech that one wants to research and the research speed would then be calculated on the basis of the faction research efficiency and the researcher's particular skills. Thus the importance of the researchers would also be increased as currently they are rather underwhelming.
 
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Hello!

Welcome to another development Diary for Imperator: Rome, and the 2.0 Marius Update.
Today me and @Braindrift will be talking about some changes coming to the Invention system :)

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Up until now the invention system has been fairly uninvolved, with new inventions arriving at every tech level, and the selection of inventions you can implement severely limited at any time.
The idea behind this system was that while technology progresses you do not get more than base benefits from this unless you also invest in the implementation of the various inventions that each level was associated with.
This system has also changed very little (beyond how the price for inventions is scaled) between the various versions of the game since release.

In the Marius update the plan is to replace the Invention system.
Inventions are to remain to some extent gated by tech, but more importantly inventions are now in a tree-structure, allowing you to choose in which direction you want to progress, planning ahead for what you want your country to be good at. If you want to be a naval power you can progress down the naval portion of the military tree, perhaps even focusing on what type of ships you want to improve (lights over mediums?), while an expansionist might want to go after the inventions that help in absorbing lands with reduced penalties.

This change also allows us to pace some of the benefits in the trees in a better way than the old system where you would only ever have 3 inventions of each kind available at any time.
Additionally the new system will support country or culture specific branches, and will have new inventions added to better allow you to customize your country, interacting with Laws, Great Wonders, and more

The Trees:

@Braindrift has been working on making the new trees, and adapting our old inventions to them as well. I will now leave the word to him to explain the thoughts behind the trees. As with all things we show in our Development Diaries these trees are still work in progress :)

Civic Tree:
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The Civic Tree has been split up into two paths. The path to the left, starting with Standardized Measures, focuses on trade, commerce and provincial infrastructure. The path to the right is more oriented around civil rights, laws and cultural ideas around population, giving you improved output from slaves and freemen and improvement to happiness for cultural groups.

Military Tree:
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In the Military Tech Tree, you will find three main paths, each focusing on a specific area with the thought that it will make it easier to specialize. In the left-hand tree, you’ll find most things related to naval warfare and ships. The middle tree is oriented around military culture and logistics, mostly with improvements around your land-armies and the organisation around them. The right tree focuses on inventions and war-machines that empowers your siege abilities as well as fort defense.

Oratory Tree:
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The Oratory tree has two paths which roughly can be described as foreign and domestic affairs, or perhaps the Conqueror and Diplomacy path. The left tree is oriented around inventions that give you reduced War Score costs and lowered Aggressive Expansion impacts, but also increased loyalty and income from your subject states. The left tree focuses more on the internal affairs and diplomatic relations of your country, with a series of inventions that can increase the loyalty of characters within your nation and lowering corruption and tyranny.

Religious Tree:
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The Religious inventions are organised into one big tree, but similar to the others, the paths will have different themes. The leftmost path is oriented around religious culture for both the civic and military area, where you’ll find inventions such as; Tolerated Cults and Household Priests that will lower the cost for Divine Sacrifices, or Oath of Brotherhood and Military Decorations which will give you improved morale recovery for your armies. The middle path tries to capture the relation between state and religion, while the right path orients itself around inventions that come from the religious field.


Invention Benefits:

Most inventions will still focus on making your country slightly better at something, modifiers to things like the strength of certain units, to population happiness for specific pop types, how good your country is at demanding land in wars, etc.
The new system does however also support direct effects from inventions, or locking actions, laws, unit abilities, etc, behind them. Instead of the implementation of a certain invention just getting you a better ship type it might also get you a better port, or a new ship.
To some extent this relates to features that we have yet to talk about, so there isn’t too much to show here yet.

Unlocking Inventions - Progressing in the Trees

One other thing we want to revisit in the Marius Update is how you unlock inventions. For now the main way to do so will remain a gold cost, scaled on the number of pops in your country (the idea being that implementation of an invention is more costly the larger your country is), but this has in the past created situations very large countries really cannot afford to prioritize inventions.
The economy is changing a fair bit in the new update so we will await how the old costs play in the new system before we make any adjustments to this cost.

One new thing we are introducing to make things more interesting, however, is “innovations”. Innovations are essentially free unlocks in an invention tree that you get every time you gain a tech level.
Innovations represent important, milestone unlocks, adopted as part of the cultural zeitgeist of your nation, and allow you to progress over time in the trees of inventions in your desired direction, without diverting the funds from other areas.

Innovations may also be gained from some other sources (but technological progress will be the main source of them throughout the game).

That was all from us this week, except that Arheo has now hijacked the dev diary to leave you with another teaser…

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Will certain nations start with certain innovations unlocked? Are any unique innovations going to be part of entire trees or just singular innovations to the side attached only by requirements?
 
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