|
I think my first 2.0 Epirus game comes to an end. Rome is all around me and blocks me from completing the "story" mission. I was too slow. Maybe I have to sit and wait for a good Roman civil war. We'll see how fun is it to grow your cities in a peaceful way. I can also go for Illyrian small tribes but I doubt it'll be of benefit. Egypt and Thrace are my allies.
|
# ? Feb 21, 2021 18:07 |
|
|
# ? Jun 5, 2024 08:03 |
|
Epirus is basically impossible if you follow the missions, you have to jump into Italy as soon as possible or the Romans will eat it all before you get theretrapped mouse posted:So after playing this game for another few hours, this is what I think so far. Some of the bugs in the 2.0 release seem so prevalent and obvious that it makes you wonder how they get through such as UI labeling bugs and the issues with levies being the wrong units or with units becoming depleted. With that said I thought that the "territories are permanently highlighted" bug was finally fixed, it was the most hated bug of 1.5 and I'm sure that if it was coming up again I would have seen tons of people complaining about it.
|
# ? Feb 21, 2021 19:24 |
|
Alright, this seems significantly better than it was at launch, but so far I've still noticed a few weird things. -Forts seems to always cost 3 capacity rather than what the tooltip says, which is that the first one in a province will cost 3 and each on after that will only cost 1. -The AI seems to have some problems. I've been called into multiple wars where my allies do absolutely nothing, and I either get my rear end kicked, or I do all the heavy lifting and then my ally peaces out. -Tribal levies can't be merged into one stack, which seems to be WAD, but there's a problem with how food is distributed when you raise them. Your primary stack gets enough food to last for years, while all the other stacks start with zero and have an extremely low capacity, so they immediately start taking attrition in hostile territory. -Lots of other little UI issues, and some concepts aren't very well explained. The game could really use an in-game encyclopedia like CK3.
|
# ? Feb 21, 2021 21:01 |
|
KOGAHAZAN!! posted:The bottom row is more powerful than the top, and the left half of the bottom row is more powerful than the right. Foundries, theatres and temples are the best, imo, but each of them requires an invention to unlock. If you're going to try for assimilation over integration then theatres are probably vital- that's by far the biggest boost to assimilation speed available. Also a question: what is the generally recommended strategy here? Integrating cultures as your main approach seems like it would tank your stability and your integrated pop happiness really quickly. When I conquer a new region like Umbria it's got a bunch of cultures, and I thought the idea was to assimilate those over times as a baseline solution; is it actually recommended to integrate instead? How do you keep your happiness high then?
|
# ? Feb 21, 2021 21:23 |
|
RabidWeasel posted:Epirus is basically impossible if you follow the missions, you have to jump into Italy as soon as possible or the Romans will eat it all before you get there Yeah, those missions are ambitious. First you capture small border nations... Now go dominate entire Greece, destroy Macedon, capture Troy while you're at it. With a lot of waiting and allying people I've managed to capture Peloponnese, but then Rome blocked my by capturing core Macedonian lands. And I'm even glad that Rome is so aggressive but it feels like you don't have enough tools to deal with it peacefully. Like in EU4 rival system helps with finding allies in that situation, in CK3 you can bend the knee. Here Rome can probably destroy me in a single war if I don't cheese it with attrition or something. Is there any way to fight against the tide in I:R?
|
# ? Feb 21, 2021 21:51 |
|
Fister Roboto posted:-Forts seems to always cost 3 capacity rather than what the tooltip says, which is that the first one in a province will cost 3 and each on after that will only cost 1. The tooltip is ambiguous, but it means the second fort in a territory, not the province. Two level 1 forts are 6 points; one level 2 fort is 4. I think they were looking for a way to keep the number of sieges you have to win down. Deltasquid posted:Also a question: what is the generally recommended strategy here? Integrating cultures as your main approach seems like it would tank your stability and your integrated pop happiness really quickly. When I conquer a new region like Umbria it's got a bunch of cultures, and I thought the idea was to assimilate those over times as a baseline solution; is it actually recommended to integrate instead? How do you keep your happiness high then? I don't think anyone knows, yet. My experience playing the Scordisci is that I should have been more open to integrating cultures early on than I was. That tribe in particular sits at the intersection of four culture groups and five (!) regions; refusing to integrate Dacians, Illyrians and other Celts meant that no matter what direction I was conquering in I was taking in large numbers of unintegrated pops- and usually of the wrong religion. My own primary culture was spread around in such a way as to not be easily concentrated in any one region. That meant that that while I was expanding fairly rapidly to start, my armies weren't growing- and increasingly large proportions of my population were angry foreigners permanently threatening revolt. When my neighbours also began to grow I found myself having difficulty keeping the momentum up- until I conquered and integrated the Evarisci. I am thoroughly impressed by how well the new design is achieving its goals, here. If you're not in that situation then you might get by fine without integrating anyone. Rome, for example, with its huge starting population and same-religion neighbours, probably doesn't need to integrate anyone. Something to bear in mind is that assimilation is slooow. It's a decades-long project- longer, if the pops aren't of your religion. Integration reduces happiness, yes, but it's not by so much that you can't afford to do one or two, and it doesn't have to be forever. You can absolutely integrate someone, convert them with relative speed and stability (the religious conversion policy is three times as effective as the cultural assimilation one), then de-integrate the culture and assimilate them later. Bonuses to integrated culture and state religion happiness are also relatively common, which makes it easy to offset the cost as you grow. You don't need to integrate everyone, either, just enough to get you a strong core of loyal provinces with large levies.
|
# ? Feb 21, 2021 22:01 |
|
ilitarist posted:Yeah, those missions are ambitious. First you capture small border nations... Now go dominate entire Greece, destroy Macedon, capture Troy while you're at it. With a lot of waiting and allying people I've managed to capture Peloponnese, but then Rome blocked my by capturing core Macedonian lands. Yeah, I'm likewise really unsure how to deal with Big Red if you're in their immediate path. At release I played a north germanic minor and by the time they got near I was a major power and could just barely out-fight them in a long, drawn-out war. It was a pretty fun all-warfare campaign, although it didn't really leave me hankering for more Imperator afterward. This time I played Syracusae, successfully formed Sicily in 460ish, zoomed out a bit and realized that I am deeply screwed as pretty much all of Italia and Magna Graecia is already full of smelly romans and they're barreling southwards. I already used my super-cheap mercenary mission power to beat Carthage with the power of money (and also nearly tank my economy because I wasn't paying attention to the disband costs), and Rome sure is a whole lot bigger. I guess I maybe could've hired some pirates to get enough navy to punch pieces out of mainland Carthage while at war, but even then I'm not sure I'd have all that many good options to avoid having my circles disturbed now. I could just chalk it up to the price I pay for deciding to start next to the end boss, but it's a little unfun in any case.
|
# ? Feb 21, 2021 22:18 |
|
KOGAHAZAN!! posted:The tooltip is ambiguous, but it means the second fort in a territory, not the province. Two level 1 forts are 6 points; one level 2 fort is 4. I think they were looking for a way to keep the number of sieges you have to win down. Thanks, that makes sense. I have to admit as Rome my starting levies and vassals were enough to divide and conquer my way through Italy for now, but I might integrate the Etruscans for a laugh.
|
# ? Feb 21, 2021 22:23 |
|
You basically integrate every culture with a decentish number of pops (definition of "decentish" depends on how big you are but ~200 pops is big enough to consider it unless you're already quite large) and later on if you find yourself hurting for happiness in your integrated pops you start to remove previously integrated cultures starting with the smallest ones. It's worth taking into account that the relative value of integrating vs. assimilating is actually higher for cultures which aren't urbanised or of your religion, because it's harder to assimilate pops outside of cities or if they're not your religion already. So you can integrate a "difficult" culture, convert them to your religion and build cities in their territory, then take away their integrated culture rights later and quickly reassimilate them back into your culture without the happiness hit.
|
# ? Feb 21, 2021 23:04 |
|
Basically if integrating them gives me a significantly bigger military then it's worth it. I've really played carthage so far but integrating the massalyisans and maesyllians or whatever are no brainers, because your gonna be expanding Into those regions anyway integrating them immediately gives you more levies. By contrast the Mauritanians in the east are a much smaller population and are outnumbered by the other cultures in the region, so I don't bother integrating them. oh yeah you can also unintegrate cultures later,so if you want to you can give the romans rights after you conquer italia for the massive military, then later om after you have more sources of armies you can take those rights away and remove so call roman "culture" from the map Agean90 fucked around with this message at 23:29 on Feb 21, 2021 |
# ? Feb 21, 2021 23:19 |
|
I really cannot find how to build a city. Where is it buried? Would my strategy "build every city you can afford" a viable one?
|
# ? Feb 21, 2021 23:32 |
|
There's a bit of artwork of a village or city in the state screen or whatever click on that and it'll let you upgrade
|
# ? Feb 21, 2021 23:36 |
|
Also it's generally best not to go too overboard with cities. I usually just go for one a province: cities can't produce their own food and can need a fuckton of it.
|
# ? Feb 22, 2021 04:18 |
|
Welp, took four bloody not-punic-wars, but I managed to eat Italy and form Magna Graecia as Syrakuse. Not too difficult, but I had to go v hard on +discipline inventions and wait for them to get distracted elsewhere.
|
# ? Feb 22, 2021 05:54 |
|
I'm not sure what the point of provinces getting disloyal/rebelling is. It seems really hard to prevent, and I don't see much reason to try to prevent it either, since fighting a single province is usually trivial to do, and they don't appear to ever team up and rebel together. Even when multiple provinces rebel at the same time, it's just two piss-easy wars instead of one. You even get to reduce AE by .5 when you win by banishing their noble families. I feel like it's almost an optimal strategy to tell the new provinces you conquered to go gently caress themselves and not even bother spending any real effort integrating them.
|
# ? Feb 22, 2021 06:17 |
|
I think they said in a developer diary that they wanted provinces to revolt a lot more because historically there were lots of revolts that had no chance of success, but that there's the potential for things to snowball if they hit at the wrong time which is more likely to happen if they actually revolt at all.
|
# ? Feb 22, 2021 07:46 |
|
I wonder if integrating the big cultures in Magna Graecia is a trick option, in that doing so gives the governor even more power base as the levies come online.
|
# ? Feb 22, 2021 09:38 |
|
NewMars posted:Also it's generally best not to go too overboard with cities. I usually just go for one a province: cities can't produce their own food and can need a fuckton of it. I think this was more true of earlier patches than this one. I've been doing two or three to the province and haven't had food issues anywhere outside of the capital. AnoHito posted:I'm not sure what the point of provinces getting disloyal/rebelling is. It seems really hard to prevent, and I don't see much reason to try to prevent it either, since fighting a single province is usually trivial to do, and they don't appear to ever team up and rebel together. Even when multiple provinces rebel at the same time, it's just two piss-easy wars instead of one. You even get to reduce AE by .5 when you win by banishing their noble families. I feel like it's almost an optimal strategy to tell the new provinces you conquered to go gently caress themselves and not even bother spending any real effort integrating them. I've actually found it more useful in some cases to use Bleed Them Dry to provoke a rebellion than Local Autonomy and Harsh Treatment to try and get them under control.
|
# ? Feb 22, 2021 10:03 |
|
Epirus has bonuses to Freemen so I went with bonuses for them. I still hit research cap but I build Freeman building that gives bonus to food and many of my cities have positive food supply.
|
# ? Feb 22, 2021 10:33 |
|
KOGAHAZAN!! posted:I've actually found it more useful in some cases to use Bleed Them Dry to provoke a rebellion than Local Autonomy and Harsh Treatment to try and get them under control. Harsh Treatment is amazing for emptying out already fairly low pop provinces into the surrounding, if you have a rubbish wrong culture / religion province next to one with a city in (with some room to grow) you can easily convert the majority of the pops in the province by forcing them to move. I got almost the entire population of (Causasian) Albania to move this way
|
# ? Feb 22, 2021 10:42 |
|
KOGAHAZAN!! posted:I think this was more true of earlier patches than this one. I've been doing two or three to the province and haven't had food issues anywhere outside of the capital. This reminds me but Campania at start has like five loving cities. At least Rome's constituent cities are all on farmland and are clustered; Campania has them all over the place, some in really lovely positions, and IIRC all have a solid amount of pops residing in them. Very frustrating to the optimization nerd in me, trying to puzzle out whether I should demote them at all, and if so, which ones to demote and how to get the pops to move to a better location.
|
# ? Feb 22, 2021 10:45 |
|
Following on a bit from the integration discussion earlier it's worth bearing in mind that there are some military tradition bonuses which are really quite strong and fairly easily accessible in certain trees, which makes it very worthwhile to integrate relevant cultures if you are in a position to unlock those trees. For example Indian Kingdom traditions have a tier 1 tradition with zero prerequesites which gives a levy size buff and immediately unlocks 4 inventions. Roman Traditions have the sieges + roads section along the left side which gives a really good siege buff and unlocks 6 inventions and roadbuilding for 3 traditions Persian Rural Traditions get a total of 25% heavy cavalry offensive, 25% heavy cavalry defensive, 15% heavy cavalry discipline, 10% horse archer discipline, a 10% plains combat bonus for all units, unlocks the cavalry skirmish tactic and 4 inventions, for 3 traditions (this is amazing unless you are already all in on using mostly HI) Most inventions and traditions are roughly on par in value, or the traditions are only slightly better, so unlocking 4 inventions is a huge bonus. For example 4 inventions in the mil tree can get you 10% discipline to all units, or get you most of the way towards unlocking Quick March, or unlock Foundries and get some other bonuses as well.
|
# ? Feb 22, 2021 12:48 |
|
I've checked paradox and Imperator subreddit and boy are people euphoric. The popular opinion is that I:R is now objectively better than EU4 cause it has objectively more depth in mechanics. While I see the point about the complexity of mechanics I can imagine Johan feeling very misanthropic now. It's like a lot of fans just want more numbers thrown at the wall. I think Paradox is afraid of making Victoria 3 cause nowadays they want to make good games instead of the ones with a lot of numbers. But now they can probably pull it off by bloating the game with mechanics. Seems that Master of Orion 3 was just ahead of its time! Mind you, I like I:R and liked it from day one. It's just at the moment it feels more alpha version of a game than it was on release. It's expected cause the whole UI and a lot of mechanics are brand new. But it makes me sad that this is apparently what fans at large want. Screw polish, AI, balance, all praise the huge number of buttons to click.
|
# ? Feb 22, 2021 14:09 |
|
NewMars posted:Also it's generally best not to go too overboard with cities. I usually just go for one a province: cities can't produce their own food and can need a fuckton of it. You should absolutely found as many cities as you reasonably can, taking into account the trade goods in a particular province. Ideally, imo, if it can't get a Mine or a Farming Settlement, it should ideally be turned into a city. If your population in a province gets too big to support, you have three ways to deal with that; either move slaves around to boost food production, move people out of the province, or get more import routes in the province and import food. Cities are just crazy useful now and you really should be trying to get as many cities as possible.
|
# ? Feb 22, 2021 15:06 |
|
ilitarist posted:Mind you, I like I:R and liked it from day one. It's just at the moment it feels more alpha version of a game than it was on release. It's expected cause the whole UI and a lot of mechanics are brand new. But it makes me sad that this is apparently what fans at large want. Screw polish, AI, balance, all praise the huge number of buttons to click. Turns out that an engaging, interesting game with some flaws (*cough, Victoria*) is indeed better than a balanced, polished turd. A good game is a game people enjoy playing, regardless of objective design quality or whatever other metric people want to come up with.
|
# ? Feb 22, 2021 16:00 |
|
I would much rather play the empire sim that imperator is now than the map painter that it was at release. Also I dont care about "balance" in my history sims because this isnt a moba and Rome should be insane compared to random germanic tribes and minor greek city-states
|
# ? Feb 22, 2021 16:11 |
|
I liked IR on day one. The game only got better and better, but the last time I played it was uuh.. Marius I think, a few moinths back? I came back to it yesterday and uuuh... I do not like the GUI change one bit and yellow is an ugly rear end color. Other than that I didn't get to play much so i can't wait to see what's new
|
# ? Feb 22, 2021 16:12 |
|
I actually like the fact rebels are hard to prevent. It’s one of Crusader kings biggest problems rebellion is insanely easy to stop
|
# ? Feb 22, 2021 16:36 |
|
The thing about stopping rebellions in I:R is that it at least make sense, if you build infrastructure and convince the locals to worship your gods then they'll probably not revolt. Or you can just be total shitlords to them and force them to disperse away from their homelands where they won't have enough of an impact to stir up trouble in the same way that they could when they were all in one place.
|
# ? Feb 22, 2021 16:40 |
|
AnEdgelord posted:I would much rather play the empire sim that imperator is now than the map painter that it was at release. The balance is not about factions but about strategies. As in how viable are all the decisions you can take. I've not played I:R enough to see if it's there, but it's what you need for a strategy game to be long-lived. @RabidWeasel clearly knows more about the game than I do and he said that Epirus has to ignore its missions to thrive. This to me says that the game has issues with keeping it all together. Not a big deal by itself, but combined with all the problems with UI and bugs I'm afraid that devs get a message that piling up features is more important to make people like their game than making the game good. Also, Crusader Kings 3 sound design makes all previous Paradox game obsolete. I actually think I:R map is the best looking map ever, but CK3 ambient music with special events triggering special tracks is exactly what grand strategy games need. ilitarist fucked around with this message at 17:24 on Feb 22, 2021 |
# ? Feb 22, 2021 17:19 |
|
ilitarist posted:The balance is not about factions but about strategies. As in how viable are all the decisions you can take. I've not played I:R enough to see if it's there, but it's what you need for a strategy game to be long-lived. ? its not that epirus has to ignore its missions to thrive, its that you are playing a nation that starts right next to rome. its like if youre playing byz in eu4, even if maybe not that hard. the biggest issue with epirus specifically is that, because the ai is now much better at choosing where to expand it makes the campaign harder and so you need to both expand faster as epirus and also expand a little more intelligently. it shows the difficulty as medium but it should probably be hard.
|
# ? Feb 22, 2021 17:55 |
|
Yeah the issue is that Epirus is a weak state starting off in a position where it's almost entirely surrounded by larger states or smaller states protected by larger states. The only part of the map it can reasonably expand into (and gain anything from - Illyria is a wasteland) is the boot, if you just follow your missions then you'll miss the opportunity to eat up the small but well populated Italian minors. It's not impossible to go for Greece first but it's harder and it also means you'll have to have a showdown with Rome after they already conquered most of Italy. If you're playing a game with an asymmetrical starting state then of course some choices of start will have a more restricted amount of viable starting strategies, that doesn't mean that it's a bad game. Personally I find this to be part of the game's charm and earlier versions of Imperator largely lacked this feeling as the AI never actually did anything threatening. If you don't want to deal with Rome then you can start somewhere further away.
|
# ? Feb 22, 2021 18:23 |
|
Saw this game had a major update and decided to jump back in and take a look. The new UI is very different, but I think I like it. The new missions interface is cool, it reminds me of EU4 missions, and I like having some specific attainable goals along with whatever other crazy stuff I can think of. Can I just say I despise tutorials that don't mirror the game? Meaning, I was REALLY hoping the tutorial was changed so Rome didn't have the extra money and political influence. It changes how someone plays the game if they start with more resources, and therefore, it's useless in terms of learning the strategy of the game. I might be alone on this, but I think tutorials for grand strategy should not only teach the mechanics, but also the basic strategy on how to approach playing the game. If I start with 300 extra bucks than I normally would, then my perception of what I'm capable of doing at the beginning is warped. I'm probably just tilting at windmills here and overthinking it, but that just bugs me. Next time I play, I'm probably going to start a Carthage game and see what I can do with that. Gotta learn those naval mechanics.
|
# ? Feb 22, 2021 18:31 |
|
Lucas Archer posted:Saw this game had a major update and decided to jump back in and take a look. The new UI is very different, but I think I like it. The new missions interface is cool, it reminds me of EU4 missions, and I like having some specific attainable goals along with whatever other crazy stuff I can think of. If you want to learn navies, don't play Carthage. They start with enough boats to never care about anything other than just selecting one big group and right clicking where you want them to be.
|
# ? Feb 22, 2021 18:40 |
|
Of course it is. Why should I know how to work boats in order to play a nation known for it's boats? Ugh, that annoys me. I'm sure it's a function of how the game is programmed/designed/etcetera, but I feel like that's telling someone to not worry about how armies work for Russia in a WW2 game because you can just slam giant numbers of people against the enemy... Wait, hold on.
|
# ? Feb 22, 2021 18:49 |
|
there does not exist a paradox game where boats are a remotely interesting feature
|
# ? Feb 22, 2021 19:38 |
|
Sampatrick posted:there does not exist a paradox game where boats are a remotely interesting feature Is there a game with both naval and land combat where the naval combat is interesting?
|
# ? Feb 22, 2021 19:53 |
|
Sid Meier's Pirates!
|
# ? Feb 22, 2021 19:58 |
|
Mantis42 posted:Sid Meier's Pirates! Great game. I love the dancing minigame
|
# ? Feb 22, 2021 20:04 |
|
|
# ? Jun 5, 2024 08:03 |
|
Is there actually a cap to how many boats you can field at once like in EUIV?
|
# ? Feb 22, 2021 20:07 |