DD7: Food rework + Bankruptcy + Iberia + new Cultural Inventions + Tribal/Assimilation tweaks
Salvete readers!
Thus far we’ve highlighted various flavour additions to different areas of Imperator, but today we’ll be discussing various mechanical features we’ve developed to enhance immersion on a wider scale. We have various exciting items to showcase, including a total rework to the importance of food, a reworked bankruptcy system, new cultural inventions, tweaked gameplay for Tribes and a new assimilation change.
We’ll begin with a very important change to how food works, i’ll hand you over to PresidentStorm.
Salvete! My name is PresidentStorm, the developer of the Harvest Seasons mod and the developer of the food rework for Imperator Invictus.
Ever since Patch 1.2 “Cicero”, Food has often been relegated as a minor part of Imperator: Rome. Unless you plan on constructing a megacity, food is an afterthought. Each province produces a certain amount of food, this being primarily dependent on what terrain the province is. Added to this, certain trade goods that are produced like Grain and Livestock also provide an additional amount of food.
Now, there are issues with this mechanic. For starters, it is fairly easy to keep your food production high enough that it will consistently increase toward the maximum food capacity. Unless you build multiple cities in a single state, or focus on developing a megacity, you will rarely need to import food to keep your population satisfied. Another issue here is how food production stays consistent throughout the entire year, which in many cases is non-historical.
To remedy this, we have implemented a new mechanic: seasonal food growth.
Every December, a modifier will be added to every province in the game that affects the food growth in said province, and this modifier will last until the 1st of March. The modifier that affects the province varies wildly, which depends on several factors. Settlements will have their modifier based upon what trade good is being produced in that province, while Cities will have their modifiers based upon the terrain of the province. Along with these, the modifier is also affected by the severity of the winter, which consists of either mild, normal, severe, or very severe.
Along with the Winter modifier, Summer has also been implemented to help counteract this reduction in food production, by providing a bonus between June and September.
The result of this will be a more dynamic food system, in which the time of the year becomes more important.
However, we have done more than modify the production of food, but we have also modified the demand for food as well. Pops in Invictus consume food at a much higher rate than what Pops consume in vanilla.
With the increase in demand for food, especially among the nobles and citizens, this will make cities much more food needy than they are in vanilla. With these changes, it should prove to be more difficult to build and sustain large megacities.
Now onto reworked Bankruptcy mechanics by Jphiloponus.
Hello, Jphiloponus / GloryGloryByzantium again, bringing a foretaste for some of the exciting economic changes we’re looking at. Today I’ll be discussing a simple, yet powerful modification being made to one of the game’s vanilla features - bankruptcy effects. To remind those who are financially-savvy enough never to experience a negative treasury amount - Imperator has a unique feature to discourage overspending; rather than a loan, the player is greeted with an event with a random outcome ranging from a free gift from the gods to strong-arming the nobles into donating to the state with some steep maluses. While the random outcome perhaps adds to the desire to avoid such a situation, I always found it odd that the player ‘randomly’ chose to plunder nobles or neglect infrastructure. Another odd feature about the event was the random way it would fire (it’s not automatic to occur as soon as a negative balance is reached).
To remedy these issues in an immersive way, several new buttons with original artwork from Nerdman3000 have been added in the economy window, one corresponding to each of the negative outcomes of the event. These have been modified from their original outcomes for balance purposes, but generally keep to the respective themes of the original. Importantly, these can be pressed at any time as long as the conditions are met. Thus, one could have an abundance of wealth but still desire to strong-arm their citizens or neglect infrastructure for some quick cash but with long-term detriment to nation-building. Given that there would be nothing hindering a historical ruler from committing an act of tyranny - except for the consequences of such actions - this freedom should add an immersive element to the game.
Now onto another change to how Assimilation works by Diskianterezh.
Good afternoon, I’m Diskianterezh, Invictus French translator and a contributor for some cultural content for the mod:
In Imperator, we are used to creating huge empires and extending our dominion to the edges of the world. However, in this fun project we are often forced (against our will and unfortunately) to enslave forcibly incorporate some minor peoples… for the greater good of course!
As you may have noticed in your games, the integration and assimilation of different cultures is covered in Imperator by several layers of abstraction: loyalty, cultural happiness… and often, even if the new annexed pops were VERY angry, they would eventually assimilate over time, and only express their disapproval in occasional, small-scale revolts.
We looked at this topic and thought that the assimilation of numerous cultures might need more content and flavour. We have a lot of ideas and we get a lot of inspiration from all the suggestions that are offered on our discord, and several projects are being studied for later updates.
But for the time being we have agreed to tweak assimilation to make it dependant on unrest:
Now the greater the unrest, the greater the penalty for assimilation. This should make the mood of your citizens much more important when it comes to adopting your customs
Now you may think that the unrest's influence on assimilation is not so important, and you’re quite right ! Unless you start to lower your stability to a dangerously low level, it should not be that much of a problem. However, what if we consider assimilation speed in a place where the assimilating pops are not of the right religion, with wrong dominant religion and unintegrated dominant culture ?
146 years ? Ouch … better give the Saurashtran culture some cultural rights to smooth things over !
We hope to give you more immersive content to enhance internal management of multicultural empires on later releases, but we feel this change is a first step in the right direction!
Next, we have new Cultural inventions made by Stephan and Dustin.
My name’s Stephan (olivenkranz on the forums) and together with Dustin we have been working on making new cultural inventions. In vanilla, only the Greek, Indian, Gallic and Italic culture groups have unique inventions. We found this to be somewhat unfair and unbalanced, because not everyone had immediate access to these, if at all. So we decided to make inventions for the other culture groups too.
For the first release you’ll get inventions for the Iberian (and Celt-Iberian), Thracian, Dacian, Illyrian, West Levantine, Numidian, Egyptian and Mesopotamian culture groups. We are also working on other regions, such as East Africa, Anatolia, Persia and beyond. We plan to add inventions to most culture groups at some point in the future. On occasion there will be some overlap where inventions may be shared between two different culture groups. For example, beer is unlockable by both Egyptian and Mesopotamian cultures while a few agricultural inventions like the horse mill are available to West Levantines and Numidians.
Here are a few pictures of most of the West Levantine inventions. Obviously, we don’t want to spoil the surprise of what they contain - for the most part.
A few inventions unlock a special decision that is only available to a certain culture group or religion, even if another nation were to unlock it. The decision is obviously not the only thing the invention grants… One of these decisions is Child Sacrifice in the West Levantine tree, which will allow the sacrifice of a child if you find yourself in a dire situation. The Gods can grant some boons to help you out, yet beware, as they could be displeased and the sacrifice could backfire…
There are some limitations though, as you can only sacrifice a child once every 10 years.
Next we have more content/tweaks to Iberia from Tudhaliya.
Salvete! I’m
@Tudhaliya the Hittite, today I will show you some changes and new content that will be ready for the initial release of Invictus.
First of all, some clarifications about the Turdetanian Setup. Some of you may get confused about the last DD because I was talking about Karmo, Hasta, Onuba... but the Political screenshot showed the names Karmoia, Hastaia or Onubaia. For example, Karmo is the capital of the country of Karmoia. Paradox chose to call nearly all barbarian tags with names finishing with -ia, so we thought it would be nice to keep the vanilla style for the country name. To compensate this, there you can see the CoA of the new Turdetanian tags!
Here we have more CoA, these ones generated by the game itself using some of the new assets:
Regarding the new Iberian heritages, we decided to tweak some of them to better represent the countries' values while at the same time, looking to create interesting different approaches to a Turdetanian Campaign. Screenshots of the new Turdetanian heritages (Plus the Arsean Heritage) can be seen below:
Another change I want to bring up about Turdetania is the inclusion of a special modifier to the territory of Tharsis (1415) called “Mines of Tharsis.” As these mines were famously productive and a significant source of commerce for the region, we felt this warranted a unique provincial modifier, which can be seen below:
These mines have been used since prehistory and are functional even today. These mines were so important in the Classical Era that Greeks and Phoenicians usually referred to Southern Iberia simply as Tharsis. Iron, Gold, Silver, Copper... these mines had all the valuable metals a Punic player would like and the territory may become a goal for any expansionist power in the region. If you are wondering which resource produces Tharsis in game, it’s Iron.
We have also reworked the Iberian and Celt-Iberian levy templates and created some cultural exclusive templates. Indigenous peoples of Iberia didn’t use archers a lot like other barbarians, so we have marginalized them as a residual percentage. Iberians rely on Infantry (the Edetanian template of the image below) while Celt-Iberians prefer Cavalry (the Lusitanian template). Turdetanians and Turdulians will enjoy an exclusive template in which Heavy Infantry have more presence while Cantabrians, Callaecians and Asturians will enjoy an exclusive template that rely on major Light Cavalry:
Here a Cultural map highlighting the cultures with exclusive Levy template:
We have been expanding and tweaking the Iberian and Celt-Iberian Military Traditions from Iberian Flavour Mod:
The Iberian Tree focuses on creating a powerful Light Cavalry while can enjoy some benefits to Starting Experience as reference to the Iberian Mercenaries and Build cost and City founding as reference to the Phoenician and Greek contacts.
The Celt-Iberian Tree focuses on creating a strong Light Infantry while unlocking tactics like the Cavalry Skirmish as reference to the famous Cantabrian Circle as well as benefits to the defence as reference to the Numantine Defence. To finish my part, I want to show you a little teaser that will be in the release but it tells you that maybe more things are coming in the future.
Now back to some content from Snowlet.
Salvete! While I’m usually busy doing other work, I did find the time to implement the Tech spread mechanic from the Bronze Age mod into Invictus.
Concretely what this means is that when Tribes mutually trade with Civilized states, they will get an event roughly every 5 years where they will get some tech progress. This means that Tribes will slowly advance in Technology and they will not fall behind completely, especially when near the Civilized world.
We’ve also made some tweaks to the modifiers Tribes get. Mainly, they get slightly higher army morale, manpower and manpower recovery speed to emulate how they historically fought.
As you all know by now, the mod releases on the 30th of June. We’ve finished the content for the first release and are now exclusively fixing bugs. As always, expect bugs on release, we’re a modding team, not a full on dev team. We’ll make another post on release, but know that we will be closely watching the release and doing hotfixes as fast as possible.
Now as a little teaser for Wednesday we have compiled a feature list to share with you all:
- Reworked map setup in Iberia and the Balkans
- New food system with varied Seasons and increased difficulty
- Historical Galatian invasion
- Gamerules: for the Reworked Diadochi CB, and Dynastic Names
- 6 new Mission trees (list is below)
- A dynamic Background system
- Tons of new custom art for Deities, Cities, Wonders and more
- Added tons of Deities to forgotten religions
- Added tons of Treasures spread around the World
- Dynamic tech spread for Tribes
- Buffed early-game tribes
- Many new Military traditions and reworked how you get new traditions
- New heritages spread around the world
- Improved Wonder Building
- New content for Hibernians
- Tons of balance changes to make the game better
- Various new cultural inventions
- 4 languages to play in: English, German, French and Spanish
- And more various pieces of content
List of mission trees:
- 3 new Mission trees for Macedon
- Generic mission tree for Punic Puppets
- Generic mission tree for smaller Black Sea republics
- 1 new Mission tree for Carthage
We're very glad to see such a positive response from the community. It's been a humbling experience and we hope you all enjoy the mod immensely as it releases later this week. Thanks for tuning in to the last DD before the 1.0 release!