Review for Imperator Rome

[KingStevenofEarth]

Imperator Rome is a game that promises a lot, but ultimately fails to deliver on it's promise. While the latest update has done much to solve some of the most glaring issues in the game, there is still a lot of work to be done to raise this game to the caliber that I have come to expect from Paradox. So, in this review, I will hit on both what the game does well, and what is working but needs improvement, and also the things that need a complete overhaul. With over 100 hours played since the Marius update, this review will focus entirely on the game post update. So, let's get started.

1.) Events in Imperator Rome are extremely generic, and outside of mission events, they are both predictable and utterly useless and thusly annoying. While mission events show some promise, they too need work to not feel so bland. The events rarely change throughout the various stages of the game, and thus have a distinct lack of importance other than being made to grab attention. 3.5/10

2.) Technology increases have both positive and negative affects. On the positive side, your civilization advances in four categories that can affect your gameplay to a large degree. On the negative side, unlike historically, military technology advances extraordinarily increases the cost of maintaining any kind of standing army, holding a large Navy, or building a lot of forts to help secure your borders and important cities. With this in mind, the player is often forced to choose between keeping a weakened Navy in early to middle stages when having a strong Navy is extremely important, or having a strong Navy but forced focus on economic only gains to offset the cost-disallowing for expansion on a large scale, and rendering it impossible to focus on pop assimilation, conversion, or building. As a result, technology gets a 2.5/10 for what it does do well.

3.) Military traditions play an important part in the effectiveness of your armies. This is an interesting feature that promised to be much more, but still has already done a lot. When playing as any country, the forced focus on economic increases over pop increases, as stated above, results in an inability to branch out to other tradition branches until in stages far enough into the game as to become irrelevant. A good example of this would be the lack of access to heavy ships from the start, or them being a technology. When playing as Rome, you must unlock the Greek tradition tree to get access to these extremely important ships for Naval, or even indeed Land warfare. More on this below. Military traditions are otherwise very good, and so get a deserved 5/10.

4.) Land Warfare has potential to be much more, but is still very good. With the update, players are now forced to plan ahead for wars-not as much as they could be, but much more than they were before. While the ability to set your armies to be automated to do things like defend your borders, recon, carpet sieging, build roads, perform drills etc, as well as what tactics they use in combat land warfare is mostly automated while needing only limited input from the player in most cases-especially in later stages. With so much automated, it seems rather odd that I have to manually take control of an army to move it to a port to load it on a ship. While there are other features that could be included in the land warfare aspect, it is still pretty good, and gets a well deserved 6.5/10.

5.) Naval Warfare was probably the aspect I was looking forward to most out of all warfare-only to be heavily disappointed in it so far. While the ability to build a fleet is great, the cultural limits on the types of ships is unrealistic. Rather than a military tradition a technology would have been a better aspect for the building on each type of ship where you start with the capability to build light ships, with one of the first unlockable technologies being medium, and then the ability to make heavy ships-regardless of culture, should have been how this worked as far as what ships you could have. The ability to attack a port or raid a port with heavy ships as a requirement is as ridiculous as blaming the sky for being blue when your having a bad day would be. Because of the internal mechanics of the game some cultures, like the Romans, completely loose the ability to ever capture or raid ports effectively limiting their navy to blockades and pirate hunting. This makes conquering some areas of the world practically impossible and severely limits the joy from controlling more than just land based armies. Navies are pretty much just a money drain, and in a game where maintaining a surplus on your budget is already difficult means that this feature is useless at best, and just plain ignorable for the most part at worst. Combine this with the fact that Navies do not cost anything more than cash to build-no manpower requirements and as long as the area they're being built in has access to wood you're golden, allowing for you to have a practically unlimited Navy so long as you can afford it. And when attempting to automate your army to hunt enemy fleets or destroy pirates, it will regularly attempt to take on far larger fleets, costing you even more money to rebuild, or you will grow an extremely large navy from absorbing pirate ships. 1/10

6.) The overall game, with the update is decent. Not great, but it's decent. In the coming days, I will seek to add more to this review, as I try out various countries with the new update, and will also include a 'wish list' of features that I would love to see any future updates of the game receive. 18.5/50 overall

 

[IsaacCAT]

Very subjective/partial review, but helpful nonetheless. Thank you for the insights.

 

[AggaWackTan]

To be quite honest I think Paradox just forgot the type of players who play their games. I mean I don't know anybody on these forums but all my friends who play EU4, IR, HOI4 have all done history in school and only really played Age of Empires or Rome total war when they were kids, fifa and assassins creed but not really Call of duty.

They play the games because they love the era the game is set in and expect a company like Paradox with a reputation for complexity to represent the era well. There's nothing really too flashy about Paradox games so they can't rely on gimmicky features to provide fun, the fun used to be in actually thinking out what your strategy should be for the time era the game is set in.

But the whole challenge in IR is still about balancing AE, senate approval, stability, political influence. And how you gain/ lose them don't make sense for the era.

• As a tribe you want to control grain in a neighbouring province? You attack without a cb (according to the game) you gain 50 AE and lose 25 stability, suddenly all your population are in uproar and your country is falling apart. Where's the migration/ domination/ tribal politics to represent these factions?
• As Rome, you start with 3 families who seemingly call the shots. There's no sequential order to families gaining offices and a 16 year old can be put in as praetor by the player no questions asked. All these families during the mid republic also see their holdings as powerbase to overthrow the republic regardless of their character traits. . So you the player are managing character powerbase and scorned families (strange IR perspective of politics) instead of playing an even simplified system or patrician vs plebian, optimates vs an emerging populares faction (they should become an expansionist players problem) game of politics that actually resembles what you'd think the era would have been like.
• There's no fog of war (that was in EU4) so little Hibernian tribes are completely aware of the evolving diplomatic situation in the Mauryan Empire or in the steppes
• As Carthage, my fleet has the sole purpose of ferrying troops and just beating other ships. No trade role whatsoever
• Phalanx, triplex acies are inventions in 304BC.....Like half the world was introduced to the phalanx just 30 years earlier and now the Diadochi have to invent it all over again
• Why are animations between horse vs soldier so hard? People can say they want resources diverted to this but modders can make models in <week.
• Athenian democracy doesn't feel very special and a resurgent Sparta doesn't play the League politics you'd expect these Greek polis's to play.
• Buildings need to be given much more importance. In the Europa Barbarorum 2 mod for medieval 2 total war you could build a colony building. Now there is the colony button in the culture tab but say for the seleucids, there should be a strategy to build a colony and have a diplomaic option available 'appeal for colonists' instead of being guided down a mission tree to achieve this. Following a mission tree path and getting rewards out of nowhere is not strategy, give me the tools as a strategy game to do this and put obstcales in my path and allow me to try and find away around it.

These are only some of my issues but essentially it comes down to this, I don't strategize in IR through what I know of the era, it's all down to overcoming game mechanics with gimmicky features and ticking modifiers etc.

 

[Akbar The Great]

2.) Technology increases have both positive and negative affects. On the positive side, your civilization advances in four categories that can affect your gameplay to a large degree. On the negative side, unlike historically, military technology advances extraordinarily increases the cost of maintaining any kind of standing army, holding a large Navy, or building a lot of forts to help secure your borders and important cities. With this in mind, the player is often forced to choose between keeping a weakened Navy in early to middle stages when having a strong Navy is extremely important, or having a strong Navy but forced focus on economic only gains to offset the cost-disallowing for expansion on a large scale, and rendering it impossible to focus on pop assimilation, conversion, or building. As a result, technology gets a 2.5/10 for what it does do well.



Hmmm, I don't agree with this. I don't think that military maintence costs need to follow the Historical trend you seem to have indentified (where are yuou getting this information by the way?) even if it is accurate, because military costs are there to challenge the player into making choices, and to prevent snowballing to a degree.

Not sure why you're complaining that you have to make choices? that's the back bone of good strategy, not every option or decision is meant to be a benefit without cost or downside...so if you're having to decide what to prioritise then that's the game doing ts job.

As for being unable to focus, on pop assimmilation, conversion, or buildings, that's just not true at all. I've done all three.

Complaining about having to make choices, or prioritise in a GSG seems to me to be a strange line of argument.

 

[Hannibal_theCannibal]

• As a tribe you want to control grain in a neighbouring province? You attack without a cb (according to the game) you gain 50 AE and lose 25 stability, suddenly all your population are in uproar and your country is falling apart. Where's the migration/ domination/ tribal politics to represent these factions?

I get what you're saying but I think tribes are incentivized to use the war council (name?) interaction to get claims. You're right that tribal warfare, migration, and politics all need additional attention down the line.

• As Rome, you start with 3 families who seemingly call the shots. There's no sequential order to families gaining offices and a 16 year old can be put in as praetor by the player no questions asked. All these families during the mid republic also see their holdings as powerbase to overthrow the republic regardless of their character traits. . So you the player are managing character powerbase and scorned families (strange IR perspective of politics) instead of playing an even simplified system or patrician vs plebian, optimates vs an emerging populares faction (they should become an expansionist players problem) game of politics that actually resembles what you'd think the era would have been like.

I'm not sure if it's already been introduced in the invention tree but there should ABSOLUTELY be a milestone invention called "Coursus Honorum" that gives XYZ benefits BUT it gives loyalty penalties to older characters if someone younger than them is awarded a more prestigious office. I'm pretty sure @Lord Lambert has talked about the need for something like this in one of his videos.

• As Carthage, my fleet has the sole purpose of ferrying troops and just beating other ships. No trade role whatsoever

Yup, definitely is out of whack and something I think the devs said they wanted to focus on in a future major update.

• Phalanx, triplex acies are inventions in 304BC.....Like half the world was introduced to the phalanx just 30 years earlier and now the Diadochi have to invent it all over again

It certainly felt more correct in 1.5.3 that certain culture types start the game with certain military tactics already unlocked. All the Diadochi should have phalanx unlocked. Granted you could make the argument that a hoplite phalanx and a phalangite phalanx should be different tactics (or even incorporate another unit type). I'm not sure how where the devs go from here but having to unlock Phalanx as a Greek Poleis just feels wrong.

 

[AggaWackTan]

I get what you're saying but I think tribes are incentivized to use the war council (name?) interaction to get claims. You're right that tribal warfare, migration, and politics all need additional attention down the line.

Yeah,,, I know its to incentivise the player, but how the player is being incentivised isn't how they should be. Instead of thinking that by invading without a reason 'I'll upset the balance of power in the region and the surrounding tribal assemblies may unite and divide up my land' I'm thinking Ill end up waiting a few decades to let me AE decay and stab recover. The point is you're not thinking strategy you're thinking maths. As a tribe we hadn't even invented the number zero yet I don't want to be thinking maths. I know most people playing know not to invade with no CB, it's just to highlight the core issue with the game that this is the baseline punishment to avoid and what strategy in the game largely is. I'm always thinking numbers, modifiers instead of legit diplomacy based on the attitude these cultures would have had.

 

[Jiben]

Yeah,,, I know its to incentivise the player, but how the player is being incentivised isn't how they should be. Instead of thinking that by invading without a reason 'I'll upset the balance of power in the region and the surrounding tribal assemblies may unite and divide up my land' I'm thinking Ill end up waiting a few decades to let me AE decay and stab recover. The point is you're not thinking strategy you're thinking maths. As a tribe we hadn't even invented the number zero yet I don't want to be thinking maths. I know most people playing know not to invade with no CB, it's just to highlight the core issue with the game that this is the baseline punishment to avoid and what strategy in the game largely is. I'm always thinking numbers, modifiers instead of legit diplomacy based on the attitude these cultures would have had.

The way i look at is it that your people become disatisfied at being draged into a unjust war. Like: why should i send my sons to fight and die against these guys when we have no reason to. Tyranny and war exhaustion would maybe be more realistic? but i can see why it's like it is since those 2 modifiers barely hurt.

 

[Lord Lambert]

2.) Technology increases have both positive and negative affects. On the positive side, your civilization advances in four categories that can affect your gameplay to a large degree. On the negative side, unlike historically, military technology advances extraordinarily increases the cost of maintaining any kind of standing army, holding a large Navy, or building a lot of forts to help secure your borders and important cities. With this in mind, the player is often forced to choose between keeping a weakened Navy in early to middle stages when having a strong Navy is extremely important, or having a strong Navy but forced focus on economic only gains to offset the cost-disallowing for expansion on a large scale, and rendering it impossible to focus on pop assimilation, conversion, or building. As a result, technology gets a 2.5/10 for what it does do well.

This is the first time I've seen someone complain about the tech system. I disagree with all of it and give a subjective 2.4/10 for your rant.

 

[MrReaper182]

To be quite honest I think Paradox just forgot the type of players who play their games. I mean I don't know anybody on these forums but all my friends who play EU4, IR, HOI4 have all done history in school and only really played Age of Empires or Rome total war when they were kids, fifa and assassins creed but not really Call of duty.

They play the games because they love the era the game is set in and expect a company like Paradox with a reputation for complexity to represent the era well. There's nothing really too flashy about Paradox games so they can't rely on gimmicky features to provide fun, the fun used to be in actually thinking out what your strategy should be for the time era the game is set in.

But the whole challenge in IR is still about balancing AE, senate approval, stability, political influence. And how you gain/ lose them don't make sense for the era.

• As a tribe you want to control grain in a neighbouring province? You attack without a cb (according to the game) you gain 50 AE and lose 25 stability, suddenly all your population are in uproar and your country is falling apart. Where's the migration/ domination/ tribal politics to represent these factions?
• As Rome, you start with 3 families who seemingly call the shots. There's no sequential order to families gaining offices and a 16 year old can be put in as praetor by the player no questions asked. All these families during the mid republic also see their holdings as powerbase to overthrow the republic regardless of their character traits. . So you the player are managing character powerbase and scorned families (strange IR perspective of politics) instead of playing an even simplified system or patrician vs plebian, optimates vs an emerging populares faction (they should become an expansionist players problem) game of politics that actually resembles what you'd think the era would have been like.
• There's no fog of war (that was in EU4) so little Hibernian tribes are completely aware of the evolving diplomatic situation in the Mauryan Empire or in the steppes
• As Carthage, my fleet has the sole purpose of ferrying troops and just beating other ships. No trade role whatsoever
• Phalanx, triplex acies are inventions in 304BC.....Like half the world was introduced to the phalanx just 30 years earlier and now the Diadochi have to invent it all over again
• Why are animations between horse vs soldier so hard? People can say they want resources diverted to this but modders can make models in <week.
• Athenian democracy doesn't feel very special and a resurgent Sparta doesn't play the League politics you'd expect these Greek polis's to play.
• Buildings need to be given much more importance. In the Europa Barbarorum 2 mod for medieval 2 total war you could build a colony building. Now there is the colony button in the culture tab but say for the seleucids, there should be a strategy to build a colony and have a diplomaic option available 'appeal for colonists' instead of being guided down a mission tree to achieve this. Following a mission tree path and getting rewards out of nowhere is not strategy, give me the tools as a strategy game to do this and put obstcales in my path and allow me to try and find away around it.

These are only some of my issues but essentially it comes down to this, I don't strategize in IR through what I know of the era, it's all down to overcoming game mechanics with gimmicky features and ticking modifiers etc.

I been playing Paradox games since 2005 and grand strategy is my favourite type of game but I will play any type of game (as will most Paradox fans I guess) because a good game is a good game regardless of what type of game is. I will happily play FIFA football games for example. You and your friends are no more "real" Paradox grand strategy fans just because you shun certain types of games. It just makes you gaming snobs.

 

[MrReaper182]

I'm really enjoying the update to this game. Yes there are a few things that need fixing but I'm having lots of fun and as long as people like me are having fun then that's all that rally matters. It seems that fun has been forgotten by a lot of people that post on these forums and that people like me who are having lots of fun with the game are not allowed to have fun. It seems to me that a lot of people who post on these forums are so miserable and negative all the time.

 

[Samitte]

This is the first time I've seen someone complain about the tech system. I disagree with all of it and give a subjective 2.4/10 for your rant.

Hold your horses! That credit is mine, I started doing so the day it was revealed!

Though even I disagree with the OP's take on Technology. And judging the entire game by just the warfare aspects makes for a bad review in my books.

 

[AggaWackTan]

. You and your friends are no more "real" Paradox grand strategy fans just because you shun certain types of games. It just makes you gaming snobs.

Whatever you’re “quoting” I didn’t say. So stop giving it the big one, I’m not trying to make you feel bad for playing other games.

 

[OutsiderSubtype]

The big complicated tech tree is one of the best parts of the game.

 

[IsaacCAT]

The big complicated tech tree is one of the best parts of the game.

I think the boundary between inventions and politics is being blurred with these trees. Many inventions look more like political decisions.

I am not saying this is bad. But it seems that inventions are inmune to politics bickering/costs and players love it. This is a shortcut and a lost for the game as a whole. We have isolated a key element to give more control to the player.

 

[Mod S]

Your ideas are intriguing to me and i wish to subscribe to your newsletter.

 

[TheWorstPro]

1. The events being generic is a fair assertion. I feel a lot of the events are just "choose who loses loyalty" or "spend something to gain bonuses." The game could really use some more stroy-type events where one event choice leads to another event, which leads to another, etc. Although I'm not really sure what you mean by "The events rarely change throughout the various stages of the game, and thus have a distinct lack of importance other than being made to grab attention." I mean, don't all paradox games have this "issue"? I can't tell you how many times in CK3 I got the horse taming event in just a single playthrough. I honestly can't think of a single paradox game, or even any game, where the basic events actually change over time. I don't know, maybe I'm wrong and there's some game that exists out there which does this and all other games need to adopt this type of event.

2. I don't think I can agree with you on any point you make here. I also have to agree with some of the other posters here, that the tech tree is designed to force you to make choices. Why would you ever want to be some kind of military juggernaut that's amazing at everything, destroying enemy armies and navies alike? That just seems completely boring. Anyways, it doesn't even matter because you're still wrong about not being able to do it. It's completely possible if you spend all your tech points on military techs without doing any of the others. There you go, your perfect space-marine empire is ready for you to never be challenged by anything ever again.

3. I'm not even sure what your complaint is. Yes, it should take at least some effort to unlock other military traditions, and honestly it's not even that difficult to unlock a bunch of traditions over the course of a game. In my current Syracuse run, it's only 125 years into the game and I've unlocked North African, Latin, and Levantine traditions in addition to my starting Greek one, plus have had plenty of military xp to spend on developing the trees further. Also, complaining that Octeres and Mega Polyremes are locked behind military traditions is ridiculous. Historically, the Romans never seemed to take much interest in the massive ships the Greek successor Kingdoms used, and this is shown by the fact that the very large ships stopped appearing in historical records after Actium, and that the method of constuction also seems to have been lost. The complaint is like saying "OMG why can't the Mauryan Empire build viking longships? They're such a useful ship you should make them tied to tech and not vikings!"

4. Not many complaints here, although I would like to mention that navies has a specific automation which auto-ferries troops around. Now, I don't know how it works in combination with troop automation, but it's very easy to use and make troops ferrying as simple as clicking where you want to go, and the troops automatically walk to the coast and get picked up by the ships.

5. The entirety of this post can be summarized to "I don't like that heavy ships are limited to military traditions so I'm going to pull out a bunch of stuff from my a** to justify why my Rome should be building tessarakonteres." Firstly, the Romans can unlock Greek traditions extremely easily. It takes 3 (yes, a whole 3!) traditions to unlock the Greek paths. Not to mention you're literally right next door to the Greek heartland, where you can integrate their cultures almost right away in your playthroughs. Assuming you never ever go to war as Rome, have a 0-stat Tribunus Militum, and never build legions once or drill them, it would take 67 years to gather enough military XP to unlock Greek traditions. From there, the only thing you need to do is invade Epirus, integrate Epirote culture and voila, you can unlock Greek traditions. From there, again, if you never ever declare war as rome and never get a Tribunus Militum with more than 0 martial, it would only take 89 to unlock mega polyremes. So just to clarify once again, you can play an almost pacifict Rome game (in fact, you could even be 100% pacifist if you manage to make Epirus a client state diplomatically) and play suboptimally on purpose, and still unlock heavy ships as Rome with over 100 years left to spare. Secondly, this in no way makes it so that "conquering some areas of the world [are] practically impossible" since the only way you can use the heavy ship abilities is if the target is a port, which, surprise, is really only useful in the Eastern Mediterranean (you know, the place where the Greeks already are), where where's a lot of fortified islands. In 99.9% of the cases in other parts of the world, it's better to just invest in land sieges even if you have acces to mega polyremes, since chances are the overwhelming majority of forts and conquerable land won't even have a coastline.

Now don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to say that Imperator is a perfect game. Of course, it has a lot of areas that can and should be improved upon (trade, character loyalty, developing cities/provinces, etc.), but to come out here and blatantly make things up just pisses me off. Anyways, that's my rant over. Just wanted to address these points since I found some of them ridiculous. You're of course welcome to repond or give my post an arbitrary rating/10.

 

[stratigo]

I think the boundary between inventions and politics is being blurred with these trees. Many inventions look more like political decisions.

I am not saying this is bad. But it seems that inventions are inmune to politics bickering/costs and players love it. This is a shortcut and a lost for the game as a whole. We have isolated a key element to give more control to the player.

I mean, what's the difference between a tech that involves training your soldiers to form formations and a tradition that does the same? XD

 

[stratigo]

3. I'm not even sure what your complaint is. Yes, it should take at least some effort to unlock other military traditions, and honestly it's not even that difficult to unlock a bunch of traditions over the course of a game. In my current Syracuse run, it's only 125 years into the game and I've unlocked North African, Latin, and Levantine traditions in addition to my starting Greek one, plus have had plenty of military xp to spend on developing the trees further. Also, complaining that Octeres and Mega Polyremes are locked behind military traditions is ridiculous. Historically, the Romans never seemed to take much interest in the massive ships the Greek successor Kingdoms used, and this is shown by the fact that the very large ships stopped appearing in historical records after Actium, and that the method of constuction also seems to have been lost. The complaint is like saying "OMG why can't the Mauryan Empire build viking longships? They're such a useful ship you should make them tied to tech and not vikings!"

I do have an issue with how traditions unlock other traditions being unmoored from local or regional concerns. Playing as syracuse myself, I have plenty of latin populations, but no ability to unlock the italian traditions. Or the punic ones if I were inclined to invade carthage. What I'd have to do is, essentially, invade egypt or persia, far out of my way, to get to traditions, then carthage for those til I can finally access the italic ones. And that's just... off for me. Syracuse is not going to have any legitimate conquest of those regions unless you are doing a map painting game. And maybe that is just what most people do, but I don't. I'm happy with a more logically limited state in italy and maybe parts of north africa if I get around to it.

Traditions you have access to unlocking should be more about the region your state exists in than trying to mimic the diadochi as, like, massilia.

 

[IsaacCAT]

I mean, what's the difference between a tech that involves training your soldiers to form formations and a tradition that does the same? XD

A very important one: the unlock for military traditions comes from military experience. The unlock for inventions comes from research points.

I am more in favour of actively playing the game (the former) than passively obtaining perks (the later)

 

[goodcigar]

The 'respectfully disagree' button should be removed from the forum. It doesn't have any kind of positive affect on the forum or discussion. It basically turned the forum into Facebook.