It's going to be exactly like Stellaris with endless reworking of systems without improving anything.
Hate to quote myself but...
I disagree, Stellaris is clearly better than before. Althrough I would agree its a deeply incomplete game at its core. They should have really given it another year of development. I never saw a game get revamped so hard. I started playing it with the Apocalypse expansion, so from what I heard, 1.0 Stellaris is a total different beast from Stellaris 2.0.
The problem is that its not better
enough.
The biggest issue of the game, leaving incompleteness aside, is the tech debt. We all know how Stellaris is fucked up, performance/code-base wise.
Imperator, on the other hand... As I said before, the problem is the game's inherent design. Paradox needs to pull a rabbit out of their hat for this to become good.
What stellaris doesn't have is campaign like game play,a premade map with different empires and such. If you play a single game in stellaris,you had seen everything that the game have the offer,all the games are identical.
That's because their galactic generation is somewhere between low effort and utterly shit. Take CK2, EU4, heck even HoI4, and the world has a past. The map has been shaped by centuries of conflicts, influences, moving borders, migrations, alliances, etc. States have different sizes, power, economies, alliances that are consequences of that past. Some are old, some are new, some are in-between. The state of the world is not a blank slate with nations thrown there for no reason, which is what Stellaris gives you: a galaxy with a couple "Fallen Empires" and a bunch of civilisations all starting the space-faring age at the exact same time, with nobody ever in contact with anyone else. From a roleplay or world building point of view, it's shit and boring. From a strategic/diplomatic point of view, it's even worse.
Of course, that's what all 4X games do. But Stellaris styled itself like being so much above that and "grand strategy" and roleplay and whatnot. Well, it's more whatnot than anything else, sadly. And I could even give a pass to Paradox is Dwarf Fortress wasn't a thing, but it is. Just look at DF for what world building means. Before you even start playing, the game simulates an entire world through eras, wars, migrations, cities rising, empires falling, heroes becoming legends and songs. The world has a past, it has a life, things have been shaped by that past, and it explains the present. That's the charm Stellaris's blank slate galaxy doesn't have. There's no point looking into the galaxy's past, no point in analysing relationships, alliances, families. There's no option to pick from that galaxy and play the exhausted superpower, the dynamic upstart or the threatened trade network. You're one of the many new factions starting on the same exact footing at the same time. It's just a 4X by the numbers, without even the one feature that at least gave it a bit of flavour: FTL asymmetry.
It's ok as is, I'd even go as far as calling it a better 'game' than 1.0 and I still play a game every now and then, but it's modern Paradox in a nutshell. Throw shit at a paid empty shell and see what sticks. No vision, no artistic integrity. It's nowhere near the bigger/prettier Distant Worlds it was looking like it could become.
To get back on topic, it's just amazing that they could fuck up Imperator like this when it covers such an amazingly rich time period... Yet, here they are, in the throwing shit phase. Not much seems to stick this time round though...
