Keeping Imperator's Future Bright

[krushka5]

Hi all

Imperator has developed a robust and passionate community around the game, with many expressing concern for the future of the product. With recent announcements, I feel paradox may have trouble maintaining this community and its future patronage. In the best case scenario, development is halted and a team is assembled, yet this will see an attrition of the community and undermine any return to force. During this period, I feel it would be a good idea for Paradox to find some other way to support Imperator's continued development, at a significantly reduced capacity.

Back in 2020, Paradox hired a freelance content designer to assist with adding flavour content for a country pack for Hoi4 (Battle for the Bosporus), while the main dev team focused on other elements of the game. Perhaps Paradox could engage with such a practise again for Imperator, giving the reigns for at least one small content update focused around adding flavour and no new mechanics.
I feel this would allow:

• The community to stay alive with new content
• Demonstrate Paradox's continued commitment to the product whilst allowing its developers to support other pressing product demands across its other games
• Not interfere with Arheo and the outgoing Imperator team's vision, focusing instead on flavour

This could encompass things such as new missions, modifiers, countries events etc. It could be region, government, country, generic or unique to some other criteria.

If a freelance option is not available, Paradox could open submissions for small content injections created by the community? Whilst I am not sure what the arrangement with Cities Skyline's content creator packs are, maybe the ethos of utilizing the communities skills could be adopted?

At the very least, it would be a good idea to consult with the community and see if there are any ideas on how to preserve the product and community during this year in some other form?

If anyone has any idea's for how to keep the game alive in some form till a new team can take the reigns it would be great to see them.

 

[manager2525]

At this point I am on the pessimist side. Yes the game is a lot better, yes there is a fan base that really likes the game but at the end of the story we are too few probably.

Anyway my suggestion is to at least keep one, if possible two people still involved with the community via these forums, tweeter, reddit etc. It wouldn't need to be a high valued developer or anything so the investment would be minimum. The community will feel a bit more engaged and in case Pdx decides to continue the life cycle of the game this "community manager" could promote ideas and the overall view of the community to the new team. I cannot see a big downside for Pdx to do this. It is very clear that the game is at a "maybe we will continue development phase" so you are not creating expectations or anything (I would like to thank you for your honesty on this btw).

So yeah that is basically it hire, keep a community manager for imperator till you figure out what you want to do.

 

[Lars_Schneller]

Agreed. Currently, the future looks grim and modders can only do so much.

Besides, to make this game reasonably finished, we need more flavor (tribes, I am looking at you). New mechanics are great, but at this capacity they are not possible.

So yes, do anything to finish the game, within the realm of possibility of course.