Reading is always best but a good video has it's own value. Animation on top of a map helps better comprehend the relevant geography and movements of armies and people. A good narrator that's conversant with the sources is able to deliver the narrative in a more interesting way and add potentially valuable commentary. With animation there's room to inject some humor and make the history more alive.
Disclaimer: the first bit of this DD talks about the internal nuts and bolts operation of a dev team itself, not game features. If that doesn't interest you, you can safely skip to the second portion with the gameplay screenshots.
Hi all. Jamor here with this week's Imperator dev diary. Some of you may be wondering, "who's this dude, he's not Arheo or Trin Tragula?". Well, I could never step in to those inimitable shoes, but I am in fact the producer of Imperator: Rome.
Now what does that mean, exactly? Often I see people mixing up the roles of Game Director,Technical Lead,and Producer when talking about our teams. This is entirely understandable since in the old days, when PDS was a lot smaller, the roles were often combined in one person. However, when a game and the company as a whole gets to a certain size and complexity, it pays to get specialization of effort. Here's what Arheo (GD), Egladil (Tech Lead), and I do:
Game Director: the owner of the creative vision for the project. Head of Design. Decides 'what' we are going to try to do.
Tech Lead: runs the technical implementation of the game, all its features and under the hood systems. Leads and organizes the work of the programmers. Master of the innumerable builds and branches we maintain, figuring out when to merge branches in to the main trunk, all that stuff. Figures out the 'how' part of carrying out the goals set by the GD.
Producer: in charge of time and budget. Making sure we put all the pieces of the puzzle together, programming, design, art, writing, script, localization, audio, backend and store pages for all the various places our game is sold, so we can get a video game product out the door and in to your hands. The slave of time, the one resource that once spent, can never be got back. Decides on the 'how much, and when'.
We have a lot of autonomy within the dev teams at PDS compared to other parts of the industry. This triumvirate makes most of the tactical decisions about the project, where we settle on a scope that's deliverable with the time and resources we have. My colleague Shams Jorjani likes to say that "ideas are cheap", and he's 100% right: good ideas are the absolute easiest part. Everyone has them. The mind freed from any practical constraints and operating purely in the realm of unfettered imagination is an incredibly creative thing. When we get back to reality though, we have to have the self-discipline to temper our exuberant dreams in to something that is shippable with the team and time slots we actually have, in the real world where deadlines and interdependencies and team bandwidth exist. If we said “yes” to everything, we might ship a perfect, world-changing video game in 2058, but the lights would be off a lot sooner than that. That's where I come in.
So what does all this mean and why is this guy taking up a DD slot?
First answer is, Arheo, Egladil and the rest of the team are working on finishing up 1.5 Menander, and I want them to have maximum focus on that right now. But also -
The big reason:
Subject progression, the system of evolving relationships between overlord and subject that we announced in the first overview of Menander, is cut from 1.5.
In my role, I have to keep on top of project scope. What that means is, do we have the people, time, and capacity from our supporting teams (like DevOps, Product Launch, QA, Art, Audio, Localization), and general ability to ship this update with this feature set? Can we hit a date that has to be agreed with external partners like the digital stores we're on, months in advance?
If upon digging in to implementation and finding out that we were too ambitious with our desired content for the release, the answer becomes plainly "no", I have to step in and reduce scope. Sometimes, sadly, that means cutting a feature. We always try to do this before it is announced to you, the fans, but there's a constant conflict between wanting to avoid building false expectations versus wanting to meet the demand for news about future content. In this case, we announced the feature, then when we got in to implementation found out the 1.5 update was going to be heavier than we thought. So, unfortunately, something had to come out. That's when duty obliges me to put on the black hat and get the chopping hatchet out. It's disappointing for us as much as you, but now at least you know who to be cranky at. It's not my game director, tech lead, or anyone else on the dev team, nor on the biz side of the company. Odd fate decreed it would be me, an old QA guy and fan of more than a decade. But as we say, "it is what it is".
As a long time Paradox fan who moved halfway around the world after playing our games since HOI2, I gotta tell you, cutting sucks. I'm a gamer too, and I want the cool thing in as much as anyone. But if that cool thing puts us over capacity, to the point where I'd have to ship it with terrible quality or at too harsh a cost on my team's well being, I gotta cut it. There's a saying in the games industry, that you have to be ready to kill your babies: what they mean by that is, working in this creative field that is ruled by practical limitations of time and resources, you have to be prepared to delay, shrink, or cut your features sometimes. It's just like any other thing in life where hopes meet reality.
What does this mean? Is subject progression gone forever? Probably not, in fact. As you might know, Imperator is trying out a new mode of releases for PDS. We aim to do smaller but more frequent updates compared to the massive once or twice a year things our other games have traditionally done. I'll tell you the same thing I told my guys, when I ran the numbers and things didn't fit: this feature is very cool, and it deserves better than to be rushed out with poor quality. We'll pause it for now, and come back to it in a future release when we have the time and resources to do it justice, and make something the fans deserve. With this new style of more frequent updates, that might not be too far off in the future, wherever we can make it fit. For now, our focus will be on getting 1.5 fun, stable, and playable by all of you in time for the summer vacation period.
So. I know this has been a bit of a departure from the normal DD, but I hope this glimpse in to the reality of production has been illuminating for you. I'll try to answer the questions I can in the thread.
If you want to hear more about my mindset and techniques in production, the delicate art of balancing creativity and reality, here’s a talk I did at PDXCon 2018:
Also, to soften the blow a bit, here's a message from our Game Director about some cool stuff that is going in to 1.5 Menander:
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This week will not be lacking any feature reveal however, as I show you a small project I’ve been working on in response to many of the comments about pops and pop-classes, that I read following the reveal of the nobles poptype and cultural integration.
The trade module of the game is something that I believe has the potential to augment the pops system considerably, and should be vital to a functioning empire. In its current form, however, trade can be hard to get into, difficult to rationalize, and fails to accurately portray the sheer economic power behind goods such as dyes and spices.
What this is -not-, however, is a full trade rework. Though there may be a time to cover trade in such a manner, the purpose of this small redesign is to both integrate trade to the pops system in a more rational way, and to add some variety to tradegoods while culling some of the modifier duplication.
As you can see here, nobles (and citizens) will now be responsible for flexing their buying power, contributing to the number of trade routes present in a province. This value will directly correlate to the number of citizens and nobles, and will not take pop happiness into account.
Commerce generation has been removed from pops, with the aim being to use trade routes to generate wealth and to keep pops happy. Nobles currently produce a significant amount of research, and play an important part in the tech system; with a moderate number of nobles doing the lion’s share of the work in contributing to state research. Their happiness however, will still be a significant hurdle to overcome.
Old buildings have been slightly repurposed to augment the number of trade routes that you’ll get from pops in a city, and work is ongoing to redefine how provincial investments will apply to the trade module.
Is that it? Certainly not.
What about trade goods themselves? Well, most goods will now contribute a small amount to the happiness of a poptype, and will be categorized as such:
This ‘local’ bonus will now stack in the entire province, effectively rolling the provincial capital bonus and the province bonus that used to be present, into one.
Capital surplus has remained untouched, as this was always a pretty cool way of contributing to the uniqueness of your nation, choosing which goods to ‘spec’ your country with.
Export bonus has been entirely removed, as this was something that was the hardest for me personally to rationalize, and added another layer of decision-making to every trade offer or deal with a foreign nation.
What the eagle-eyed amongst you will notice, is that it has been replaced with a Base Value. This base value is related to the value of the good itself - Papyrus commands a hefty price of 0.4 gold per month, whereas Leather is valued at 0.15 gold per month.
Importing a tradegood will earn you only 35% of the value of the good, and internal trade even less. Exporting is where the true value lies, with 100% of the trade taxes flowing directly to your coffers. It’s important to remember here, that as the government of your nation, you aren’t purchasing the import of a trade good; you’re encouraging the creation of private trade in that material from A to B. There is no reason you’d be paying to import material, although the taxes you earn will be less to simulate the amount being spent to keep the route running at your behest.
That’s about the extents of the tradegood rework I had planned. Let me know what you think in the comments below, and as usual, everything you see is WIP; especially numbers!
/Arheo
No wonder everything they put out is unfinished.
Well, you've got 3 options: Crunch, shit it out unfinished, or push back the release. Guess which option they go with?
It wouldn't be a modern PDX game without homosexual nubian princesses.
Bronze Age mod should add priest-cults (and priestess-cults on Crete) as government types.
(and I don't pretend to find this anywhere near as approachable as Caesar, haha, I just think it's rather a powerful passage).
Hello all!
Today @Arheo and I will be covering the upcoming rework of republic government mechanics.
First up is Arheo:
To begin with, I’d like to explain a bit about the process that led to the changes you’ll hear about.
The republican senate mechanics began their life as a ‘catch-all’ government type that was intended to represent all democratic nations on the map. During development, we realised we wanted to be able to have the senate able to act as a core consideration in a republic player’s game loop, by adding the ability for our Content Designers to add weights to individual actions, so that each faction could simulate an ‘opinion’, depending what you wanted to do.
It succeeded in part; the senate could be manipulated if you knew where to look, yet it was often very unclear why the senate voted any given way, without scrolling through a yard of tooltips and numbers. Perhaps even more importantly, it became such a huge task to consider every time we wanted to add new character or diplomatic actions, that ultimately it had to go.
So we went back to the drawing board. I had several primary goals in mind for the faction rework:
I’ll hand over to @Trin Tragula here, who’ll explain quite how we went about fulfilling these aims.
- That it should more accurately represent the political make-up of the roman senate
- That the senate still had the ability to get in your way and be an important, distinctive part of republic gameplay
- That we bring characters and votes more closely together
- That factions are much more dynamic, and can, in future, be expanded upon to add all manner of new content to nations
The Republican Senate
In a Republic the citizens of a state exercise power through an assembly and the most well known such assembly in our game is probably the Roman Senate.The historical senate did not have parties as such, but at any given time there would often be factions gathering senators around them.
While all senators had the right to vote it was also not always the case that everyone made the choice of how to exercise that vote for themselves.
Just as often a senator would vote to satisfy obligations that he might have to one of the more politically active members of the senate, or along friendship lines. Likewise any assembly made out of people will feature some that are more impressionable than others.
In the Roman Senate those who voted without speaking were often referred to as “Pedarii” since voting was often conducted by Senators moving from one side of the assembly to the other to show their support or disagreement with the current speaker, and any politically ambitious Senator would have to have earned the trust of a number of such pedarii. Senate politics was often as much about how many others you could mobilize around you as it was about high ideas and ideologies.
Which is not to say that ideals were unimportant in politics, no senate relies only on favors to function, but the system that has been in the game up until now has been relying on parties always voting exactly along the lines of an imagined ideology on every issue, when in reality this influence is less direct and influential politicians could most of the time get support for their ideas based on a combination of trust and individual merit.
In the Menander update we have revamped the party system altogether. Gone is the large number of generic parties that corresponded to vague ideas and instead we have gone with parties that correspond to political groupings of the era. This also means that we now have 3 parties at any given time for you to balance, with their membership and influence more in flux. Rather than trying to map the parties to issues you care about we have also tried to make the issues the parties care about matter to you (more on that below).
Parties
The Roman Parties are based on the political groupings that existed in the later part of the life of the Republic though they do not mimic them exactly:
Optimates
This party represents primarily aristocrats of ancient pedigree. They oppose the rise of New Men and the influence of common people on the senate. The Optimates believe that the populares are a destructive force that will wreck the ancient privileges and traditions of the republic.
Boni
The Boni try to strike a balance between looking to the needs and wants of the poor masses, while still preserving stability and acting through gradual reform. They believe that the way forward is through the senate, and using the existing rules, rather than radical reform and empowering popular movements. The boni believe they are looking out for the best of the country as a whole instead of supporting any particular group in society. Their opponents believe they will favor the status quo at any cost.
In Roman historiography the Boni and Optimates are often used as synonyms. Here we use them to separate those that seek to protect and preserve the ideals of the old Republic, such as Cicero, from those that more purely seek power on the behalf of those already privileged.
Populares:
The “men of the people”, claim to act in the interest of the common people such as indebted farmers, poor aristocrats and veterans that could not adapt to life after war. The Populares oppose the Optimates in almost every way. They are happy to overthrow old traditions and the privileges of the few, to empower and enrich the many and those who can sway them.
Votes & Party Membership
In the Menander update the votes that the parties of the Senate wield are no longer dependent on discrete modifiers, instead they come from the characters that are part of its membership.
Every character in a country will now have a Senate Influence rating, and when added together for all characters in a party this determines how many votes a party has.
How much Senate Influence each character has can vary greatly. With some being good for many more votes than others. This means that it will now be possible to handle a particularly troublesome party by trying to get rid of their influential members. Should such a character abandon one party for another it will also now have a much more deeply felt effect.
The Senate influence of a character is based on their power base. But it is also modified by a number of factors, such as traits (an Orator will have increased influence, as will characters with high popularity) or jobs.
A character being made governor or general will see their influence sharply reduced, despite their now increased power base as it is hard (if not impossible) to exert influence over the Senate when you are not in the capital.
Likewise the factors that contribute to a character changing their party membership have been revisited, with their personality traits and social standing now playing a much bigger role in where their loyalties lie. Some further examples to illustrate this are is that some characters that are less independent minded will tend towards supporting the party of their Head of Family, while others would shun the party of their Head of Family for exactly that reason.
Party Approval & Abuse of Power
Just as before the parties of the Senate will be able to vote on many of the actions you take, and will be able to obstruct the rule of a weak consul. As seen above their power to support or obstruct your actions hinges on the influence of their members. Their willingness to support you however is no longer dependent on the action being taken. Instead every party will now have an approval value, reflecting the favor you have gathered with this party through your actions as a ruler. If you give land to heads of families the Optimates will approve, but if you hold triumphs for Minor Characters they will lose approval. Members of the Boni will applaud upholding the ideals of the Republic, while Populares and Optimates will both favor curtailing them in various ways.
Ideas and political intrests thus remain very important to the functioning of the Senate, but you can also reliably muster support for your actions by ensuring that all parties get to do at least some of what it is they want.
Approval is useful since it determines how parties will vote. As long as you have sufficient approval from the parties in your Senate you can do _almost_ anything (the current Support you have in the Senate is something you can always see in the top bar).
Should you abuse this power however it may come back to harm you, the parties have opinions on everything you do and if you use their votes to do things they do not approve of they are unlikely to support you in the future.
This is especially true if you stop them from pushing through their Party Agendas...
Party Agendas & The Consular Veto
At any given time every party in your Senate will have an Agenda that they wish to see fulfilled. These are always visible in the government screen and can range from quite reasonable things like improving the infrastructure in some province to far less easily accommodate things such as the changing the laws, or confiscating land from Heads of Family.
Sometimes the parties will even propagate for the declaration of war on other countries.
Should you at any time fulfill the Agenda of a party you will have their gratitude, in the form of a nice boost to their approval in the Senate.
You cannot however rely on the parties staying silent about their Agendas. If one of their members holds the consulship they will expect to be able to fulfill their Agenda. As long as there is sufficient approval you can be sure that the party in power will try to push its Agenda through the Senate. When this happens you will be presented with a choice of either allowing it or using the Consular Veto, which will stop the agenda from being pushed through during this term.
Opposing the ruling faction can be costly however. Using the veto against the ruling faction will see their approval plummet, in a way that may be hard to recover in a timely manner.
More Republics, More Parties
This Diary has focused on the Roman parties but we are revamping the system for all Republics in the game. Menander will also feature 3 new parties for other Republics, which are more inspired by the world of Greek Politics, but also more general since they need to work in many parts of the world.
These parties are:
The Oligarchs
This party represents the richest members of your society, as well as the ancient noble families. They seek to increase their wealth and power and are less afraid of making use of the masses to reach their goals than the Roman Optimates are.
The Democrats
Democrats seek to preserve the freedoms of the citizens in their society, they are less focused on personal honor than the Roman populares but just as intent on acting against the interests of the Oligarchs.
The Traditionalists
The traditionalists are focused on avoiding disturbing the gods and preserving the privileges of the priesthood. They are no pacifists but they will oppose the sacking of holy sites of your religion and will in general take a conservative position on many things. Where the Boni yearn for the old Roman virtues and the founding principles of the Republic the Traditionalists are far less concerned with such political ideals.
Since we want to take the time to make them special we have for now focused on making the Roman parties perform as we want, and adding a reasonable general setup for the other (largely but not only Greek) Republics. It was important to us that even these generic parties should model real life social struggles and interest groups, since that was in our opinion one of the major failings of the old system.
In the future however we want to add more country or culture specific parties to Republics around the world. Something this new system should lend itself well to support.
As usual anything you see here is subject to change to some degree even if the underlying mechanics described are accurate for the current state in development.
Whether you are playing with the Roman parties or the more general ones we think these changes significantly change how Republics play and we hope you will enjoy it
Trin Tragula said:Non-roman factions have their own agendas (with some overlap).
And I should add that the Optimates are not the only faction that can ask for war, the populares will also sometimes advocate for this, but the two parties have different logic for how they pick their goals
Judging by Paradox's past achievements, it will forever be a bland biscuit. But the modders can use such things to create great things.
Populists are by no means there anymore. A completely different faction with similar name is there. Populists were some abstracted abortion that gave you negative modifiers across the board and was set up as some manner of bad guys that you should prevent from getting in power. It was the same in EU: Rome. Their replacement with something that actually isn't just "bad guys, keep their influence low or suffer arbitrary debuffs" is a major incline in this aspect.
