Love in Imperator

[Snow Crystal]

I can only speak for myself, but it was only Joe and I who were purely Content Designers for most of Imperator's lifetime, so I am half of the duo who worked on the game for most of its development when it comes to content.

Originally it was because I felt it was really hard to work with characters. The character system is, in my opinion, one of the worst flaws of Imperator (we will talk about one of the other flaws a tad later). They felt hard to work with, as they aren't really as built up CK's character system, and I find that they can be really hard to differentiate as a player. It does not help that you don't really play as a character, or as a state, but a weird in-between mix. You also have a bunch of characters, whereas very few of them feel particularly notable or special, particularly if you don't pay special attention to them. I know Peter tried to fix this later down Imperator's lifetime with things like making specific characters pop up more, and the like, but I never felt it worked as more than a light band-aid fix to a glaring problem in the game.

As we started working on patches, and particularly after 1.3, we hit the biggest content problem for Imperator. Mission trees, our biggest mistake through patch development, if you ask me. I know there are mixed opinions on them. They took an incredible amount of time, were too rail-roading in what they did, and in the end I think they only exacerbated some of Imperator's problems, rather than fixing anything. As a developer on the project at the time, it felt like CDs were stretched thin between making missions, adding new features (religion rework in 1.4, republic rework in 1.5, or one of the many plethora of changes in 2.0), and fixing old problems in the game. There wasn't a lot of time to add events in-between all of that, and if I made them I didn't want to have to go through the wonky character system to do it, then I'd rather do something with the country or a state (what would be called province in-game) instead, something I felt were the strong points of Imperator.

 

[Snow Crystal]

@Snow Crystal In hindsight, how would you have preferred to implement characters in I:R?

Impossible to say, really. I honestly don't know what you'd have to do, to make the character aspect a better experience.

Dear @Snow Crystal, please answer this important question: were Imperator's dynamic mission trees much more diffcult to code than the static Focus tree in HoI IV?

Good question. I have no idea. I've never made a focus tree in my life, nor seen the inner workings of one. But I find it interesting you want to compare something that a Content Designer spends 4-6 months creating (a focus tree), versus something we had a week to create (a mission tree).

 

[Snow Crystal]

@Snow Crystal what would you love to see in the game (regardless of feasibility)?

A disease system, and a proper system for large tribal movements.