Imperator Rome: Rome wasn't patched in a day!

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Video Games > Imperator Rome: Rome wasn't patched in a day!

Fuligin: Oct 27, 2010; wait what the fuck??

canepazzo posted:

Can someone explain families to me? Why do I want them happy? Why would I want to collect more families from my conquests?

haven't got a chance to play yet, but from streams i believe the idea is that you can use them to administrate same culture/religion areas for less tension with the locals

# ¿ Apr 25, 2019 22:13

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# ¿ May 15, 2024 08:49

Fuligin: Oct 27, 2010; wait what the fuck??

I haven't formed a solid opinion on gameplay yet, but the UI is a weird combination of extremely good ideas with some puzzling choices. Icons bunching up over each other is an issue.
The event art is really reminiscent of Osprey which I like.

I guess in general the design feels very 'euro boardgame' if that makes sense

# ¿ Apr 25, 2019 23:28

Fuligin: Oct 27, 2010; wait what the fuck??

Huh, my armies have stopped reinforcing, despite plenty of manpower and being stationed in my territory.

e; lost my connection to iron

Fuligin fucked around with this message at 01:33 on Apr 26, 2019

# ¿ Apr 26, 2019 01:30

Fuligin: Oct 27, 2010; wait what the fuck??

Drone posted:

Switched over to Egypt for a bit. Wasn't there supposed to be some kind of event or something (is it on Ptolemy's death?) that pops up giving you the option to change your ruler to Egyptian culture and Kemetic religion?

You'll get an event to embrace the cult of Serapis, which lowers the penalty for religious unity I think? Or you can just convert to Kemetic but that will piss all your nobles off

# ¿ Apr 26, 2019 08:54

Fuligin: Oct 27, 2010; wait what the fuck??

i'm having a lot of fun tbh. I played like two hours as Egypt which taught me most of the systems but was so easy i couldn't gently caress up. I started again as scordisci in hungary and it's a lot more dicey and interesting.

# ¿ Apr 26, 2019 09:41

Fuligin: Oct 27, 2010; wait what the fuck??

Taear posted:

It's a real shame that you can't form Hibernia. As a Gaulish country I've got loads of extras to do, but nothing as them. Although "form Galatia" is an option for me and it involves....a shitload of places in Anatolia. I guess that's the name of the Celtic Iberian thing.
I wonder why that's in it, but not Hibernia??

hibernia wasn't a real polity. Not saying it wouldn't make a good formable, but that's the difference

# ¿ Apr 26, 2019 18:19

Fuligin: Oct 27, 2010; wait what the fuck??

one thing that's mildly annoying me is that i'm getting no achievements on ironman. I have one mod that claims to be compatible, but even if that's wrong the game itself had no warning on the start screen

# ¿ Apr 26, 2019 19:14

Fuligin: Oct 27, 2010; wait what the fuck??

KOGAHAZAN!! posted:

I feel like, even though it's just out of scope, the game should be able to handle Alexander's conquests.

That would be my design target: make that work. Which I think means conquest should be even easier?

Blobs are definitely far too stable, though. The Maurya in particular are absurdly resilient, which I think is a consequence of culture penalties being almost the only serious source of interior frictions and their culture group covering the entirety of northern India.

e:

They made a lot, prerelease, about there being a major overhaul of their core engine tech in this game, which I think may be a factor- if their codebase has changed sufficiently that a lot of this stuff had to be rebuilt from scratch then it's no wonder that we're missing most of the QoL features we've become accustomed to.

maurya has exploded in all my games thus far

# ¿ Apr 28, 2019 00:36

Fuligin: Oct 27, 2010; wait what the fuck??

CharlestheHammer posted:

I mean it fell apart because Alexander made literally no attempt to keep it together.

Alexander fell apart for the same reason a lot of kingdoms fell apart. No succession plan leads to civil war. It�s not special.

I dunno where you're getting that impression. Alexander absolutely intended for his empire to hold together after death and made preparations for it; hence founding all those Alexandrias, encouraging intermarriage between Persians and Macedonians, etc. It was the speed of his death and the fact that Roxanna hadn't yet given birth that set the stage for the Diadochi to tear themselves to pieces.

Not trying to jump on you, people just take the "Alexander was a brash hothead who couldn't think beyond his next conquest" thing a little far

KOGAHAZAN!! posted:

"Make it work" purely in the the sense of "yeah you can take all that land at once". The peace system is not set up for that, at current.

I'd rather see soft limits on the scale of conquest via economic and logistic constraints and a more complications in consolidating and administrating these massive empires than the hard limits of the warscore system, is what I'm saying.

yeah hard agree with this. This is like, the era of map painting.

# ¿ Apr 28, 2019 00:58

Fuligin: Oct 27, 2010; wait what the fuck??

CharlestheHammer posted:

Literally none of those things matter to keep the empire together. It�s not like his empire fell back to the natives or old dynasties. Post Alexander was still ruled by Greeks, just many Greeks instead of one.

I think I'm just failing to understand your thesis here. 'Multiple feuding kingdoms ruled by Macedonian elites' is pretty qualitatively different than 'united empire ruled by one Macedonian royal house.'

# ¿ Apr 28, 2019 01:12

Fuligin: Oct 27, 2010; wait what the fuck??

CharlestheHammer posted:

My point is that his empire really didn�t fall apart do to size or cultural differences. It fell apart the same reason a lot of kingdoms fell apart, with no succession plan the generals stepped into the void.

The intial argument was that Alexander�s kingdom fell apart because of how big it got and how quickly it happened. I don�t think that is particularly true

Ahhh okay, then I agree with you

# ¿ Apr 28, 2019 01:19

Fuligin: Oct 27, 2010; wait what the fuck??

Autism Sneaks posted:

has anyone seen the AI use a tactic besides the default Shock yet? I haven't and so building my armies around Bottleneck/Phalanx has helped me dunk on Greeks

i've seen skirmish and bottleneck as well

gonna hop on the 'good feels' train, I'm having a lot of fun so far. I just popped a civil war in my Syracuse -> Magna Graecia game after my surgeon (whose loyalty I hadn't checked) gave my primary heir brain damage. Unfortunately his younger brother was a war hero and Olympic victor, and after their father died things got hairy fast

Fuligin fucked around with this message at 20:22 on Apr 28, 2019

# ¿ Apr 28, 2019 20:18

Fuligin: Oct 27, 2010; wait what the fuck??

Chomp8645 posted:

I want to know why a character having, say, dementia doesn't seem to hinder their election to Consul. Like it's one thing if they develop it while in office, but my Senate just seems to love this old, dementia-riddled baffoon and they elected him while he already had it.

Actually that makes me realize I have no idea what, if anything, affects the "likely to be next Consul" status. Is it basically just random or can you affect it somehow?

tbf electing decrepit septuagenarians to office is very roman

# ¿ Apr 28, 2019 22:25

Fuligin: Oct 27, 2010; wait what the fuck??

Zane posted:

the portraits for this game are really great. they're diverse as heck and pull more than their weight in adding characterization.

yeah they did a good rear end job. They're also pretty diverse in terms of clothing and hair style across cultures. Armenian nobility looks fly af

# ¿ Apr 29, 2019 07:57

Fuligin: Oct 27, 2010; wait what the fuck??

CharlestheHammer posted:

People would be insanely annoyed if tech was random

If it was properly weighted and came at roughly the same rapid pace it does now, maybe not. I like inventions as A Thing but it does get tiresome having to make that choice every other minute or so if you're playing a nation with decent research and civics income

# ¿ Apr 30, 2019 22:06

Fuligin: Oct 27, 2010; wait what the fuck??

steinrokkan posted:

Why did they release this broken garbage game if they already knew everything had to be reworked to be even borderline acceptable?

possibly maybe you are exaggerating slightly

# ¿ May 1, 2019 01:05

Fuligin: Oct 27, 2010; wait what the fuck??

Sydin posted:

I mean the game is pretty bad in it's current state and very clearly unfinished so

I mean, I think it's pretty good and there's definitely others who have been enjoying it in this thread. Calling it unfinished is just dumb. It's got some rough edges, but this is not a launch Stellaris situation

Obviously there are people who are much cooler on it though, which is also fine!

# ¿ May 1, 2019 01:28

Fuligin: Oct 27, 2010; wait what the fuck??

Descar posted:

Since you can't have governors local troops in your capital province, Ironic enough it's the capital region that has the most unrest.
Nice one paradox.

I mean... that sounds about right

# ¿ May 2, 2019 19:58

Fuligin: Oct 27, 2010; wait what the fuck??

Random stoned Paradox thought: March of the Eagles should be remade in imperator

# ¿ May 3, 2019 22:32

Fuligin: Oct 27, 2010; wait what the fuck??

Syrakuse gets decisions to form sicily ir magna graecia

# ¿ May 4, 2019 03:37

Fuligin: Oct 27, 2010; wait what the fuck??

Taear posted:

The game is actually on "Mostly Negative" on Steam at the moment which is something I've never actually seen before.

lol drat. Hopefully this means the patching will come thick and fast

# ¿ May 4, 2019 20:56

Fuligin: Oct 27, 2010; wait what the fuck??

I'm just getting a lot of joy out of watching the paradox forum melt down tbh

# ¿ May 5, 2019 03:06

Fuligin: Oct 27, 2010; wait what the fuck??

PederP posted:

Which is almost the exact same thing Johan said in one of the first community interactions after the post-release backlash. What's the difference between nation A and nation B in EU? If you approach it from the perspective of min/max'ing map-painter - not that much. If you approach it from a number of other playstyle - quite a bit.

In EU4 you will engage with mechanics that have a strong coupling with history. Portugal will focus on colonization, trade, building a powerful fleet, explorers, conquistadors, north african expansion. Austria will focus on HRE dominance, a land army, territorial continental expansion, handling unions/inheritances, etc. In I:R Epirus and Bosporus will raise the biggest army they can, gobble up weak neighbors when possible and spend mana on the same things. Colonization is the only real difference, and it's a very awkward mechanic. At the end of the day constant territorial conquest is the only interesting thing to do. If you don't expand you'll get bored and/or wiped off the map.

Sure, EU4 and Rome both have different geopolitics for nations, but the mechanics you interact with, vary from nation to nation in EU4. Rome feels samey to players who focus on mechanics more than geopolitics.

Buildings in Rome are a good example. There are 4 buildings with very distinct mechanics, but they are also very abstract and generic. Some players want baths, coliseums, aqueducts. To the design team this probably seems redundant, bloated and inelegant. The buildings are already good at varying stages of the game, so present a sufficient strategic choice. Adding more buildings, making the effects culture-unique, complicating the system - all take away from the strategic impact and balance of buildings.

The design team starts from a mechanical base and applies flavor on top. But many players want to see mechanics derived from flavor. On top of that there is a very striking lack of mechanics that limit the expansion potential of a nation. Germanics and Celts can easily reach high tech and civilization levels. Any culture/religion can be map-painted at equal cost. Balance is heavily favored over flavor.

The inability to understand that a grand strategy game can be more than a puzzle and an optimization challenge to paint as much map as possible seems to be the very core of why many players (and apparently Paradox staff) are genuinely baffled by the poor reception.

This whole situation reminds me of the old Games Workshop game, Epic: Armageddon. The designers were so proud - it was an incredibly elegant game design, and it was well balanced. But it was poorly received - many wanted back the clunky, but charming and flavorful mechanics and army lists, from the old Epic games. A lot of gamers don't want a streamlined, elegant and balanced game. They want whacky, unabalanced, clunky and diverse games.

Stellaris has a bootload of really horrible perks and numerous ways to gimp your empire, but it has a variety. Crusader Kings 2 is a glorious mess of mechanics, options and interactions. A lot could be abstracted and steamlined, but the unnecessary gunk is part of the charm.

i appreciate the epic armageddon deep cut, but for the record it was great

# ¿ May 22, 2019 10:05

Fuligin: Oct 27, 2010; wait what the fuck??

there's quite a few bugs in the beta (weird huh), but the qol changes are appreciated.

# ¿ Jun 21, 2019 06:49

Fuligin: Oct 27, 2010; wait what the fuck??

They broke warscore from battles, it's making big wars a huge drag

# ¿ Jun 27, 2019 03:53

Fuligin: Oct 27, 2010; wait what the fuck??

I've put in maybe 5 or 6 hours with the patch and I'm enjoying it a lot, but the warscore stuff is just too annoying and actually ends up distorting a lot of the game. If it gets hotfixed before Paradox heads to summer break then I'll probably put a lot more time in. If not, then uhh lol i guess

# ¿ Jun 27, 2019 19:57

Fuligin: Oct 27, 2010; wait what the fuck??

So! Re: warscore buggery, turns out this is a very simple fix for players. If you go into defines and change... 'battle_scale' or something like that from 0.02 to a higher number (I settled on 2.0, which I assume was the intended value), it works pretty well! this has actually made Pompey playable for me and the world is more interesting and dynamic as well. I've been having a fun campaign trying out the new internal management stuff as thrake, would recommend

# ¿ Jun 28, 2019 19:59

Fuligin: Oct 27, 2010; wait what the fuck??

i expect the september mana patch will be the hyped up real 'relaunch'. pompey is more like... just getting the game into a much more playable state. I'm having a lot of fun with it right now at least, having fixed the warscore poo poo

# ¿ Jun 29, 2019 06:15

Fuligin: Oct 27, 2010; wait what the fuck??

There are at least two new mystery resources to replace mana, at least one of which is probably gping to be "gov. Influence," whatever that is. I'm excited though! Pompey is a lot of fun, I'm eager to see what imperator will become with more polish and a stronger focus on ~~simulation~~

# ¿ Jul 2, 2019 03:33

Fuligin: Oct 27, 2010; wait what the fuck??

Tbh pompey is pretty fun and solid right now. Makes sense to beta cicero early, given it changes everything and will inevitably require a ton of rebalancing and they only have like two months, one of which is vacation time

Imperator is already better than stellaris as an actual strategy game imo

# ¿ Jul 4, 2019 20:22

Fuligin: Oct 27, 2010; wait what the fuck??

Senor Dog posted:

why do they only have two months?

I think sometime in september was planned for cicero in the roadmap. I may be misremembering

# ¿ Jul 4, 2019 22:34

Fuligin: Oct 27, 2010; wait what the fuck??

appropriatemetaphor posted:

The "new mana" symbols in the beta are just placeholders yeah? Like how all the buildings have that Circle/Triangle/Square thing.

Ja. There's a mod that replaces them, would recommend

# ¿ Jul 13, 2019 20:21

Fuligin: Oct 27, 2010; wait what the fuck??

Rome's rise to hegemony was neither preordained nor a cakewalk, they got their asses kicked on many occasions and frequently took horrendous casualties. So yea they shouldnt have a greased slide into power

# ¿ Jul 24, 2019 19:18

Fuligin: Oct 27, 2010; wait what the fuck??

TorakFade posted:

does it have proper icons, or everything is still using the same placeholder icon making it impossible to understand what currency you're actually spending?

Just use the workshop mod, 1.2 Icons or something.

I really, really like what I've played of the new food/city update fwiw, game finally feels like it's own beast

# ¿ Aug 9, 2019 23:44

Fuligin: Oct 27, 2010; wait what the fuck??

Magissima posted:

Feels like I've kind hit a civilization wall as a settled tribe. I maxed out centralization, which puts my civilization at 30%, but to change government types I need 50% civ in my capital. Afaict the only way to get it higher is to encourage urban development in my capital, which is one point every two years, and to improve my technology, which will take decades with the tiny number of inefficient citizens I have, even with the citizen output omen. Am I missing some other way to boost civilization?

Maybe a government interaction, or laws? I dunno the tribal ones.

# ¿ Aug 11, 2019 21:48

Fuligin: Oct 27, 2010; wait what the fuck??

KOGAHAZAN!! posted:

I've been playing games on the beta patch and, unless they're tweaking it going forward, the Hellenisation is actually faster and more total, because it's always on now rather than only happening when the AI governor selects the assimilation policy at random.

this has been the opposite of my experience

# ¿ Aug 13, 2019 19:16

Fuligin: Oct 27, 2010; wait what the fuck??

Tomorrow, although the beta opt-in might actually be the same as the release candidate, they aren't clear

# ¿ Sep 23, 2019 18:59

Fuligin: Oct 27, 2010; wait what the fuck??

Drone posted:

Ah, derp.

Okay, so I'm sitting at 100% centralization with a +35% maximum civilization level with Menapia in AUC 485 (god I hate this loving calendar they chose). Seems like my main bottleneck now in order to become non-tribal is that maximum civilization level, which I can only raise via research at this point (I already took Rights of Birth). However it seems like my pops refuse to promote into citizens, which I desperately need in order to fix my 8% research efficiency. Despite having all of my provinces on the "Social Mobility" governor policy for what feels like ages, none of my pops are currently promoting to civs. In fact, most of them are showing as demoting to Slaves.

Do tribesmen need to be demoted to slaves before they are then eligible for promotion into freemen, and then citizens?

Might be the ideal pop fraction in your provinces screwing you over? If that's the case then you want to build more... well I can't remember which building, but the one that gives +citizen fraction

^^agreed that monarchies are more fun to play right now. The constantly changing leaders in republics are kind of a pain in the rear end. I think if their terms were longer, and could be extended via tyranny (which already might be in, it's been a minute), and the party effects were stronger or otherwise significant, that would help a bit.

Fuligin fucked around with this message at 02:28 on Sep 26, 2019

# ¿ Sep 26, 2019 02:25

Fuligin: Oct 27, 2010; wait what the fuck??

ilitarist posted:

Perhaps that culture thing would work better if pops had, so to say, original and "tolerated" culture or something. E.g. those Greeks you conquer as rome gradually become labeled "Roman Greeks" and for mosrt intents are considered Roman (maybe not as good at providing manpower or something). But if they were reconquered by any Greek power or rebel they are as Greek as any Greeks. Probably slowly lose Romanness on their own. What do you think of this idea?

This wouldn't make much sense with religion so maybe those poos should instead eventually get something like "integrated" status, and you get this faster with right policy or if culture or religion was right in the first place.

steal a page from how some of the religions end up working in EUIV (I think Tengri, Confucian, Fetishist?) and let ruling cultures choose to syncretize, dominate, or tolerate others within their territory on a case by case basis ching chong bing bong so simple

# ¿ Sep 26, 2019 22:59

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# ¿ May 15, 2024 08:49

Fuligin: Oct 27, 2010; wait what the fuck??

TorakFade posted:

I got an Arverni game off the ground, and the problem you get is the same you used to get before: once you become a regional power, you "lose" defensive leagues and alliances and everybody pounces on you as soon as you dare declare war on someone else, and being a relatively dirt poor tribe and completely surrounded by others, you can't really fight off everybody else combined. Which might make for fine gameplay, I guess, if you like that feeling of "oh I just lost half of what I worked to get, let's build back up again", but I really don't

Also there's some fuckery going on with clan retinues, I had a few "warhost" armies that used to be clan retinues, but then the clan leader died and half the cohorts became "mine" while half remained "clan retinues", also I am 100% sure I had an army with 6 heavy infantry (because I used it to win the first wars with neighbours) and 20 years later, I had a grand total of 2 heavy infantry between all my armies, and I have no idea where the other 4 HI ended up.

So eh, I tried a game as Knossos and after you unite the island (which takes about 10 years) you really have to enjoy waiting. Everybody is either guaranteed by Phrygia, Macedon or in a defensive league with 9-10 other nations and contrary to EU4, countries are willing to join defensive wars even if they're fully occupied and with high war exhaustion (and both Phrygia and Macedon have been super stable, actually expanding, for 100+ years), I managed to snipe a couple settlements from Rhodos thanks to their being in a defensive league with Halikarnassos which was not guaranteed by any big dog, but when I got around to it everybody had so much money that they just hired 80k mercs and plopped them on their capitals, so I could only get the undefended small island which is part of Crete province, and Halikarnassos' capital (because for some reason they could not send the mercs there)

Anyway, now I think I'd try an England game - what's the best nation to pick there? I'm guessing somebody near the coast or some kind of bottleneck so you don't have to worry being attacked from all directions like it happens with the Arverni...

Iceni have unique heritage, let you employ women as generals, and are camped out in the middle of a swamp. I had fun, anyway

# ¿ Oct 8, 2019 07:37

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