Hello and welcome to another Development Diary for Imperator: Rome!
The last two weeks many of us have been busy reading and reacting to the various reactions to the released Menander update, while others have begun to work on the next update for the game.
It's been interesting seeing what players do with the new features, both in the form of stories of games played and the written feedback many of you have provided us with. The
Suggestions forum and the new
Senatus Populusque forum have both seen many good ideas for how the new systems can be improved upon as well as new ideas for the game in general.
These suggestions are much appreciated and both me and others on the team spend quite a bit of time looking through them on a regular basis.
In some ways Menander was an update that allowed you to interact more with your pops, and the internal parts of your country, and it is clear that this was a focus that many of you appreciated.
Based on player input we made a number of changes in the
minor 1.5.1 and
1.5.2 updates last week. The latter patch also included some fixes that we had been working on for older bugs and QoL but that we had not been able to include in the 1.5.0 release, this is for instance how 1.5.2 came to include the addressing of the old inconvenience that you could not both take land and take subjects in the same peace treaty.
Most of all however 1.5.2 was an update that looked to tweak the balance of the many new changes and additions of Menander. In particular changes have focused on:
Stability
One of the changes of the Menander update, apart from the new systems introduced such as cultural integration, or the new senate, was changing how Aggressive Expansion, Tyranny and Stability interacted with each other.
The new way of things is a quite dramatic change from how it was before and took some getting used to for many. It also became clear that it needed some more tuning, and so in 1.5.2 we decreased the impact on stability, and increased the impact of tyranny on Aggressive Expansion as well.
This also provided an opportunity to make characters in government more impactful and so ruler traits and offices now have an increased importance for those who want to keep their country stable by reducing Aggressive Expansion or Tyranny.
Integrating Cultures
One of the biggest changes to the Menander update was the new system for integrating cultures and affording rights and privileges to non-integrated cultures. This is a change that seems to have been well received but many expressed hesitation about if it was worth integrating cultures due to the severe effect this had on the state and other integrated culture happiness. To address these concerns we have added some additional ways to increase the happiness shared by your integrated cultures as you grow bigger and increase in rank while also reducing the negative impact of integration.
Bugs:
We also spent quite a bit of time replicating and fixing some bugs reported in the wake of the new update.
One specific issue that we had to spend some time tracking down was the seemingly random, but quite common, sudden death of all characters in a country after winning a civil war - it turns out this happened whenever the revolt leader was on a ship on the time of surrender (!) - something we were able to hunt down thanks to saves posted on our forums.
That was all I had for today about what we have been up to these last two weeks!
We have now begun to look forward to update 1.6, an update which we will talk more about in the future. While we can’t promise anything at this stage, we are continuing to keep an eye out for major issues or imbalances related to Menander, particularly investigating some of the issues you’ve raised with us regarding food imports and AI naval construction.
-Arheo’s bit-
@Arheo here! Something I’d wanted to mention in the last weeks, is that the dialogue between community and dev team is still very much appreciated, and I’ve been particularly impressed by the level of meaningful debate in numerous threads I’ve seen both here and elsewhere.
One topic of conversation that repeatedly occurs is one that I’d like to address here. Much is made of the ‘historical extents of the Roman Republic/Empire’ - and this is something that remains a constant thorn in the side of both balancing and gameplay. It’s a tricky enough balancing act to enable those that wish to play the titular nation of Rome and maintain a relatively historical rate of conquest, as well as those who enjoy a slower pacing of gameplay that might be more apt for other nations.
The difficulty or ease of such a feat has fluctuated a lot over the last few updates, but I believe it’s now somewhere I’m relatively happy with. Recreating the Roman Republic at its historical extents should, in my opinion, be a very difficult challenge. This is something that should require you to utilise all tools available (aside from exploits… we’re watching you
). As a counter to this, it makes the concept of that ever-elusive World Conquest almost entirely unattainable. This is something I’m ok with. It will always be done, as the Three Mountains of EU4 has shown - but it’s not something I am actively intending to balance around, and I feel like it is fair to make that clear.
This said, it is a topic I’m keen to hear more on from those interested in following this up, so by all means make yourselves heard.
On an entirely different note, while some of you are understandably impatient to get your hands on more information regarding the next update coming for Imperator, you will have to wait just a little longer.
In usual fashion, however, I shall tease you by announcing two things. Firstly, while we’re working away on the season of war, it has not quite yet begun. Secondly, your next update will be termed Vitruvius, and we’ll be introducing some new faces in the coming weeks, to talk about it.
/PWN
