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

[Average Manatee]

Tall doesn't really work in imperator because the mechanics don't allow you to grow more pops than any other nation and cities can't magically make pops an order of magnitude more efficient (a decent +xx%, sure, but your enemies have cities too). Tall is retarded in EU4 because mana and dev is retarded.

 

[Silva]

Tall doesn't really work in imperator because the mechanics don't allow you to grow more pops than any other nation and cities can't magically make pops an order of magnitude more efficient (a decent +xx%, sure, but your enemies have cities too).

Are you sure? At some moment in my Massilia playthrough I was ahead of Rome in the scoreboard while having just half a dozen coastal provinces and they already owned Italy.

Also, playing tall also has to do with having interesting decisions and things to manage in peacetime, and this game is full of those.

I agree about EU4 though.

 

[Average Manatee]

The scoreboard rates you based on how much you grew from your starting population essentially. So someone who starts with 100 pops has to grow to 1000 pops to match someone with 10 pops growing to 100 pops. It's also weighted in terms of happiness and as a player you'll definitely just manage pops better and have higher happiness.

I guess if you consider being ontop of the scoreboard then tall technically "works" as someone small, but not in the sense of being equal or even comparable to Rome in power or wealth.

 

[Silva]

The scoreboard rates you based on how much you grew from your starting population essentially. So someone who starts with 100 pops has to grow to 1000 pops to match someone with 10 pops growing to 100 pops. It's also weighted in terms of happiness and as a player you'll definitely just manage pops better and have higher happiness.

Thanks for the info, didn't know that. I would prefer if this was factored together with a more "concrete" form of score though.

I guess if you consider being ontop of the scoreboard then tall technically "works" as someone small, but not in the sense of being equal or even comparable to Rome in power or wealth.

Not just that, but the amount of stuff you have to do/manage in peacetime is light-years ahead of any EU entry ever.

In the Massilia campaign I cited above I just warred at the very beginning to get some critical mass of territory from neighboring barbarians. After that I must have stayed around 30 or so years in peacetime and it was FUN. Trying to reduce the initial tyrany score I accured from those conquests while steering the democrats into power and keeping 51% congress approval was a challenge onto itself. I had a civil war when the elected (democrat) party asked me to "revoke 5 holdings from elite families" (which I did, causing those families loyalty dropping to the ground and kicking off the civil war), traitor admirals running away with my fleets, barbarian kingdoms asking for help against migratory hordes, forming a league with fellow merchant cities, stimulating POP migration and promotion to where I wanted (while displeasing those traditionalist characters that wanted to revoke the poor tribal sods citizen rights), etc.

Really. At this point I don't even care what "Tall play" means, what I care is that this beats any EU ever made for the simple fact that it has (interesting) stuff to do besides map-painting. It's a fusion of Vicky and CK in a way that simply works, with mechanics synergizing and feeding into each other in a way that makes EU4 "subsystems piled above each other to feel deep" look like garbage. It still has rough areas, bugs and broken mechanics though, and it does need more content.

 

[Average Manatee]

The scoreboard rates you based on how much you grew from your starting population essentially. So someone who starts with 100 pops has to grow to 1000 pops to match someone with 10 pops growing to 100 pops. It's also weighted in terms of happiness and as a player you'll definitely just manage pops better and have higher happiness.

Thanks for the info, didn't know that. I would prefer if this was factored together with a more "concrete" form of score though.

The tooltips in the scoreboard breakdown will tell you both your absolute score in pop happiness and the divisor due to your starting size

 

[Silva]

Average Manatee , questions:

1. Are there actions I can take that automatically give me party support? Or I only gain support when prompted by the elected party agenda? E.g: sometimes the traditionalists agenda is to revoke a culture citizenship. If I do this on my own/before the party being elected, do I win some party support too?

2. How much tyranny until I get into trouble? I got to the high 40s in my last campaig and I found myself with constant disloyalty, a civil war, and a couple periods being the Boule's doggie. In a new game I think I would care to not go above 30 as an overall guideline. Makes sense?

3. What should I look out for in regard to pop migration? I see there's a button to forcefully migrate Pops but I never used it. Should I move Pops around more and if so, on what criteria?

 

[Average Manatee]

Average Manatee , questions:

1. Are there actions I can take that automatically give me party support? Or I only gain support when prompted by the elected party agenda? E.g: sometimes the traditionalists agenda is to revoke a culture citizenship. If I do this on my own/before the party being elected, do I win some party support too?

Not sure, haven't really played with republics.

2. How much tyranny until I get into trouble? I got to the high 40s in my last campaig and I found myself with constant disloyalty, a civil war, and a couple periods being the Boule's doggie. In a new game I think I would care to not go above 30 as an overall guideline. Makes sense?

Entirely depends on how good you are at managing loyalty and knowing all the methods of avoiding civil war. High tyranny gives both a great bonus to slave output and keeps your AE down which lets you blob faster/have happier pops. Every time I've played I've eventually gone 100% tyranny because it's a huge bonus to everything while if you avoid civil war there's basically no penalty (though you'll probably spend a good amount of political power bribing people). But again, haven't played republic so I'm not sure if managing loyalty is more difficult for them.

3. What should I look out for in regard to pop migration? I see there's a button to forcefully migrate Pops but I never used it. Should I move Pops around more and if so, on what criteria?

You can only forcefully move slaves. You can move anywhere within a province or to neighboring territories in another province. This is useful:
- If you need more of a specific good (x amount of slaves = +1 trade good each).
- If you want to colonize (need 10 total pops and needs to be majority your religion).
- If you want to move pops to cities where they can be more efficient.

As for natural migration, it's mostly only coastal provinces to other coastal provinces. It's not that useful anymore since megacities were nerfed. Used to be you could create super cities that attracted 1000s of pops and had 1000%+ bonuses to all pop production, but now that the production modifiers are capped there's no intrinsic reason to have one megacity over many regular size cities.

 

[Silva]

Thanks. One more:

Is there a downside to Integration besides dominant culture Pops getting pissed? Say, does some rating like research or taxes or civilization level etc. go down or something? Because I went full integration and didn't notice a drawback.

P.S: you should try a republic game.

 

[Average Manatee]

No downside besides the happiness, but happiness is what determines all pop production (aside from slaves) so it's important. If you go from 50% happiness to 45% then you've lost 10% of your manpower, research, and non-slave income.

EDIT: Also, I *think* that integration means that all integrated pops lose the happiness, not just the primary culture. If you integrate too many then integrated pops end up with no more happiness than unintegrated pops, or even less. Kind of weird.

 

[Silva]

Is your resolution above 1080? I've tried using Nvidia DSR feature to increase res above 1080 but found it fucks up with text.

 

[Multi-headed Cow]

Is your resolution above 1080? I've tried using Nvidia DSR feature to increase res above 1080 but found it fucks up with text.

Nope, that's at 1080.

 

[Average Manatee]

Played my own Massalia game, managed to take out Rome in under 40 years.

Granted Carthage did some of the heavy lifting in a war that they concluded right before I attacked. Romans still greatly outnumbered me though and had like 3x the pops.

As far as senate support my takeaway is:

Oligarchs: Great (They get happier with tyranny and grateful families which makes them easy to keep at max happiness)
Traditionalists: Also pretty good (Gets happy when you have all deities from your state religion). Downside is they hate low stability, so changing a bunch of gods around early on or getting lots of AE will hurt you.
Democrats:: Fucking awful (get massively unhappy with tyranny and grateful families)

You can find these modifiers by the tooltips here:

Unfortunately the % control of each faction is very hard to manage early on because the heads of each family have most of the power in your nation and you can't really affect which party they choose to be part of. Once you've expanded you can start granting offices and provinces only to traditionalists and oligarchs and get loyalty high easily. Early on I had like 70% traditionalist influence just because all family heads were traditionalist but now a bunch of the fuckers are democrats.

Notably the faction of your ruler will give +.2 to your party and -0.14 to other parties. Since normally your leader is of the strongest faction (they have the most powerful members after all), this tends to be good. The top left character in your offices screen will specifically give their party another loyalty boost, so I recommend making that character the strongest oratory member of the Oligarch/Traditionalist party, whichever your ruler isn't (hopefully you never end up with a democrat ruler, I think you're just kind of fucked then).

 

[Average Manatee]

Correction: I misunderstood how the senate power works. Provincial governors have a -100% penalty to their senate influence. So you in fact want to assign powerful democrats to be province governors where they won't influence the senate.

Downside is that this means you'll have a bunch of governors with -15 loyalty (assuming you play like me and have forever 0 democrat approval due to tyranny).

 

[Silva]

Average Manatee , that's nice.

Do you think the game is easier to map paint than the average Pdox or something? I couldn't say as I rarely go for map painting, but I've read some people saying something to

And any tips for a more trader playthrough as Massalia, preferentially with minimal map-painting except for strategic coastal cities like it's mission tree suggests ?

P.S: is that a woman as the oligarchs party leader? Preposterous.

 

[Average Manatee]

Yeah, the game is definitely currently a lot easier than something like EU4. This was on Very Hard where basically all I had to do before a war was stockpile ~300 cash to hire mercs and slap the shit out of the enemy with 3x their numbers. Once you start conquering you can sell the captured familes as slaves to fun future conquests and quickly snowball. AE isn't really a hard wall like in EU4 and coalitions don't exist, pretty much the only danger is bordering an aggressive large enemy like Rome or Carthage. When you do go to war with majors the mechanics also work for you pretty well, holding wargoals gives a lot of warscore fast and if you can beat the enemy in battles you get more + the enemy tends to want to peace out and give you a lot.

I'll admit that I'm not really even sure how you would play a "trader" game. You can't really specifically boost your trade much except by certain tech paths, and if you go to war with someone there's no real reason to only take trade port-like enclaves as opposed to annexing everything. In the end a huge amount of your income is just purely based on slave numbers.

P.S: is that a woman as the oligarchs party leader? Preposterous.

Without the feminism law I basically always run out of characters to run things. Which is bad enough when you're a monarchy but when you are also playing republic and have to hire specific characters for specific roles depending on their party it's just hell without all the extra characters.

 

[Silva]

How's the Performance on this? Compared to say, Stellaris or HOI4.

Never played neither but Imperator runs fine on my rig which is kinda old so... I think it will be fine if your PC is not 10 years old or something.

 

[Average Manatee]

How's the Performance on this? Compared to say, Stellaris or HOI4.

Much better than both, as in reasonably good and playable even till late game.

 

[Silva]

Average Manatee , what's a good start to FORCE a veteran EU4 map-painter to learn the domestic game of Imperator?

I'm trying to convince a friend to try the game, but I wanted a scenario where he shouldn't be able to just sideline the domestic stuff altogether and map-paint to his heart content like he does in EU4. I've read Athens is a tough start where the internal assembly/senate/boule/whatever is tough to maneuver while being limited conquest-wise for being vassalized to a bigger power, is that right? Any other suggestion?

 

[Average Manatee]

Honestly anything is kind of fine. One of the good design choices of imperator is that the side effects of lots of map painting is some combination of being overextended and weak or being prone to civil wars, and only good domestic management allows you to continue doing well. The problem is that once you do understand the internal management strategies the map painting becomes increasingly easy to do and allows you to snowball way beyond the AI's ability to handle. Especially when you run 100 tyranny for +50% slave output and -a ton of AE (AE being one of the big problems with blobbing, so if you can manage high tyranny you can keep blobbing fast). The recent wonders update magnified this since if you can stockpile ~8000 cash per wonder you can basically solve all internal problems with your first one, get tons more money with the 2nd, and supercharge your military with the 3rd.

 

[Theodora]

imo, some very based news — someone resurrected the original bronze age mod, i.e. the imperator version; hopefully they stick with it. think they might need a native english speaker or two though.

I'm trying to convince a friend to try the game, but I wanted a scenario where he shouldn't be able to just sideline the domestic stuff altogether and map-paint to his heart content like he does in EU4. I've read Athens is a tough start where the internal assembly/senate/boule/whatever is tough to maneuver while being limited conquest-wise for being vassalized to a bigger power, is that right? Any other suggestion?

Athens would be a good start because you start in the shadow of the Antigonids as their feudatory. Can't just jump to warring and map-painting, etc.

 

[Silva]

Bronze Age mod is back.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Imperator/comments/mlwedo/bronze_age_20_is_out_this_time_updated_by_a_new/

Edit: ninjad by Theodora.

 

[Theodora]

すみません ｍ（＿　＿；；ｍ

 

[Silva]

If I have a couple provinces with populated capitals but everywhere else unpopulated, what's better: to build cities everywhere or to build tribal settlements/legates?

What's a legate anyway?

 

[Average Manatee]

Cities are better than rural buildings. For some reason rural buildings tend to be more expensive than city buildings and they'll only affect about 1/3rd to 1/5th as many pops anyway. Ideally you'd want a minimum of 1 city per province but that can cost a lot of mana depending on how fast you conquer.

Cities get Grand Theater (assimilate conquered pops and give happiness/loyalty), Great Temple (same but conversion), Academies (nobles = research) and Foundry (Large bonus to everything). Unfortunately most of these buildings need to be unlocked through inventions. If you want to micromanage you can resettle out converted slaves and resettle in unconverted slaves to achieve cultural unity quicker.

Also god damn am I starting to hate republics. It seems every term they'll have an event where either they fuck up your laws (costing lots of stability and mana to change it back) or else you suffer a colossal -50 approval penalty with them. Unfortunately I can't get my leader to be a member of the oligarchs so I can have lifetime rule.

 

[Theodora]

What's a legate anyway?

It's an office, and in Imperator it's basically the default commander of a legion, with tribunes being secondary commanders if a legion has its stack split.

Not really sure what you are looking at if 'legates' are appearing in the same context as cities or settlements though.