Grand Strategy Imperator: Rome - the new grand strategy from Paradox

[JarlFrank]

Don't have 80,000 provinces, have less provinces and less places where battles can occur and then create more options within them.

Personally I am a big "more provinces is better" proponent. But I like things like city-states, small nations, etc.

But I agree on more options. As it is now, you can only hit your army on their army. You can't, for example, fight a Guerilla War. My iberian ancestors, the Lusitans, gave the romans immense casualties by fighting guerilla war for years, even through the Roman Empire was huge and they were just a small tribe. Romans literally had to win by making Viriato's bodyguards murder him - which spawned the saying "Rome does not pay traitors."

I was recently reading The Alexiad and it was so interesting to see many of the tactics which pre-modern armies used. So much deception, for example.

Exactly. I don't mind big provinces per se, but it's the end result of making you just do the same thing 800 times instead of making the actions more interesting. Right now, you basically can't fight any of the most interesting wars in history the way they were actually fought. You can't do Alexander's battles, to pick one example I know reasonably well, because you can't control anything micro-level like a focused charge at a specific point in the enemy lines, you can't really ever hurt someone's supply lines in a deliberate way, and so on. You can't do any significant battle in the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, because leaving aside the apocryphal stuff about controlling weather, warfare at that point had so much to do with strategic bottlenecks, supply lines, and all the other things that actually happen outside two random doomstacks rolling dice at each other's faces.

It was great to have Pdox games when there was almost nothing else around, but it's a pity that they just keep milking it over a decade while doing absolutely nothing new.

The only Paradox games that do combat somewhat interestingly are the Hearts of Iron games.
You actually get proper battle events happening that depend on terrain, commander abilities, army composition etc. And you can assemble diverse armies with different equipment, support units, etc.

But they don't port that system to any of their other games because... no reason? The same thing could easily work in ancient, medieval, and early modern settings. But instead, Paradox decided Hearts of Iron is their only combat-focused series and the others are not, so the combat is deliberately left shitty.

 

[Zboj Lamignat]

People itt are dangerously close to discovering paradox titles aren't games. We need to shut it down now.

 

[Fedora Master]

Apparently there's a bug that only affects the Linux and Mac versions where Roman levies are 100% light cav.

HOW IS THAT EVEN POSSIBLE?!

 

[Heroic Liberator]

Apparently there's a bug that only affects the Linux and Mac versions where Roman levies are 100% light cav.

HOW IS THAT EVEN POSSIBLE?!

Hipsters that use Linux and Mac for gaming deserve everything they get.

 

[Fedora Master]

Apparently there's a bug that only affects the Linux and Mac versions where Roman levies are 100% light cav.

HOW IS THAT EVEN POSSIBLE?!

Hipsters that use Linux and Mac for gaming deserve everything they get.

Obviously but I'm genuinely asking how that is possible, from a programming perspective. It's not like Linux uses different fucking integers.

 

[fantadomat]

Don't have 80,000 provinces, have less provinces and less places where battles can occur and then create more options within them.

Personally I am a big "more provinces is better" proponent. But I like things like city-states, small nations, etc.

But I agree on more options. As it is now, you can only hit your army on their army. You can't, for example, fight a Guerilla War. My iberian ancestors, the Lusitans, gave the romans immense casualties by fighting guerilla war for years, even through the Roman Empire was huge and they were just a small tribe. Romans literally had to win by making Viriato's bodyguards murder him - which spawned the saying "Rome does not pay traitors."

I was recently reading The Alexiad and it was so interesting to see many of the tactics which pre-modern armies used. So much deception, for example.

Exactly. I don't mind big provinces per se, but it's the end result of making you just do the same thing 800 times instead of making the actions more interesting. Right now, you basically can't fight any of the most interesting wars in history the way they were actually fought. You can't do Alexander's battles, to pick one example I know reasonably well, because you can't control anything micro-level like a focused charge at a specific point in the enemy lines, you can't really ever hurt someone's supply lines in a deliberate way, and so on. You can't do any significant battle in the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, because leaving aside the apocryphal stuff about controlling weather, warfare at that point had so much to do with strategic bottlenecks, supply lines, and all the other things that actually happen outside two random doomstacks rolling dice at each other's faces.

It was great to have Pdox games when there was almost nothing else around, but it's a pity that they just keep milking it over a decade while doing absolutely nothing new.

The only Paradox games that do combat somewhat interestingly are the Hearts of Iron games.
You actually get proper battle events happening that depend on terrain, commander abilities, army composition etc. And you can assemble diverse armies with different equipment, support units, etc.

But they don't port that system to any of their other games because... no reason? The same thing could easily work in ancient, medieval, and early modern settings. But instead, Paradox decided Hearts of Iron is their only combat-focused series and the others are not, so the combat is deliberately left shitty.

LoL no,the best combat system is the CK one,by far. HOI is pretty shit,you just draw a line,fill your battalions with artillery and watch them gobble the enemy. I never invest in air,tanks or navy shit,just pump up good artillery and soldier equipment and you you are fine. It is by far the most boring combat system of paradox games. Also it doesn't make sense in any other setting outside of ww times. In ancient times you had big army that sticked together,in medieval times you had peasant armies with noble warrior elite,in modern times you have small professional armies and bombings. The hoi combat system makes sense only in the first half of the last century. A whole border stretch and push was never done before,it is inspired by the trench warfare of the ww1.

 

[AgentFransis]

Apparently there's a bug that only affects the Linux and Mac versions where Roman levies are 100% light cav.

HOW IS THAT EVEN POSSIBLE?!

Hipsters that use Linux and Mac for gaming deserve everything they get.

Obviously but I'm genuinely asking how that is possible, from a programming perspective. It's not like Linux uses different fucking integers.

My guess would be a bug in the build pipeline where the linux and mac versions have an outdated data file for Rome or the Rome entry is missing and the game defaults to light cav. It's still quite weird, would make more sense if all levies everywhere would have the same issue.

 

[thesecret1]

LoL no,the best combat system is the CK one,by far. HOI is pretty shit,you just draw a line,fill your battalions with artillery and watch them gobble the enemy. I never invest in air,tanks or navy shit,just pump up good artillery and soldier equipment and you you are fine. It is by far the most boring combat system of paradox games.

Stop playing that abortion of a game called HoI4 and play Darkest Hour instead, the high point of the series.

 

[fantadomat]

LoL no,the best combat system is the CK one,by far. HOI is pretty shit,you just draw a line,fill your battalions with artillery and watch them gobble the enemy. I never invest in air,tanks or navy shit,just pump up good artillery and soldier equipment and you you are fine. It is by far the most boring combat system of paradox games.

Stop playing that abortion of a game called HoI4 and play Darkest Hour instead, the high point of the series.

Why do you assume that i play it lol. HoI generally is the game that i am least interested,i got tired from the WW2 stuff when i was teen,and this days i just skip most of the ww2 shit.

 

[Mortmal]

It aint that bad now, feels like they really rushed it or the suits ordered them to, but they steadily patch at least. Its going to be a good game finally, once we finished the paid beta test.

 

[Fedora Master]

I've noticed that the people on Steam and on the PDX forums who claim that the patch totally fixed everything are also the people who have the most trouble with the new mechanics. Lots of complaints about the UI and levies that can easily be figured out by experimenting or reading the changelog.

 

[Mortmal]

I've noticed that the people on Steam and on the PDX forums who claim that the patch totally fixed everything are also the people who have the most trouble with the new mechanics. Lots of complaints about the UI and levies that can easily be figured out by experimenting or reading the changelog.

Yes , they fixed the levies xp issue as far i can see and added an autotrade button in each province trades, lot of stuff not mentioned in patch notes . That alone help things greatly, especially when you have 20+ trade lines in your capital and half of them break after declaring a war. Now it takes a bit to get used to the UI, maybe not much worse than other paradox games.
Game has some depth now, worth looking at . There's a few vital things to find, the cultural menu is much more important as you set rights . Giving above free men status means integrate, which gives you their culture levies and as tradeoff satisfaction malus to your main pop, or deny them, create a colony, and so on .
Still hard to massively expand without having province loyalty problems, i am trying a full conquest with rome and it's hard due to the short game time limit , hard to keep provinces loyal by building infrastructures, while funding efficient legions . Temple and grand theater seems mandatory, but costly.

 

[Average Manatee]

Autotrade actually makes the game too easy, you have too much money that you would never have before unless you spent 50% of your time microing trade.

Standing armies seem to be a complete waste of money. From what I can tell and read your pops only get damaged by levies being completely wiped, not normal combat. So this way you save money at peace and at war you don't have to pay manpower reinforcements after the war (since if you send an army back home with 5k/20k manpower left you don't have to pay to refill it for the next war). This also makes assaulting overpowered, especially against the endless morass of small nations. Protip: for some weird reason assault seems to cause %-based casualties to your armies while the amount of damage your army can do to the enemy is capped, so only assault with medium-sized armies (10k or so vs. a 500 fort) to waste as little as possible.

The 'total war' option at the end of the oratory tree is kind of bullshit. It causes +war exhaustion every time you take a province. I took all of Italy and Sicily in a war as Albion vs. Rome but was at 30 WE for over half the war and had to fight province uprisings in every conquered province afterwards (though thanks to abusing assaulting you can win these wars in a few months generally).

 

[Theodora]

Apparently there's a bug that only affects the Linux and Mac versions where Roman levies are 100% light cav.

HOW IS THAT EVEN POSSIBLE?!

Hipsters that use Linux and Mac for gaming deserve everything they get.

Tbh quite a few games run better on Linux than Windows now. Valve has done a loooot for Linux gaming thanks to Proton. Maybe that "Steam machine" will still show up one day once it's more polished off.

It aint that bad now, feels like they really rushed it or the suits ordered them to, but they steadily patch at least. Its going to be a good game finally, once we finished the paid beta test.

Was nice to see some more free content in the hotfix.

One of the biggest changes that isn't as readily talked about is being able to let governors automatically manage trade for a province.

 

[Fedora Master]

You'd think GSG players are a pretty smart crowd but after reading the PDX forums, that Illusion has been shattered.

e: Holy shit Paradox you unbelievable retards.

The AI now just deletes all its forts.

 

[Average Manatee]

Forts are way too expensive, in my empire of 5000 pops I have maybe 10-15. Every war ends up with my income going down significantly until I delete 10 or so forts.

 

[Keyboard Vomit]

Impregnator: Rome is a very good game now. The UI is easy to read and it even works on Windows XP. The new national overview screen is a welcome innovation.

On sale on Paradox Plaza for only 2.5 USD!

 

[Mortmal]

Impregnator: Rome is a very good game now. The UI is easy to read and it even works on Windows XP. The new national overview screen is a welcome innovation.

On sale on Paradox Plaza for only 2.5 USD!

First one always is a good game, but imperator is far superior now.

 

[Fedora Master]

Oh by the way, apparently the way the AI expands now means unless you blob REALLY REALLY hard and fast you can't play minor nations anymore. The late game will always be dominated by a handful of super stable megablobs. It's like sitting next to France in EUIV but now you can't escape them. The sole exception being Britain because the AI can't do naval invasions.

 

[Average Manatee]

Disagree. I mean you have to blob a bit but you can fight an AI with 2-3x your pops pretty handily. While they blob they are absolutely shit at converting culture so they might have 5k pops but only 1k are their culture and can raise levies while you have 2.5k and 2k of them are you culture. So in reality your levied army is 2x their size. You probably also make more money just due to not being dumb and keeping costs of forts/standing armies down, so you can spam out 30k mercs.

Besides, the game is supposed to be about Rome blobbing and if there's an alt-history where Rome died then there should be another blob. Game gets boring if the player has no big enemies to face. Fuck fighting those defensive alliances of 20 different tribal fuckers at once who hire every merc on the continent as soon as you declare war.

 

[Fedora Master]

"The AI is bad" is not exactly a good argument bro.

Rome should be historically important, agreed, but even they actually got their shit pushed in by other lesser cultures on occasion.

 

[Average Manatee]

So what is your argument? That a nation 1/2 the size of Rome should be able to beat Rome even if both sides are played equally well? That makes little sense.

 

[Fedora Master]

The expansion of the great powers should be slowed down somewhat and the internal stability of the AI reduced so they don't form monolithic blobs. It's not just Rome, it's Maurya and Egypt too - Factions that don't face any real opposition because of their place on the map but still collapsed historically.

 

[Average Manatee]

How are you going to do that? If you make the AI randomly collapse then the AIs will all randomly collapse eventually. And you just complained about poor AI, yet you want to make it worse.

Rome historically did expand a shit ton during this period, if anything the AI underachieves. I haven't noticed significant expansion by the Alexandrian/Mauryan nations in my game. Obviously they expand some but it's not like they triple in size by conquering half of Europe like Rome does.

 

[Fedora Master]

The Diadochi are obviously somewhat exempt because they're hardcoded to keep each other busy, Egypt (and Maurya) again being the exception because they're out of the way.
Im not saying the AI should "randomly" collapse, I'm saying the AI benefits too much from snowballing. Already big nations only get bigger because population is now the be-all-end-all to determine power. (It's also the sole reason Rome can grow as much, it's overpopulated compared to other parts of the map like Greece) Smaller AI nations have no chance to grow, although that's partially because they are too passive.
You don't see them suffer AE or internal conflicts either, so there's no chance for smaller AIs to pounce on them. The late game turns into Player Blob versus roughly the same AI blobs.