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ANOTHER SCORCHER posted:It is genuinely funny that Imperator (and EU: Rome, I think) ends at the date of the creation of the Roman Empire. Its like ending Crusader Kings at 1096 - the most famous element of the period for which the game itself is named - is not present. Tbf imperator was a title used during the republic too, and imperial Rome is a super boring setting until it's falling apart since they were so dominant. I guess you could do a 'be the one to topple the Roman Empire' thing, but Rome is clearly the selling point of any classical title, so an imperial setting where they've already won from day one isn't very interesting. I agree that it feels weird to leave it out, but maybe all of this just means the setting isn't as ripe for exploration as classical history nerds want to think it is.
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Dec 1, 2021 21:09
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Most of Rome’s history is mired with patrician families trying to plunder as much as they could from the empire, sowing the seeds of discord, while simultaneously trying to keep the realm whole. A fool’s endeavor that would probably have made for a better game than what we had.
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Dec 1, 2021 21:11
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The stuff going on in Ancient Greece is interesting too; and then of course when it comes to Rome there's the Punic Wars. I think for a Rome centered game it should be something more like you're trying to rise up in power using the wars as your means to plunger riches you'll use to bribe people and have an army at your side. Military service was deeply intertwined with your ability to rise in power. Something like you start out managing a post office and gotta backstab and fight your way to the top levying and establishing patronage networks all the way; with an economic/administrative aspect too since to be really successful you probably also want to be a competent administrator; but instead of starting from some post office and spreading out from there you actually get assigned to new posts/positions as you rise up in different locales; mandating you carefully forge new alliances and create those connections/networks as you rise and move about so when it comes time to administer say, a province as a military governor you already have some knowledge of who are your go-to people to hand pick to get the ship sailing again. For a Japan-example there's the book Taiko about Hideyoshi's rise through the ranks and I think something basically like that would be interesting.
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Dec 1, 2021 21:29
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It seems like the issue is that the thing Rome is trying to do in this era is unlike what 80% of the other 'nations' are trying to do. It might be a bad era for the traditional PDS thing of 'play any nation'. It's possible with a ton of gated DLC like in CK2 they could have introduced tribal mechanics, empire mechanics, etc., and focused on the things people want out of this era. I haven't played it since launch, but it never really clicked with me. I'm not sure how much work they put into fixing it, but it sounds like the game was just designed poorly.
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Dec 1, 2021 21:36
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Kaza42 posted:What should a Classical game focus on that makes it not just a recolored version of one of the others? You should play a noble family, and control parts of the Roman republic, with the aim of accumulating estates, offices and power, and eventually solidifying the state into hereditary rule for your family. The big difference to other titles is that in a very large part, everything you acrue will be ephemeral, and you will have to make good use of it while you got it. - You will control a consular army while a consul from your family is in power. Is your term coming to an end? Is there a barbarian army over that river? Winning the battle would be much more assured if you went around it first, but doing that would mean that you might have to hand off the army, and the potential spoils and glory to some other competing family, so instead frontal assault over the river it is. - You will control a province while someone of your family remains the governor. Since this is unlikely to last that long, the name of the game is to maximize what you can extract from the province while you still control it, instead of ahistorical playstyles like playing tall. - Roman foreign policy is likewise controlled largely not by the Senate, but by the closest governor to the state in question. The Senate can of course decide what they want, but they are far away, and your local garrison is close. It's not like the Senate has often censured someone for waging a private war, at least so long as it's short and successful. The arc of the game would be from mostly intact Republic where laws are mostly followed and something like raising an army and attacking your enemy directly is completely unthinkable and would result in everyone else banding together against you, all the way through the systematic dysfunction and disintegration of the Republic to alea iacta est where only who controls the largest and best army matters.
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Dec 1, 2021 22:47
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Tuna-Fish posted:You should play a noble family, and control parts of the Roman republic, with the aim of accumulating estates, offices and power, and eventually solidifying the state into hereditary rule for your family. The big difference to other titles is that in a very large part, everything you acrue will be ephemeral, and you will have to make good use of it while you got it. This. Basically I think imagining something like the Holy Roman Empire mechanic in EU4 but as the larger arc of the game. The more you and others garner power and influences towards you, the more you and others slowly contribute to the gradual erosion of the state which allows the civil wars to happen. Perhaps if you want to play it such that you want to RP as the family whose duty is to steadfastly preserve the Republic at all costs you can play a bit differently; only taking what you need in order to fend off other power hungry people and do acts designed to increase cohesion.
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Dec 1, 2021 22:59
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Tuna-Fish posted:You should play a noble family, and control parts of the Roman republic, with the aim of accumulating estates, offices and power, and eventually solidifying the state into hereditary rule for your family. The big difference to other titles is that in a very large part, everything you acrue will be ephemeral, and you will have to make good use of it while you got it. This highlights one major hurdle with Classical era games. Is this a Classical Era Paradox Game? Or is it a Rome game? Because all of this is very Rome specific, it's not going to be great at playing as Gauls or Huns
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Dec 1, 2021 23:39
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Kaza42 posted:This highlights one major hurdle with Classical era games. You start with Rome because its popular; then you figure out different mechanics as applicable. Gaul tribals with their druids are going to be very different from greek city states and so on.
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Dec 1, 2021 23:59
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Kaza42 posted:This highlights one major hurdle with Classical era games. Meanwhile Crusader Kings fails to even represent catholic feudal latins well but does gangbusters while everyone yells "no more catholic feudal latins, add China now"
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Dec 2, 2021 00:04
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And I mean that mostly works for the Greek city states where there's always that conflict between do you help the state or do you help yourself? And basically how much can you get away with without the state imploding around you. And since the aim is hereditary rule, the monarchies can start with that and you just spice them up later. Basically any state you can fit in a Rome style hole would be the first playable focus, adding the rest later ala CK2.
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Dec 2, 2021 00:05
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Rome is the only country that matters. Always has always will
Gaius Marius fucked around with this message at 00:55 on Dec 2, 2021 |
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Dec 2, 2021 00:15
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Gaius Marius posted:Rome is the only country that matters. Always has always will Username/Post Combo
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Dec 2, 2021 03:40
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Edgar Allen Ho posted:Meanwhile Crusader Kings fails to even represent catholic feudal latins well but does gangbusters while everyone yells "no more catholic feudal latins, add China now" I want them to gather a team to make a completely separate China game, if only so that they don't waste time fully simulating China in CK.
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Dec 2, 2021 04:37
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Yes, it's like a lava lamp.
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There's already Rotk by Koei, and I don't think Paradox could do better And in all honesty, while the people wanting China are vocal, I also think they're a minority, CK China would probably need a much bigger team than Imperator, and do much lower numbers
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Dec 2, 2021 05:54
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Edgar Allen Ho posted:Meanwhile Crusader Kings fails to even represent catholic feudal latins well What do you mean?
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Dec 2, 2021 06:00
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Gaius Marius posted:There's already Rotk by Koei, and I don't think Paradox could do better It would also manage to be illegal in China
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Dec 2, 2021 06:49
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Gaius Marius posted:There's already Rotk by Koei, and I don't think Paradox could do better I do, those games are mostly mediocre. Baronjutter posted:It would also manage to be illegal in China Not really true for anything before the 20th century. People said the same erroneously thing about Total War: Three Kingdoms but CA didn't have any issues. Historical dramas are a big genre over there. Mantis42 fucked around with this message at 07:02 on Dec 2, 2021 |
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Dec 2, 2021 06:58
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Mantis42 posted:I do, those games are mostly mediocre. Unlike Imperator? 
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Dec 2, 2021 07:25
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Well, okay, make a China game and don't put Johan in charge.
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Dec 2, 2021 07:29
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PittTheElder posted:I want them to gather a team to make a completely separate China game, if only so that they don't waste time fully simulating China in CK. They never will though; the reason people clamor for it being shoehorned into CK2 is because it's the only way we're actually getting a Medieval East Asia grand strategy. And like I said a bit ago, unless they hire a whole bunch of new people I really think a standalone Asia game would be a reach for Paradox to pull off properly even if they were to try it again. An expansion is much more attainable.
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Dec 2, 2021 09:43
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I don't think Imperator had some big fundamental flaw that meant it was doomed from the start. I think the only real candidate for true game-breaking issue was the bad UI, which put off so many people at release. The individual mechanics had their own issues and frustrations, but they also all had good ideas. I still maintain that the interplay and feedback between economy, pops and army makeup was genuinely good. And tending to the slow development of your pops and cities was basically a taste of what everyone is hoping for from Victoria 3. It would probably have been a very decent game with a few more changes, but it's hard to overcome a bad release.
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Dec 2, 2021 09:47
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Did the Imperator launch coincide with one of the gamer rage moments against Paradox or am I misremembering? There've been so many now it's hard to keep track but I vaguely recall the launch got tangled up in some stuff. IMO the biggest issue was just a lack of personality. A thousand different factions and all of them were basically indistinguishable at launch, it made it really hard to even make any kind of informed decision about where to play as. Going back to that discussion from a bit ago, I think the classical period really is more popular than the early modern, it's just that it's a popularity condensed around a lot of stuff that all happens in like 5 places, which makes for an extremely boring map to look at. EU4's advantage is that we know all the names. I don't think it's at all an insurmountable problem for a strategy game (Total War manages fine) but I do think it was a poor choice of era to expand the province count 10-fold for.
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Dec 2, 2021 10:00
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Koramei posted:Did the Imperator launch coincide with one of the gamer rage moments against Paradox or am I misremembering? There've been so many now it's hard to keep track but I vaguely recall the launch got tangled up in some stuff. There was a lot of "obviously the game is bad because they are putting all of the interesting mechanics (overpowered fluff missions etc) in DLC" poo poo, if that's what you mean
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Dec 2, 2021 11:46
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Edgar Allen Ho posted:My dream classical Rome game would be almost an Oregon Trail/Paradox hybrid. You necessarily start as a roman patriarch. The difficulty level determines how many Roman rear end in a top hat points you get. You can spend them on start, lands, successful ancestors, upgrading from plebeian to patrician, etc, or gain more by making your clan poor, having gently caress all, having your dad be a worthless failson who let half a legion get routed, etc. Then the game is winning political and military victories, building up your estates, rising to higher offices, and ultimately the win condition is pulling an Octavian and instituting a principate. In the mean time you'd watch Rome expand while fighting tactical battles and building up estates and industries in Rome and abroad, generation after generation. You'll probably love "A Legionary's life" if you haven't played it yet. Not the same scope, but drat if it isn't a really fun game. Kaza42 posted:This highlights one major hurdle with Classical era games. After you get this done well, then you start moving into other plausible , fun states like Carthage, the Parthians or the successor states, one by one, granting them unique perspectives and campaigns while also banking on that sweet DLC money. The people who would be mad that they can't play as some turnip farmers in Germania can be safely ignored until the actual civilizations get modeled 
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Dec 2, 2021 12:34
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Mans posted:You'll probably love "A Legionary's life" if you haven't played it yet. Hear, hear. I enjoyed every minute of it.
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Dec 2, 2021 13:07
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It's kind of sad that it's difficult to make a game which covers both the Diadochi wars and the rise of Rome in a satisfying way. The timescales and sheer difference in geographic size between the various states involved doesn't quite work out.
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Dec 2, 2021 13:12
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To be honest, I quite like Imperator in the state they left it. It's about to overtake Stellaris in hours played, even  The Invictus releases haven't wow me so far. Some new tags, some extra provinces, I think some mission trees? The building rebalance is nice. Galatia events are Not Great, at least not for player Gauls, and the Spearmen addition seems dumb to me.
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Dec 2, 2021 13:42
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SnoochtotheNooch posted:What do you mean? Well talking about CK3, the feudalism model is nothing like anything that ever existed in Western Europe; a fully monetized legalistic approach is the exact opposite of what feudalism was even about. The church is woefully underdeveloped as well. There is no Papal Reform Movement, no conflict over Investiture, and the Pope is just a guy who calls Crusades from time to time. CK3 is an interesting case because they've taken a very flexible system to model the whole map. It has advantages in that you can play say characters in the Steppe or Subsaharan Africa and the systems will work. But it also creates a very generic world where playing a Steppe Pagan feels just like playing a Feudal Latin, except with lots of free CBs. PittTheElder fucked around with this message at 13:52 on Dec 2, 2021 |
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Dec 2, 2021 13:48
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PittTheElder posted:Well talking about CK3, the feudalism model is nothing like anything that ever existed in Western Europe; a fully monetized legalistic approach is the exact opposite of what feudalism was even about. Im very ignorant on how feudalism actually worked, can you elaborate more? I know succession laws in the game seems a lot more strict than what we see in movies and shows about that period, but thats about all I know
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Dec 2, 2021 16:51
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PittTheElder posted:CK3 is an interesting case because they've taken a very flexible system to model the whole map. It has advantages in that you can play say characters in the Steppe or Subsaharan Africa and the systems will work. But it also creates a very generic world where playing a Steppe Pagan feels just like playing a Feudal Latin, except with lots of free CBs. This is sort of inevitably the case with paradox games on release, though, the same with Imperator. The focus is on building the underlying systems of the game world, and then the difference between running a country in India and a country in Europe etc etc is developed later on via DLCs. It's just an inevitable consequence of limited labour and time, when trying to model such a large and varied setting. Victoria 3 is probably going to be similar on release - which isn't a complaint, really, it's just pointing out a limitation of this combination of scope + game development approach. The only alternative is to really narrow the scope at the start of the game, like (I think? it's been a while) CK2 did, where you could only play certain countries at launch and then other countries became playable once their gov types/playstyles were developed and released as DLCs. Maybe a different version of Imperator Rome would have just restricted the playable countries to the diadochi + rome + carthage + maurya and built the entire game around playing at that scale, rather than trying to have so much of the map playable. But this kind of goes against the expectations of a paradox game, so 
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Dec 2, 2021 17:29
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Elias_Maluco posted:Im very ignorant on how feudalism actually worked, can you elaborate more? I can't speak too much to it, but from my limited historical reading, one thing that I don't think Crusader Kings as a series has ever captured particularly well is the low level, endemic violence of the Middle Ages. This sounds silly--there's plenty of wars! And there are, all formally declared with a clear casus belli and terms. But a lot of the Middle Ages was a time of raids, of minor strife between neighboring vassals, of robber barons and petty brigands. It was a time where the power of the centralized State was very limited, and it did not have nearly the monopoly on force that Rome or the early modern nations afterwards had. And that's the part I feel like CK as a series has lacked. Yes, there's viking raids, but beyond that, all armed conflict is formal and well-defined in extent. There's little of the raiding, pillaging, etc that was happening at a low level across Europe as armies spread across the land. This might be abstractly represented by supply limits, but that doesn't get across what is actually meant when we talk about an army "foraging" as it marched, for example. Edit: Ironically I think Mount and Blade does a better job on the low level strife aspect, since it shifts the focus on you the player as head of an army with the ability to do that raiding. Edit edit: I think the Hundred Years' War is a great example of something that CK just doesn't simulate well. There was on and off warfare and raids interspersed with a few key battles and many long seiges. A major part of France's troubles came not from the battles (although obviously losing major ones like Agincourt were disastrous) but from the economic devastation levied by raiding. Likewise, the French/Scottish alliance allowed for low level pirate raiding on the English coastline to great effect. Cantorsdust fucked around with this message at 17:49 on Dec 2, 2021 |
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Dec 2, 2021 17:40
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Baronjutter posted:It would also manage to be illegal in China China banning ROTK would be akin to a western government trying to ban King Arthur or the Iliad but worse. Not only is it a cultural cornerstone, it's also super popular.
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Dec 2, 2021 18:46
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Mantis42 posted:I do, those games are mostly mediocre. China is currently doing a pretty huge slapdown on gaming in general and historical gaming in particular; historical dramas are, in the CCP's eye, *too* big a genre. https://www.scmp.com/tech/big-tech/article/3156540/china-vs-video-games-why-beijing-stopped-short-gaming-ban-keeping It's not clear what will and won't be allowed going forward, but two things are pretty clear: 1) Western companies will have a far harder if not impossible time marketing games in China than they already do (most already rely on a domestic partner such as Tencent) 2) Recommending any investment in a game for the Chinese market right now would be really dumb given current instability. Lum_ fucked around with this message at 18:59 on Dec 2, 2021 |
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Dec 2, 2021 18:54
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Lum_ posted:China is currently doing a pretty huge slapdown on gaming in general and historical gaming in particular; historical dramas are, in the CCP's eye, *too* big a genre.
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Dec 2, 2021 18:57
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A Buttery Pastry posted:They're focused a lot on the younger parts of the population, aren't they? Paradox just needs to make the game 18+. Only because Chinese regulators think only minors play video games. Games are already effectively banned for minors; they can by law only be played 3 hours a week (not a typo, 1 hour a day on Fr/Sa/Su) and it's the responsibility of video game companies to enforce this. Lum_ fucked around with this message at 19:02 on Dec 2, 2021 |
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Dec 2, 2021 18:59
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Lum_ posted:Only because Chinese regulators think only minors play video games. Games are already effectively banned for minors; they can by law only be played 3 hours a week (not a typo, 1 hour a day on Fr/Sa/Su) and it's the responsibility of video game companies to enforce this. no, this is not true. online games can only be played 3 hours a week, with a spending limit on in-game purchases, because china is trying to prevent tencent and western companies from extracting money from children via gacha and lootboxes. y'know, the kind of thing that other countries should probably also put restrictions on, but don't because  . this whole "china is cracking down on video games" news trope is based entirely on a misunderstanding of what, exactly, china is doing. they have absolutely no interest in policing offline game playing of any kind, beyond passing new releases through a fairly conservative censorship board.
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Dec 2, 2021 19:29
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Koramei posted:Did the Imperator launch coincide with one of the gamer rage moments against Paradox or am I misremembering? There've been so many now it's hard to keep track but I vaguely recall the launch got tangled up in some stuff. IIRC it was around the same time that they hired noted harasser (and now known-rapist) Zak S to work on a Vampire mobile game. I don't think that affected Imperator much but it may be what you're remembering?
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Dec 2, 2021 19:52
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The PRC does not like accurate depictions of history, and they have weird feelings about people saying anything good about previous Chinas, so odds are low that they'd be okay with a game about trying to accurately depict history. Not that there aren't plenty of people outside PRC control who wouldn't want a game about Chinese history, and other East Asian countries could have good potential markets, just that odds are low on Paradox getting a game past Chinese censors.
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Dec 2, 2021 20:48
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The PRC gives almost 0 shits about anything pre-1911, and the shits they give tend to be "yeah, China rocks, 5000 years of history" more than "Cao Cao? Kublai Khan? sounds like enemies of the state, banned."
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Dec 2, 2021 20:57
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Edgar Allen Ho posted:The PRC gives almost 0 shits about anything pre-1911, and the shits they give tend to be "yeah, China rocks, 5000 years of history" more than "Cao Cao? Kublai Khan? sounds like enemies of the state, banned." they're a bit sensitive about portraying the past as significantly better than today. for example they don't like stories where someone modern is transported from a demoralizing modern life to, say, the han dynasty, where they find love and contentment. but this isn't "official policy" except in that the censorship board releases guidelines to what they do and don't like, and they bitched about those kinds of stories in a recent set of guidelines.
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Dec 2, 2021 21:11
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