Imperator: Rome (Paradox's Next Grand Strategy Title)

Installed and started!
Probably not the best idea what I have stuff to write, but I can't resist giving it a quick spin tonight.

Wish Albania luck in their goal of forming Persia.

 
I'm about halfway through the tutorial but I am enjoying it.

Enjoying it so far, but I am getting very very confused, quite often!

I've only got about 80hrs into EUiv and haven't played it for about a year.
 
Enjoying it so far, I made the mistake of burning through the tutorial, although understanding it, I then went and started as Epirus, and it's a bbbiiiitttt slowwwww...should have started with a larger power or one with more expansion options, I'm kind of boxed in, and the 'building your nation from within' part of the game just isn't there to the extent EUIV is. The game looks beautiful, the map is gorgeous, but some map modes are missing, the ledger needs to return, just niggles so far and the game will improve in leaps and bounds in time, Paradox games always do.

What I'm not enjoying is the sense of 'I don't know what's going on elsewhere' and 'Why is so and so fighting so and so?' - my perception of the world around me and further out isn't as instinctive as it is in EUIV, I love being able to click on a nation's diplomacy and see who their rivals are in EUIV for example. I'm going to continue with Epirus and probably start another campaign elsewhere too, in the meantime back to some dev diaries and vids I think, I feel like i'm missing out on what's happening.

By the way here's a link to a guide someome on the forums made. 280 pages.

Browser:

https://www.docdroid.net/OqXpw5x/imperator-rome-manual-v213-minor-changes-in-chapter-tradesystem.pdf

Download:

https://www.docdroid.net/Xd4m6pc/imperator-rome-manual-v211-coverrework-addedribbon.pdf

Collected stuff on Imperator/Paradox wiki

https://imperator.paradoxwikis.com/Developer_diaries
 
Almost done with the tutorial, enjoying it a lot so far. Very EU4 feel to it, tbh they probably could have called it EU5, looking forward to giving it a proper go over the weekend
 
Last edited:
I'm mostly done with the tutorial and initial impression, I really like it. It feels very slick, looks good and is pretty intuitive so far. As someone else mentioned it is very EU4 as opposed to CK and having never really got into CK a lot of the job, family and relationship stuff is a little opaque right now.

As an example there's a disloyal family person who wants a job as his family feels slighted, ok, cool, made him an admiral... But the job seemingly has no income?

Is there a second tutorial or just the first one? It seems to be explaining the stuff I could probably quite easily grasp but the more confusing stuff I can't really pierce.

As I say though, great first impression and much more impressed than I actually expected to be.
 
It's getting slated somewhat on Steam which is surprising. I know they are usually slow burners. but a lot of complaints say there is stuttering every turn and some can't even get fundamental parts of the game to work. Rushed? I don't see how there can be so many serious issues on Day 1.
 
It has proper UI scaling, hurray! Didn't get to spend much time with CK2 since that lacked it & I changed displays. Gonna get into it soon, just gotta gear up for Roman history immersion after a Witcher universe binge.
 
philstanbridge said:
It's getting slated somewhat on Steam which is surprising. I know they are usually slow burners. but a lot of complaints say there is stuttering every turn and some can't even get fundamental parts of the game to work. Rushed? I don't see how there can be so many serious issues on Day 1.
Click to expand...

I didnt experience any of that at all on my playthrough the tutorial and interesting that not a single person in this thread has reported it either, not that I am surprised, I stopped paying attention to the comments section on Steam a long time ago, seen far too many people spouting nonsense in game comments to give any of it any credence now.
 
It's a bit rough around the edges. I get ridiculous stutter on a pretty high end machine, the tutorial is almost useless due to the minimal amount of features it actually goes through and the UI is horrific. Despite all that though I am enjoying it, it looks amazing and the setting is great. I know it will be imporved a lot in the coming years too as is the Paradox way.
 
Managing your population, moving slaves around etc is an absolute click fest there must be something I'm missing, gonna get rsi at this rate.
 
Clav said:
It's a bit rough around the edges. I get ridiculous stutter on a pretty high end machine, the tutorial is almost useless due to the minimal amount of features it actually goes through and the UI is horrific. Despite all that though I am enjoying it, it looks amazing and the setting is great. I know it will be imporved a lot in the coming years too as is the Paradox way.
Click to expand...

The weird thing is, I experienced no stutter at all and I was only playing it on my work laptop. I see a lot of comments on steam about the UI but I have to say that I think the UI is fine, I've seen way way worse UIs and to me this UI is average, thats all, just average, but a long way from being the universe destroying, stolen my baby, terrible UI that the steam comments suggest. Hell I saw one steam comment where the person had given it a thumbs down because of the era its set in, which only goes to show how worthless those comment sections are because the era has nothing to do with the quality of a game (which is what a review should be based on) and everything to do with personal preference, whats more why the hell did the person buy it if they dont like the era anyway. Ridiculous. I swear with every passing year gamers just like to moan more and more about stuff, minor stuff often, rather than actually rate the game itself.

(The irony that I am moaning about people moaning is not lost on me)
 
First impressions - 7/10
I found it a very enjoyable game for the most part, it could do with some polishing and some options to turn particular features off and there's a few parts of EUIV that I liked better but I also there was also some other things in Imperator that I like more than in EUIV.

Really enjoying the game so far, the graphics are quite nice compared to EUIV and I like the most in the selection of overlays they picked for viewing the map, I think EUIV had a better trade view but hopefully they'll patch that or improve it in an expansion.

Absolutely love that they've launched it with the UI scaling turned on because that is a major quality of life option for me playing on an ultrawide resolution.

I skipped the tutorial and dove straight in because I'm a mad man and enjoy the challenge of having to work things out myself. I'd say it took me about 20 minutes of looking at all of the various windows to work out which ones I needed to focus on for the early part of the game. I think having chosen to start as Albania does mean I'm going to have a relatively slow start but will have less stuff to worry about because there's only the 7 nations around me to really focus on.

Almost immediately started a war within the first year of the game against Legia and Siracia, having Iberia and Atropatene on my side.
The war almost went horribly wrong right off the bat when I got a random event that nuked the morale of my armies, thankfully Iberia acted as a good buffer for the first year of the war to allow me to recover and start laying siege to Legia's territory. By year 3 of the war (approximately 50 minutes playing on speed 3 with a few pauses to think about tactics) things were going really well and Legia called for peace offering the chunk of their region that I had fabricated claim on.

Well chuffed that I won my first war without having done the tutorial!

I like that when you claim a province you get the associated land that is linked to it as part of the region and I like that Aggressive Expansion appears to now be more of an internal thing.
I also like how you've got the people within your nation to keep happy, it's a really good improvement over how they had the 3 groups in EUIV to keep happy as it feels like it has a bit more of a personal touch with them having their families... haven't fully explored how much you can interact with a character's family, hopefully you can use them to force them to act certain ways.

Having done a few battles in the war and going through the peace process (not too dissimilar to EUIV's), I think EUIV did a much better job of displaying how the battles were going when you click on an ongoing battle. I'm also not keen on the little icon that appears when you're about to land in a province where a fight will happen (the one that indicates whether you're likely to have a victory or defeat) and would really like to turn that feature off... I'd rather make a judgement myself on how my forces are going to do by looking at my units and the enemy's units than having a little icon immediately tell me if I'm likely to win/lose a fight.

Edit: I may do a more thorough review after a week of playing.


philstanbridge said:
It's getting slated somewhat on Steam which is surprising. I know they are usually slow burners. but a lot of complaints say there is stuttering every turn and some can't even get fundamental parts of the game to work. Rushed? I don't see how there can be so many serious issues on Day 1.
Click to expand...
I was playing for 2 hours on my 3440x1440 ultrawide with everything maxed out and have experienced absolutely no issues with stuttering or anything not working within the game - though I'm playing a bit over towards the east of the map and not in the cluster of hundreds of nations in central Europe.

They released a patch a couple of hours after launch (noticed it installing after I closed the game) so there's obviously some initial bugs that they're aware of and are sorting out.
Not sure why some people are having such major issues when others aren't though.
 
Last edited:
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom