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

[thesheeep]

First of all, there is always a single pop either in growth or decline, depending on the population growth of the city. When this pop is fully grown or totally dead, either a current pop is picked for death, or a new random pop is created that will slowly grow.

This seems retarded, can't they just do proper pop growth?

Maybe they'll implement the wonderful pop-chess-minigame from Stellaris?

 

[Life of the Party]

Citizens is very likely to be renamed "nobles".

https://twitter.com/producerjohan/status/1013345186116751361?s=09

https://twitter.com/producerjohan/status/1013070887111872512?s=09

 

[Life of the Party]

Hi everyone and welcome to another development diary for Imperator. Today we’ll talk about the economy and the buildings in a city.

First of all, we have Tax income. As mentioned in the chapter about pops, the tax income of a city is primarily based on how many slaves you have in that city. Then of course there are several modifiers that affect it, like access to trade-goods, stability, ministers, and some factions when in power may increase your tax income.

Secondly there is Commerce. This is only present if you either import or export trade-goods from a province. Each tradelink provides some income, and then the amount of citizens you have increase it, while marketplaces and other factors can increase it as well.

There are also various economic policies that affects your income and expenses on a country level, but we’ll go through these in a later development diary.

Finally, each city has a few building levels. Each city can have at least 1 building, and each additional 10 pops in that city allows another building level.

Currently these are the effects of the building types, but that may change during development.

• Training Camps : Gives +10% Manpower, and +10% experience to units built in the city.
• Fortress: Each gives +1 fort level.
• Marketplace: Each gives +20% Commerce Income
• Granary: -1 Unrest and +10% Population Growth

Each building type can be built multiple times, and if you have 4 slots in your city, you can fill them all with Granaries if you so desire. Of course you can order the building of multiple buildings in a city at once, and they will be built in a queue.

Next week we’ll delve deep into our characters!

 

[vonAchdorf]

So nothing changed since EU:Rome?

 

[fantadomat]

I never liked the building in Paradox games,they never make any sense. As if there is a province without a temple or a marketplace in the world. Those are not buildings that are worth more that gdp of some opm,they are buildings that are easy to make and naturally come to be. Now if they were grand temples or great irrigation systems,sure.

 

[Serus]

These units can assault, prefer to fight from the second row
These units prefer to fight on flanks

So it's going to have the same horrible combat as Vic and EU4 then. I bet they will also take months and half the continent's population to resolve, too. You could raise a legion in Iberia, ship it to the battlefield, watch it evaporate, raise another in its stead from the points it has just freed, and ship it still into the same battle, yay.

How else would you do it, though?
If you resolve the battles "instantly" it can only be based on an extremely simplistic model or require too much CPU - not really satisfying and very flawed (just look at Total War auto resolving ).
If you slow down time and give battles their own "phases", it would grind the flow of the game to a halt every few seconds if a battle happens somewhere.
If battles become kind of a semi-permanent long-term thing (like HoI 4), it becomes extremely abstract and not satisfying, either (at least it wasn't to me).

I know the numbers and times are weird, but to me, EUIV still has the most satisfying combat out of all similar games.

Is asking for a somewhat historically accurate combat system in a historically-themed grand strategy game too much ? "Battles" that lasts for weeks or months never made any sense what-so-ever historically and never will in any Paradox game in earlier period than Victoria (and even then only starting from the second half of the period depicted in Vicky). I know they will never ditch this system because gameplay-wise it sort of works and is decently balanced but at the very least, as Mondblut said, in a Rome game it could and should be closer to CK2. Why ?
a) In CK it's not as extremely retarded and "battles" resolve on average a lot faster than in EU (or Victoria), no battles lasting for several weeks or even months with several new armies joining or even getting kicked, rebuilding and returning to the same "battle" in extreme cases.
b) you don't have a direct and full control over the army composition resulting in the retarded 50% infantry + 50% artillery support units in every single army (that the AI doesn't do as good as the player anyway). It would make sense for a Rome game for the army to be mostly levied most of the time as in CK2. The composition should depend on political and social structure of your holdings/kingdom/city/tribe. The main exceptions would be the fully professional armies of late roman republic and similar situations but even then the political and military system your leader is part of should severely limit what composition is available. It still leaves some room for the player to manage and improve your army by pushing the political system in the right direction or managing your finances to be able to hire a few "foreign" mercenary units of needed type. So you are still able to bend the odds in your favour but leaves out most of the retardation.

Edit:
Also I really want skirmishers/archers whatever to actually occupy the FRONT - and have their own 2 or 3 phases in a row at the start of battle, targeting mostly the enemy front row. Then they would retreat and front would be taken by heavy infantry/whatever else. Having stronger light forces would allow you to protect your main battle lines fully and make a few casualties on enemy main battle line. And vice versa. In case of balance in light forces they would just fight each other. It would be a much better abstraction of ancient battlefield and still would use Paradox combat system basics.

 

[thesheeep]

Edit:
Also I really want skirmishers/archers whatever to actually occupy the FRONT - and have their own 2 or 3 phases in a row at the start of battle, targeting mostly the enemy front row. Then they would retreat and front would be taken by heavy infantry/whatever else. It would be a much better abstraction of ancient battlefield and still would use Paradox combat system basics. Having stronger light forces would allow you to protect your main battle lines fully and make a few casualties on enemy ones. And vice versa.

Yeah, that is something I would love to have in games, too.
You can't even pull that off well in Total War games. Trying to pull your frontline archers behind your melee troops after firing a few shots just results in a gigantic mess and likely loss of many archers...

 

[Serus]

Edit:
Also I really want skirmishers/archers whatever to actually occupy the FRONT - and have their own 2 or 3 phases in a row at the start of battle, targeting mostly the enemy front row. Then they would retreat and front would be taken by heavy infantry/whatever else. It would be a much better abstraction of ancient battlefield and still would use Paradox combat system basics. Having stronger light forces would allow you to protect your main battle lines fully and make a few casualties on enemy ones. And vice versa.

Yeah, that is something I would love to have in games, too.
You can't even pull that off well in Total War games. Trying to pull your frontline archers behind your melee troups after firing a few shots just results in a gigantic mess and likely loss of many archers...

Field of Glory 2. But that's a turn-based wargame. Skirmishers type of infantry can go through your medium/heavy infantry ranks, the only risk is if they get "caught" but most of the time they automatically withdraw to safety when pushed by heavier infantry.
Still I don't expect that kind of simulation in a grand strategy game but as said, it could be imo abstracted using the existing Paradox system with some tweaks.

 

[fantadomat]

I too like the CK battles the most of paradox games. Vicy 2 were the worst of them all.

 

[Shadenuat]

The important question is, when will aztecs arrive

 

[Life of the Party]

Midnight Sunset Invasion, where a son of Boreas unites the Thuleans, Hyperboreans, Arimaspi and Issedones, and invades the dominion of the Horae. The only way to win is to turn Rhine and Danube into a wall of ice.

 

[fantadomat]

Midnight Sunset Invasion, where a son of Boreas unites the Thuleans, Hyperboreans, Arimaspi and Issedones, and invades the dominion of the Horae. The only way to win is to turn Rhine and Danube into a wall of ice.

Nah,my Bulgarian horde will send the monkeys packing,no need for walls.

 

[kris]

Edit:
Also I really want skirmishers/archers whatever to actually occupy the FRONT - and have their own 2 or 3 phases in a row at the start of battle, targeting mostly the enemy front row. Then they would retreat and front would be taken by heavy infantry/whatever else. It would be a much better abstraction of ancient battlefield and still would use Paradox combat system basics. Having stronger light forces would allow you to protect your main battle lines fully and make a few casualties on enemy ones. And vice versa.

Yeah, that is something I would love to have in games, too.
You can't even pull that off well in Total War games. Trying to pull your frontline archers behind your melee troops after firing a few shots just results in a gigantic mess and likely loss of many archers...

What? I always do that in TW games and I only lose some if they charge dumbly with cavalry.

 

[Life of the Party]

Hello everyone and welcome to the seventh developer diary for Imperator. This time we take a look at our characters!

The characters in Imperator are deeply detailed, and together with the pops and the politics are part of what makes a vibrant living world.

They have portraits that age gradually, with lots of different ethnicities covering the world.

There are four attributes that characters have.

• Martial represents a character's ability to fight and lead troops. Characters with high martial skills make excellent generals.
• Charisma is a character’s ability to charm and persuade others.
• Zeal is a character's ability to inspire faith in other characters, and also in calling upon the favour of the gods.
• Finesse represents a character's skill in disciplines requiring a high attention to detail. High finesse characters make excellent researchers and governors.

For those of you that played the original Rome or the Crusader Kings series will not be surprised to hear that our characters have traits. Traits on a character can be gained or lost.


Traits can be categorized in the following categories.

• Personality - This includes being Brave or Coward, Cruel or Merciful. These impacts the character attributes and stats directly, as well as…..
• Military - Usually a character has a maximum of one of those, that may give a bonus or penalty
• Health - Stressed, Maimed, Lunatic etc. Not beneficial to the character in most cases.
• Status - Some exceptional traits that can be given from actions, like Conqueror

Traits can also unlock a variety of unique event options, each tailored to the specific trait in question. Those of you familiar with CKII will be (dis)pleased to see the return of the Lunatic trait.

A Character also has his or her personal wealth, and four primary stats.

• Popularity - Popularity is a measure of how the people see the character. In republics high popularity characters are more likely to elected leader of the republic. However even monarchies cannot ignore popular people.
• Loyalty - Loyalty is a measure of a character's loyalty to the state. Disloyal characters are more likely to cause problems to a ruler than loyal ones. However even the most loyal of characters has their limit.
• Prominence - Prominence represents the fame of the character. Jobs and titles help bring characters to public attention.
• Corruption - Corruption is a measurement of this character’s willingness to engage in underhanded practices. Greed, bribery and the bending of rules come hand-in-hand with high corruption.

Characters have parents, will be able to marry and get children, just as you’d expect. They can also have friends and rivals.

Characters can be given various roles. Besides being ruler of a country, they could be assigned to govern a province, command an army, handle research or be given a role in the government. Some countries allow women to be given offices, and some do not.


There are lots of different interactions you can do with and on your characters, including arranging marriages, bribe them, loan from them, or even sacrifice them if your religions so permit and desire. There will be a deep development diary on those later in development.

We’ll also talk about the factions characters can be in, what holdings are, and other character related things in future development diaries, but next week we’ll go into trade.

 

[Werdna's Revenge]

So they're lifting characters from CK2 wholesale. Not that that's a bad thing.

 

[fantadomat]

So they're lifting characters from CK2 wholesale. Not that that's a bad thing.

They should lift all the other great mechanics in that game,characters system is kind of annoying because of all the event spam that comes with it. Also i would love to see a tech system like in Vicky 2,the best technology system in a paradox game. Oh... but sadly we will endup with another stellaris level or boringness and emptiness,make way for the DLC train folks.

 

[thesheeep]

So they're lifting characters from CK2 wholesale. Not that that's a bad thing.

They should lift all the other great mechanics in that game,characters system is kind of annoying because of all the event spam that comes with it.

Yeah, I also noticed that update with a dose of scepticism. I really don't want to micromanage my Sims citizens.

On the other hand the sacrifice parts sound nice.
I'll just play a suicide cult that once per year celebrates The Culling, sacrificing the entire leadership to be replaced with new ones.

 

[Life of the Party]

Finding the Paradox Game Within Roman History for 'Imperator: Rome'

"There was a dream that was Rome," and 'Imperator' must reconcile that with a more complicated reality.


The Romans tended to dwell on idealized visions of history. Their major historians’ stabs at epic history tried to identify the essential threads running through the Roman character that could tie its imperial present to its dimly-recalled past. Writers like Livy, Cassius Dio, and Tacitus all attempted in their own ways to explain why the Romans of old had achieved so much… and why the fruits of those victories were so frequently disappointing and needlessly cruel. Long before imperial collapse truly began, Rome’s thinkers and historians felt like something was going wrong. Or maybe it had gone wrong but this time under a new dynasty, things would turn out differently.

Later historians tended to follow suit, most notably but Gibbon with his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and so Roman history was often treated as a colossal screen onto which the Romans and everyone who followed could and did project their own ideals and fears.

The power of those projections, and their durability in the imagination, is what most interests me about Paradox Development Studio’s Imperator: Rome. It’s their upcoming grand strategy game that will let players control just about any of the various republics, city-states, empires, and tribes in the wider Roman world.

Which means that despite its name, Imperator is not a game that’s just about Rome. Paradox games take a wider view: That's why with Imperator, you can play as anyone from a small tribe in the British Isles to a fledgling Indian empire.

“I don’t like making games where it’s just about the country. That’s not really a Paradox game. A Paradox game is about playing a country in a world,” designer Johan Andersson explains during a phone call. “That’s probably a better description. I would never make a game where you just have a Roman focus.”

But in the case of Rome, the historical record itself tends to have a Roman focus. Imperator is about history, yes, but that history itself is an ongoing negotiation between the Rome we imagine, Rome as the Romans themselves remembered it decades and centuries after the fact, and the wider and incompletely understood world in which Rome actually existed.

That makes Roman history at once fertile and challenging soil for a Paradox strategy game. On the one hand, Roman history as contemporary sources depict it might resemble a Paradox game more than any other period you could imagine: It’s history as a place of personal drama, political intrigue, and grand ambition. But on the other hand, every other Paradox game takes place in periods where we have a variety of perspectives on most of the key actors. Even when Paradox games were at their most eurocentric, they were still informed by historical experiences from across Europe. Roman-era history, we largely view through a keyhole.

When it comes to fleshing-out the wider Roman world, Andersson admits that few nations in Imperator: Rome will have as much character and detail as Rome. “Obviously when this game is released, there will obviously be more flavor for Rome than maybe like… well how much flavor will Epirus have as opposed to Sparta, or some of the other minor [powers]? Not much compared to Rome. But there’s a lot of different flavor and mechanics to pick from.”

When Andersson is talking about flavor, he’s talking about the narrative vignettes and random events that bring to life the world beyond the the number-crunching world simulation that underlies each Paradox strategy game. Paradox games can sometimes look like dry arithmetic problems, but it’s often their small details that make all those variables and systems begin to feel like they have opened a window into the past.

But again, other Paradox games have detailed national, political, religious, cultural, and economic histories that they can pull from to tell convincing stories about their world. With the Roman period, we don’t have quite as complete a picture of what the politics of a powerful Black Sea tribe, for instance, were like compared to what Roman politics were like.

To solve the problem of bringing that wider world to life, Andersson suggests that a focus on the dynamics of political systems might be one route to making players see drama and humanity in their games.

Andersson tells me a story to illustrate some of what he’s talking about. It’s a pretty typical tale of how an ancient republic chokes on its own imperial success, but it still has a cast of characters and a hero with a tragic flaw at the center of it. It also shows where the player’s control over the state collides with the foibles and weaknesses of the characters who serve it, but over whom the player’s control is not absolute.

“I was playing a game as some Italian minor power, and I didn’t care that much about loyalty because I was having my main army led by a general who was super loyal because he was the leader of the Republic,” Andersson explains.

In other words, the republic that Andersson was controlling was presently led by a brilliant general who, for as long as as he was in office, was practically Andersson’s avatar. Very l’etat c’est moi kind of stuff.

But the exact meaning of “loyalty” is important here. Imperator abstracts away a lot of the gritty details about domestic politics in favor of a loyalty system that measures characters’ allegiance to the state. Andersson was ignoring the loyalty of other characters who were filling roles in governance and administration because, with the military being controlled directly by the ruler of the republic (whose loyalty to the state he ruled was naturally maxed-out), the chance of a coup seemed nonexistent.

“Everyone else was slightly annoyed because [my ruler] was extremely uncharismatic. He had a really low oratory skill. So loyalty started dropping for people,” Andersson says. “But I didn’t really care that much because I had the army. But [other characters] started a civil war controlling two-thirds of my territory, and pretty much all my good characters and a lot of my gold.”

Now Andersson was basically on the wrong side of a civil war. His enemies had most of the power of the legitimate state, and Andersson’s ruler was now head of an elite loyalist army, a small patch of territory, and whatever meathead officers his ruler had surrounded himself with.

“[The rebels] basically raised another army quickly, and while my army was enormously experienced, I ended up in a really costly war because I had no characters I could really put in charge. Because the rebels were the most competent people in my country. And I basically had to get less competent people to do my research and handle my governors.”

Implied in this story is a game that is somewhere between Crusader Kings II’s focus on personalities and relationships, and Europa Universalis IV’s focus on the state as the critical actor on the historical stage. The exact details of domestic politics might not be spelled-out the way CK2 details its plots and character motivations, but there is still the outline of a personal drama in the saga of a brilliant but off-putting republican general whose homeland turned against him during his foreign adventures.

Republican domestic politics might be a bit more lively than what happens in monarchical systems. Andersson indicated that republics are defined by their parties, and while there’s nothing as detailed as Victoria II’s detailed sociopolitical demographics driving the action, Imperator’s republics (Roman or otherwise) still have parties of militarists, oligarchs, religionists, and populists. Depending on who is in power, some avenues of play become more costly and harder to execute while others become easier.

“So you basically have to manage your senate to make sure you get the kind of faction that favors the gameplay you want at the moment and you have important characters in power,” Andersson said.

It’s a bit less clear, at this early stage, what politics will look like for monarchies and tribal societies. Andersson admitted that politics within republics might be the most interesting right now, and so far the politics of monarchies sounds like it’s about appointing ministers and governors. T.J. Hafer’s preview over on IGN also makes it sound like there could be some really interesting gameplay around tribal cultures, emphasizing their flexibility and adaptability as well as the ways they can threaten and prey upon their more settled neighbors.

The other challenge facing Imperator is that its model for ancient societies necessarily relies on a very broad brush. In fact, its division of the world into categories of citizen, free person, local tribesperson, and slave, might be the most Roman-centric thing about Imperator. While not every society will have all these categories contained within it (most tribes don’t have citizens, for instance, because they don’t have legalistic systems where this distinction matters) this is how people are divided and defined within Imperator right now.

In Imperator, while full citizens will generate a great deal of research and trade, and most labor for the state is performed by free people, it is slaves who generate the most wealth. In the social structure that Andersson sketches out for Imperator, slavery is what allows these ancient societies to substantially escape subsistence-level economies. Which is to say that the most technologically advanced and politically institutionalized societies in Imperator will be powered in large part by slavery.

This is not really a controversial model. Leftist classicists who studied ancient economics and class relations, like M.I. Finley, tend to find the utilitarian or liberal arguments about the inefficiencies of slavery in the ancient world to be dubious ones. In a world without a large working class or much concept of wage labor, slavery filled a role that was both useful for ancient societies and profitable for those who most were most exploitative of it. With that being said, however, we should not give into the temptation to view the classical world as blind or ignorant to what they were doing, and who they were doing it do.

As Finley puts it in The Ancient Economy, “The literature of the Roman Empire is filled with doubts and qualms about slavery; fear of slaves, of being murdered by them, of possible revolts, is a recurrent (and old) theme. But this literature can be matched, passage by passage, from the American South, and in neither society was the practical conclusion drawn that slavery should be replaced by other forms of labour, should be abolished, in short.”

What this model will inevitably submerge is the different and changing meanings of slavery in these societies (especially non-Roman, non-Hellenistic), and the differences between how it was practiced in the ancient world as opposed to the insidious justifications for it in the modern. Moreover, while Andersson suggested that you will have the ability to promote members of one segment into another, it doesn’t sound like large-scale emancipation or manumission is really in the cards for most states. This a period of widespread slavery across many different cultures and societies.

That might also make this game harder-to-approach than some other of Paradox’s games, which often give you ways to avoid virtually participating in systems of oppression and violence. You don’t have to be an imperialist power in Europa Universalis, for instance, or you can at least play in ways that let you tell yourself that yours is a kinder, gentler kind of imperialism. In Stellaris you can build your dream society where there are no servants and no masters. In the classical world, exploitation is harder to escape.

If slavery is the foundation of great wealth in this world, it is not necessarily the foundation of power and progress. While citizens carry on trade and the business of progress, Imperator portrays ancient societies as being hungry for resources that will let them increase the pace and change the character of their development. The smallest unit of territory you will control is a city, and groups of cities become provinces. But it is the flow of resources between cities that determines which cities rise to become major, empire-sustaining metropolises, and what areas subsist mostly to fuel that progress.

“Every city produces its own trade goods, but every province if it produces a surplus, you get an additional bonus that stacks. So Grain gives 10 population growth, and every surplus [unit] you have gives 2 or 3 additional population growth. So if you want to really grow a city, you can import Grain or Fish or something like that. Or if you want to get a research city, you import Papyrus. A military hub? You should have access to Iron and Salt and those things.”

This spiderweb of need (or at least convenience) is one of the things that will drive states into contact and conflict with each other. And that’s one of the other features of this game: It’s trying not just to capture the parochial worldview of ancient societies, but also the vast interconnected systems that they could never quite comprehend, and of which they were only a part.

To illustrate this point, he talks about how the limits of Rome’s eastward expansion were almost always determined by Persian imperial powers like the Parthian Empire. The Parthians in particular had a great military record against the Romans, but they never really tried their hand at conquering the eastern Mediterranean. And one major reason for that is because the Parthians frequently shared an eastern border with powerful Indian imperial powers who were an even more pressing threat than the Romans ever managed to be.

But this balancing act was largely invisible to the Romans. And it is both the great challenge and great opportunity for Imperator—when it comes out next year—to suggest and evoke the politics and motivations of these distant powers who existed in the shadows of the Roman imagination. They are creating a game where the player’s exploits as rulers of barely-remembered, little-celebrated kingdoms and tribes can be as vivid and compelling as the conquest of Gaul, or the expansion-ending defeat of a Roman army in the Teutoburg Forest.

In their self-obsession, the Romans could also be extraordinary for the things they didn’t know about, or chose not to see. Yet the political and strategic dynamics of their world were significantly influenced by these people and places who remained almost unknown to them… and to us. More than the cut-and-thrust of life in the Forum, this is the stuff of a Paradox game. But getting that experience may mean letting go, just a little bit, of our fantasy of a world where all roads, or even most of them, led to Rome.

https://waypoint.vice.com/en_us/art...-game-within-roman-history-for-imperator-rome

 

[Sranchammer]

the Parthians frequently shared an eastern border with powerful Indian imperial powers who were an even more pressing threat than the Romans ever managed to be.

Dude's knowledge of history is shit.

 

[fantadomat]

the Parthians frequently shared an eastern border with powerful Indian imperial powers who were an even more pressing threat than the Romans ever managed to be.

Dude's knowledge of history is shit.

Expecting anything more than a google/wiki search from paradox?

 

[Life of the Party]

Hello everyone and welcome to the 8th development diary for Imperator. Today we’ll talk about trade system in the game.

The trade in Imperator is about getting access to goods for your cities to make them better, and meanwhile earn money on trade happening. A Trade-Route is import of one trade-goods from another province, either foreign or your own, where it is in surplus, to one of your provinces.

You can always import any trade goods you have a surplus of from your other provinces, but from foreign nations you need to have negotiated trade access first, and if you fight a war against each other, the import will be cancelled.

A province can only export if that province provides a surplus, ie, if it in total produces more than 1 of that trade-goods. A city produces 1 trade-goods, and for each additional 30 population it produces an additional +1 trade goods. There is no limit to how how many exports a province has, other than the amount of surplus goods it has.

You can always import a trade-goods if you already have a surplus of it, and that gives you a smaller additional bonus.

Surplus in the capital province gives a special bonus on the country level and Surplus is clearly indicated in the UI.

Only the capital city in each province gets the benefit of the stacked goods. The other provinces gets counted as they have access to 1 of the trade-goods. Only the province stacking bonus can be applied multiple times, so you can import 20 grain if you so desire to keep up a huge population.

Please remember that creating a new import route costs you civic power!

As default you can import one trade goods to your capital province.

There are multiple ways to get more allowed import routes to your provinces. Larger nations get more import routes to their capitals, there are ideas that allow more import, and there are inventions that can either increase all provinces trade routes or the capitals. There is also economic policies for trade, where you can forgo your income from trade for having more trade routes, or the opposite.

Income from Trade uses something we call Commerce in this game. Each commerce level building in a city provides +20% commerce to that city, and citizens will also provide a level of commerce. Trade Income is based upon total amount of trade-routes in & out in province multiplied by commerce.

The List of tradegoods include the following..

Grain, Salt, Iron, Horses, Wine, Wood, Amber, Stone, Fish, Spices, Elephants, Base Metals, Precious Metals, Steppe Horses, Livestock, Earthenware, Dyes, Furs, Olives, Leather, Woad, Marble, Honey, Incense, Hemp, Vegetables, Gemstones, Camels, Glass, Silk, Dates, Cloth, Papyrus, Wild Game

Next week we’ll talk about Diplomacy, or more specifically about opinions,

 

[fantadomat]

Curious if they will manage to simulate why big countries managed to get fucked. Or will we see Phrygia staying huge for ever because the local opms don't have the force limit. I would bet on the second.

 

[Life of the Party]

Hello everyone and welcome to the 9th development diary for Imperator. Today we’ll start talking a bit about diplomacy, and cover a few of the features of that type.

Imperator follows the “new” generation of games, if we still consider CK2 new, in that opinions are two-way, where you can love someone that hate you, and you can see in detail what is causing the numbers to be that way.

And as has been common in our games since CK2, the AI will tell you exactly why it will accept or decline a certain diplomatic action.

Aggressive Expansion is a concept we liked in EU4, but it was awkwardly implemented. In Imperator we have an AE value in your country, kind of like badboy in older games, so you can see how it is decaying etc. This is then applied in the opinion calculations with each nation, depending on where they are and their status with you.

A nation, depending on its rank, can have a number of diplomatic relations. Each Alliance and Tributary counts as 1 relation, while a defensive league occupies just 1 slot, no matter how big it is. For each relation over your limit, all your power costs are increased by 10%.

One cool new thing in Imperator is the Defensive Leagues. This is a purely defensive alliance that allows multiple nations in it, and it is defensive towards anyone outside of the league attacking it. The leader of a league is the one that invites people in. A defensive league takes only 1 relation slot, no matter how many members. Only City States and Minor Powers can be members of a defensive league.

The Diplomatic Actions include the following.

• Declare War / Sue for Peace
• Offer/Dissolve Alliance
• Proclaim Guarantee
• Ask/Cancel Military Access
• Offer/Cancel Military Access
• Demand/Break/Cancel Tribute
• Request/Cancel Trade Access
• Support Rebels
• Fabricate Claims
• Invite/Kick/Leave Defensive League
• Improve Relation
• Send Gift
• Intervene in War
• Threaten War
• Enforce Peace
• Sell City

Next week we’ll talk about country ranks, and how that impacts what you can do.

 

[fantadomat]

I see that a bunch of file editing will be needed for the game to be enjoyable. AE is pretty shit mechanic and it never felt realistic or plausible in any of their games. It was used only to rain in a good player. If it was limited to only a region/culture and was able to have more than one coalitions,it would have been a big improvement. Seeing every unrelated nation forms a coalition around you is retarded,as if Ming would care if i took 5 provinces in Italia.

 

[Life of the Party]