Now that Imperator Rome is officially in Legacy, what were the flaws of the game that could have been fixed?

[MachopPower69]

Just a random thread about what were the flaws of such a unique game that probably costed its survival.

For me, it is the unbalance of Rome and tribes. Sure, Rome is supposed to be the rising hegemon but it overextends too quickly without consequences and has a unique modifier that made it a great threat, especially if you are in Greece where you are fighting to be free from the Macedonians and end up next door to Rome who conquered Epirus 15 years after the game started. With tribes, it is too boring and hard to get going especially with some Latin folk knocking at your chiefs door.

And the Call to Arms bug that instantly pops up and disappears, ending alliances and puts your country at risk.

 

[Herennius]

And the Call to Arms bug that instantly pops up and disappears, ending alliances and puts your country at risk.

Can you be a bit more specific at this one? I never had problems with it - the request pops up at the top and I have enough time to click on it and make my informed decision. It is even lenient in the way that you still can cancel a forgotten RoP agreement with one of your future enemies, while the decision window is open.

 

[BloodAsp]

Be realistic
Few bugs here and there...
Performance will not happen, any changes to base game (new functions, rebalancing) will not happen.
Come to think of it: do you want for the game to be rebalanced by intern who got EXACTLY 2 hrs to do it?

Paradox used to milk money on flavour: EU4 is the most notorius example. It's very easy to create mission trees, etc. In Rome you have Invictus for free, so no money from there.
On the bright side this is Paradox game, so you can rebalance it yourself. You want for Camels to beat everything, np.
You want City founding to cost 0 - np
You want Rome to be weak - np

 

[MachopPower69]

Can you be a bit more specific at this one? I never had problems with it - the request pops up at the top and I have enough time to click on it and make my informed decision. It is even lenient in the way that you still can cancel a forgotten RoP agreement with one of your future enemies, while the decision window is open.

The bug occurs when the AI calls you in but the notification pops up and disappears in a blink so you can't select it. Not sure how it happens, maybe the AI sees the ticks and crosses like we do, but I'm not sure. It cost me my game when Rome asked me to join a war against a nation in France but the notification disappeared. I did have speed 5 but the game was slow so I hd plenty of actual time, but it disappeared instantly as it appeared

 

[Herennius]

I did have speed 5 but the game was slow so I hd plenty of actual time, but it disappeared instantly as it appeared

Might be related to the speed setting then (I almost never use the highest) - perhaps a combination of the technical lag you experienced and the high speed in combination. Without knowing the exact ingame date the notification popped up and the date it vanished it is hard to say if something is buggy. I would probably have reloaded the last autosave and replayed on a slower speed to investigate...but sadly it will likely not matter anyway with development now having ceased.

 

[MachopPower69]

Might be related to the speed setting then (I almost never use the highest) - perhaps a combination of the technical lag you experienced and the high speed in combination. Without knowing the exact ingame date the notification popped up and the date it vanished it is hard to say if something is buggy. I would probably have reloaded the last autosave and replayed on a slower speed to investigate...but sadly it will likely not matter anyway with development now having ceased.

i did that, didn't help, especially at speed 2

 

[WingedLion14]

For me, it's the fact that so many mechanics operated independently when they should have worked together. I'll use elections in republics as an example, since it's one I made several suggestions about back when the suggestions subforum had a use. Hypothetically, elections could have tied all the mechanics together, with characters, political party influence, and upper-class pops in the capital contributing to the results, influenced by things like trade good access and food supply in the capital, popularity of the political party leaders, and candidate prominence/powerbase (among other things). Instead, however, all these mechanics really operated independently, with fairly minimal cross-pollination (and when they do, it's not always in the clearest of ways).

 

[vyshan]

For me one thing I was hoping to see was a proper trade rework.

 

[DukeLeto42]

I mean, the key flaw was that 1.2 was not 1.0.

Let's be clear - I had a lot of fun in 1.0, and while 1.2 was an incredible improvement to the game, the 1.0 release still had a lot going for it and had me invested (and yeah, part of that was my Rome: TW nostalgia tugged at HARD, but I accept that). With that said, many people didn't, and a narrative quickly developed that it "wasn't the game they were sold." Complaints like "lacking in flavor" were similarly reflective of a game at the start of the development cycle being compared to EUIV or CK2 (with EUIV not yet in the midst of DLC-opinion-malaise and CK2 coming to a successful end of a long development career).

With that in place, 1.2's release began being talked about as "did they fix it?" (which carried the implicit assumptions that it was originally completely bad and probably still is) instead of excitement about how it improved the game. Past that point, it's clear that they were left with either the long haul of trying to draw people back to the game or to cut it loose, and sadly they went with the latter.

I:R's death has little to do with the flaws in the game as it hit 2.0. Few could be marked as things we couldn't look forward to over the course of a successful Paradox development cycle (from bug smashing to a trade rework). The existing changes to population, culture, religion, and buildings had demonstrated the capacity to address core flaws in the game design and a strong vision for what the game could become.

 

[IsaacCAT]

Some thoughts from Arheo twitter account:

https://twitter.com/x/status/1547442647710810113

https://twitter.com/x/status/1547443247030714374

https://twitter.com/x/status/1547443688854405120

https://twitter.com/x/status/1547444367752892416

https://twitter.com/x/status/1547446344176001024

 

[MachopPower69]

So was Imperator basically a "test"?

 

[olivenkranz]

So was Imperator basically a "test"?

Maybe Maybe Maybe

 

[TinWiz]

[...] Past that point, it's clear that they were left with either the long haul of trying to draw people back to the game or to cut it loose, and sadly they went with the latter.

I wonder if they would have put more effort into a long-haul revival if it wasn't for Covid and the personnel issues PDS was having.

 

[Gurkhal]

While my heart bleeds as much as anyone else's for Imperator, it is very encouraging that there's a hint that a game in Antiquity might work better with a character focus than a state focus.

Here's hoping Paradox will give the era another shot at some point and we'll get a character focused game with as interesting characters to play as and interact with as we can read about in the sources.

 

[mhvg1994]

Are you sure Imperator is not going to be revisited after Vicky 3 comes out?

I was very disappointed with the game when it came out; I was so looking forward to it because I love Ancient Rome and paradox grand strategy, but then found it was just a mana based, shallow tech demo... But as time went on, the game slowly became what it should have been to begin with. They were heading in a really good direction just when production was cut. I hope they return to it and continue development. It grew into a genuinely good paradox game

 

[Herennius]

Are you sure Imperator is not going to be revisited after Vicky 3 comes out?

I was very disappointed with the game when it came out; I was so looking forward to it because I love Ancient Rome and paradox grand strategy, but then found it was just a mana based, shallow tech demo... But as time went on, the game slowly became what it should have been to begin with. They were heading in a really good direction just when production was cut. I hope they return to it and continue development. It grew into a genuinely good paradox game

As much as I would like it - I seriously doubt that this will happen. While the first official statement from Paradox_Pariah leaves that possibility theoretically (though the conditions "-3rd party publisher picking up the rights", "huge demands for game generates dev attention"- are hard to meet, IMO. And no, I have no illusion that we forumnites here alone count as "huge demand" sadly ), the follow-up statements @IsaacCAT linked above and here ( https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/foru...s-discussions-and-latest-news.1527240/page-13 ; especially from Johan Andersson) sound pretty final.

Also I don't see why the Vic3 release in particular will change anything - unless of course one assumes that Vic3 will be a complete failure, the game gets abandoned instantly and then the devs are heading to IR. But seriously: How likely is that? I personally don't believe in such a disaster (and I also don't hope for it - as I would like to play a good, new Vic3 ) and that means its dev team will be busy with patching and DLC'ing. So where should be the wiggle room for (wo)manpower being redirected to IR?

 

[Herennius]

Stop talking about Vic3, IR is better and always will be

We don't have to go down that far with the level

That reminds me that Vic3 will have no tactical movement of armies...so once the Imperatrix: Victoria mod is released we should see some traffic here, as clearly not everyone liked that design decision

 

[namewhichisnottakenyet]

So was Imperator basically a "test"?

Ngl, I would be kinda interested in a game set in the really early parts of antiquity, like just-leaving-the-stone-age antiquity up to about the time of Imperator.

That being said, that would require a hell of a lot of different government mechanics, plus, it would be way more speculative than other PDX games because it would start before the invention of writing, or, at best, around the time of the earliest proto-writing systems, and even then only a limited number of cultures developed any form of writing before the later parts of the bronze age, and for the other parts of the world, the devs could only use archeology and maybe folklore to develop content. So especially the interactive history type of PDX players would probably hate the game no matter what.

Since we're talking about several thousand years here, the tick speed would likely have to be longer. But I don't think that's that much of a problem - EU4 ticks once per day for around 400 years, whereas a game of HOI4 spans 10-15 years but ticks hourly for a similar number of total ticks. So for a 4000 year game, one tick per week or so sounds about right.

That, or the game would have to be broken up into an anthology of smaller scenarios like the unification of Egypt and the Old Kingdom, or the unification of China, or the late bronze age collapse. But I kinda want to play as a small Siberian tribe that's hunting the last mammoths and then has a scientific and cultural golden age which lets it develop ironworking by 1500 BC and conquer all of Asia around the year 0 with their early plate armor wearing shock troops, so smaller scenarios kind of defeat the point of the game for me.

 

[mhvg1994]

As much as I would like it - I seriously doubt that this will happen. While the first official statement from Paradox_Pariah leaves that possibility theoretically (though the conditions "-3rd party publisher picking up the rights", "huge demands for game generates dev attention"- are hard to meet, IMO. And no, I have no illusion that we forumnites here alone count as "huge demand" sadly ), the follow-up statements @IsaacCAT linked above and here ( https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/foru...s-discussions-and-latest-news.1527240/page-13 ; especially from Johan Andersson) sound pretty final.

Also I don't see why the Vic3 release in particular will change anything - unless of course one assumes that Vic3 will be a complete failure, the game gets abandoned instantly and then the devs are heading to IR. But seriously: How likely is that? I personally don't believe in such a disaster (and I also don't hope for it - as I would like to play a good, new Vic3 ) and that means its dev team will be busy with patching and DLC'ing. So where should be the wiggle room for (wo)manpower being redirected to IR?

That's a shame... I assumed (or hoped) that the reason they pulled people off Imperator was to make sure Vic3 would get released on time (kind of give the development a boost), but that Vic3 would go back to baseline staffing after release and Imperator would get their workers back. But you're probably right...

 

[diegosimeone]

The main problem is that they marketed a Rome game when in fact this was a Diadochi game with a touch of Punic wars where you could avoid all that by focus on creating Rome yourself.

People expected a Rome game, people had expectations based on CK experience because for some reason ancient Rome is likened to the middle ages which I don't really get (there were 5 main families in Rome and that was pretty much it, everyone else was just filling up the space at any given time). It's a rise of Rome game and the actual ancient Rome hype is for the end of the Republic and the birth of the Empire (Julius Caesaer, Augustus etc)

Rebranding this as an Alexander the Great legacy game could have been more beneficial in terms of marketing, but Rome still sells more. I think they misjudged the reaction and assumed that people would swarm in just because Rome was in the title. Surely Rome is one of the key nations to select in the game, but it's not really a Rome game. In the first 30 years of each game, Rome is more fragile in I:R than the Ottomans in EU4 which is supposed to be a colonization game. But no one would name a game EU: Ottomans.


The game itself is enjoyable and I think the different flavor added later was more than welcome. It's a game, you'll see bugs around and with proper QA and development it could have become a great game. But it would never get the following it deserved because people expected a Rome game and this was a pre-Rome game.
It remains a decent empire building game but it's below expectations.