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

Panos said:
I found the tutorial kinda frustrating, and that from someone with hundrends of hours in EU4 and CK2.
But I wasn't put off. Took a break, and went back to the game 4h later. By that time was 12:30 am. Suddenly was 6:30am :D

Haven't played much today as is Good Friday and had a lot of things to do. However after Easter Sunday, I will take it properly.

Here is progress with the Irish tribe after 7h on my first game. (still learning things).
Most of it is colonization, and 2 brief wars. Pushing atm to hit civilization level 50 on the capital to become monarchy.
However to do that need around 100-120 pops, to make the marketplace buildings to raise the capital civilization limit to 50. (35 atm)
It all will depend if need to build second granary to feed the population or not.


oTXKsCQ.jpg


General thoughts. The game runs great on both my systems.
PC 8600K (stock speeds) and Vega 64 (Standard Mode)
Laptop 6700HQ and 1060 6GB. Mind though there is some of the stuttering everyone talks about if I set the map mesh mode to 4K with the laptop only. Feels more like Nvidia drivers issue than game issue.

Looking forward for the 1.1 patch next month, as it incorporates the last 2 months worth of features development, that didn't made it to the game due to bugs.

Imho feels like EU4 on release day :D and far far better than CIV6 release or god forbit Total War Rome 2.


FYI I would take some complainers at the official forum with some salt.
There are people trying to play it with AMD A9 and A10s on laptops which they claim are "new".
However AMD A9/10 are bellow minimum spec.
Click to expand...



It runs fine on my old 2500k based system. The people at the forum will whine and cry about anything and everything tbh, the hissy fits thrown over there not being two consuls, which from a gaming standpoint is a negligible feaure, had to be seen to be believed.

It's light years better than Rome 2 at launch, I'm enjoying the game but it's also light years away from where EUIV is now, and that's to be expected, tbh it does feel like a starting point, it's a bit empty and it needs more meat on its bones. This is my first Paradox game where I've been in at launch and i'd happily give it 6 out of 10 on my first few hours of gameplay.
 
Darujhistan said:
It runs fine on my old 2500k based system. The people at the forum will whine and cry about anything and everything tbh, the hissy fits thrown over there not being two consuls, which from a gaming standpoint is a negligible feaure, had to be seen to be believed.

It's light years better than Rome 2 at launch, I'm enjoying the game but it's also light years away from where EUIV is now, and that's to be expected, tbh it does feel like a starting point, it's a bit empty and it needs more meat on its bones. This is my first Paradox game where I've been in at launch and i'd happily give it 6 out of 10 on my first few hours of gameplay.
Click to expand...

If you pick the CK2 or EU4 demos (Steam) you will see how those two games were on release.

Fast forward 7 and 6 years respectively, even without any DLC just the free patches, are completely different games.

Personally needs 3 things. The "2 DLCs" from CK2. Conclave & Way of Life in addition to character finder like CK2 has.
Preferably the tribal families be more "frisky" also, as takes couple of civil wars and cannot fill half the government and research slots.

However as Johan said today, this version of the game is the same we saw almost 3 months ago at first Dev Clash. Last 3 months just fixed the bugs etc.
There is a new 1.1 version coming next month, with 3 months worth of new features and improvements. (hot fix 1.0.1 is out next week)

I played Stellaris on launch day, and was more shallow and empty than Imperator is. Yet clocked hundrends of hours.
Funny thing, and especially post patch 2.0, is completely different game today.
 
Well I completed the tutorial and considering the game is called Rome I went Rome on my first try.

Ultra aggressive and pretty fast I have all of southern Italy (apart from the tip of the boot held by Syracuse) either owned or as a feeder state I can chew up as the passes. Took a few territories to the north and just rebuilding my manpower after nearly 10 years of constant war (had 300 manpower left of 102k at the end of the last war :D) before pushing north. Integrating a few of my smaller vassals as well before the push as I dont want too many vassals at one time.

Trading a lot more now and income is pretty insane, as expected Rome are pretty OP so going to push hard and be aggressive early before having to worry about the likes of Carthage, Egypt or Macedon.
 
No1newts said:
Well I completed the tutorial and considering the game is called Rome I went Rome on my first try.

Ultra aggressive and pretty fast I have all of southern Italy (apart from the tip of the boot held by Syracuse) either owned or as a feeder state I can chew up as the passes. Took a few territories to the north and just rebuilding my manpower after nearly 10 years of constant war (had 300 manpower left of 102k at the end of the last war :D) before pushing north. Integrating a few of my smaller vassals as well before the push as I dont want too many vassals at one time.

Trading a lot more now and income is pretty insane, as expected Rome are pretty OP so going to push hard and be aggressive early before having to worry about the likes of Carthage, Egypt or Macedon.
Click to expand...


Yeah they are OP (but then again historically, it's pretty accurate), i'm not going half as fast as I could do.
 
Panos said:
If you pick the CK2 or EU4 demos (Steam) you will see how those two games were on release.

Fast forward 7 and 6 years respectively, even without any DLC just the free patches, are completely different games.

Personally needs 3 things. The "2 DLCs" from CK2. Conclave & Way of Life in addition to character finder like CK2 has.
Preferably the tribal families be more "frisky" also, as takes couple of civil wars and cannot fill half the government and research slots.

However as Johan said today, this version of the game is the same we saw almost 3 months ago at first Dev Clash. Last 3 months just fixed the bugs etc.
There is a new 1.1 version coming next month, with 3 months worth of new features and improvements. (hot fix 1.0.1 is out next week)

I played Stellaris on launch day, and was more shallow and empty than Imperator is. Yet clocked hundrends of hours.
Funny thing, and especially post patch 2.0, is completely different game today.
Click to expand...


Yeah, carachter finder, ledger, better UI and I'd like a UI that reflects the culture/region/religion etc, not just the flat white background, mission tree I really miss that from EUIV, buildings are nowhere near good enough, maybe 12 cities in a province and 4 building options? Just no.

DLC's will come no doubt that, I don't mind paying for them, because let's say I've spent over £120 on EUIV, that's for 2.7K hours, now compare with spending £50 on Anthem a repetitive, featureless desert with a roadmap they just made up to placate the fanbase with...
 
Got about 20 hours in this so far, so my thoughts are as follows on various things;

People are whining about the game not being in-depth yet, but the game is what I was expecting a new Paradox title to be, a good starting point which needs the input of people actually playing the game to see what to improve. I picked up Rome:TW2 on release and hardly played it, this is a more interesting title on release for me.

For the record I am happy with the game and I have been enjoying playing it. :cool:

I like the addition of the extra unit types over the previous games, gives you a bit more of a tactical decision to make on what units to field. The new tactics options seem good too.

I don't like the lack of an easy way to build to an army template, if I want to build a new stack it's a lot of clicking.

The new automated armies thing is quite cool, but they also act like idiots. I was trying to use a bunch of armies a bit like a mini vassal swarm, but the AI isn't amazing.

They probably need to rework the mercs, by the end of the game you have these huge merc stacks cluttering up the map making it almost hard to see what is and isn't mercs.

Diplomacy is certainly too shallow, I didn't much like having to individually fabricate claims like in EU4, but the diplomats felt like they had a purpose.

Building up provinces feels lacking compared to even EU4 or CK2. The new building types only being useful for the specific pop types that are present is not the right approach I think. Maybe buildings should work apart from pops and have their own bonuses to prevent stacking pops in one place being the meta. Maybe higher pop counts should give access to better buildings, and in some combination with "civ level" allow you to build better things, but that pop count should cap off at something sensible.

Both of the above (Diplomacy and Buildings) mean that when not at war the game is not as interesting, as you don't have as much to work on/do outside of warring people.

Moving pops around is both a pain, and also expensive, if you need to move pops you will not be making many technological advancements without spending cash to get more civic power. Additionally you can only move one pop at a time, and the list of places to move to seems to be ordered by random, so it changes order almost on the fly.

For tech advancements, I don't mind the system they use, but I would often wind up with just a lot of bad choices for new techs, and some of those would even be repeats in the same category. From what I could see you get 3 choices from each of the 4 categories, but sometimes 2 of those choices would just be the same thing I don't want!

Having all of the enslaved pops going to the capital is both fun and insane, by end game my Rome had about 900 slave pops. Rome was "starving" pretty much all game long as my pop growth was negative in Rome.

Navy combat probably needs some development as it's dumbed down even from EU4. Naval transport is weird too I couldn't see a way to embark an army on a docked fleet, I could only move the fleet out into the sea tile, then move the unit onto the fleet. For undocking I could land on a port though. Without trade ships the naval side feels a little simple.

Very happy with the map in general and the art style, not used all of the map modes yet, might be some missing that I haven't picked up on yet, notably I could not find one that would show me my claims.

Late game is horrendously slow on the autosaves in Ironman. My save file for my Rome game was 60MB big, and it would take about 15-20 seconds just to save every 3 months.

I had quite a few problems with provinces that weren't loyal, but it wasn't really clear how to influence making them loyal again. As Rome I basically had to fight half my country on 2-3 occasions as I went over 20% disloyal pops in provinces. Would definitely like to see some way to identify this as a problem before it becomes one.

There are other things but i'm sure Paradox are already working on re-balancing some things, and addressing others.
 
@HungryHippos that's a lot of the same thoughts I've had, the happiness thing is a little weird and seems to be unable to be influenced beyond very, very basics measures like omens. It's almost TW esque in its simplicity that you just need to let them rebel and crush them every so often to keep them in line.

I still can't work out transporting troops by ship, not sure what the heck to do it's just weird and if it's possible it's very unintuitive.

I would agree with a lot of the general improvements you mentioned one I think is missing for Rome (not sure on how it plays out with other factions) is more and better ways to interact with characters and especially the factions in the capital. If you want them onside you have two choices, befriend leader or make your consul even more popular. Should be more duplicity involved like assassinations, sponsoring junior members to get them to take over and back you, straight up bribes or favours for short term backing.


None of the above is game breaking for me and as others have mentioned I fully expect and believe Paradox to be **** hot on expanding the game and adding more depth as they do.
 
To put people into ships I worked it out, it's a bit like CK2.

You need more ships than you have army to transport, for example your army is 20K in size, you'll need more than 20 ships in one stack (select ships > G key to group them).

Then you put your ships into the adjacent sea tile off the coast from where your army is.

You can now move your units onto the ships the same way you move between cities.

Once on the ships you just move the ships about to transport them, you can then do the opposite to offload them, i.e. move off an adjacent sea tile back onto land. The ships can also be redocked at a friendly port which dumps the units back on that land tile.

Hopefully makes sense?
 
Last edited:
Yeah that makes sense, I was trying to work it out like EU4 so I had a fleet of 14 and army of 20 and I just thought it would take 14 and leave the rest standing, now I know I have to be more specific :p
 
HungryHippos said:
You need more ships than you have army to transport, for example your army is 20K in size, you'll need more than 20 ships in one stack (select ships > G key to group them).
Click to expand...

Unless you have some odd modifier I haven't seen yet you should only need an equal number of ships per army 1 thousand, 20k troop will go into 20 ships.
 
I was doing well as Knossos, formed create and broke into North Africa. Got a little cheeky and ended up in a war with a country (Macedonia?) and I got annihilated!

Time to restart.
 
Anyone know a way of speeding up manoiwer recovery? Sitting on 1k recovering 470 a month and whilst I don't want to wait until 111k max out and I need a pretty substantial number.

Got loads of gold, nothing to do with it and just waiting staring at the screen :p
 
No1newts said:
Anyone know a way of speeding up manoiwer recovery? Sitting on 1k recovering 470 a month and whilst I don't want to wait until 111k max out and I need a pretty substantial number.

Got loads of gold, nothing to do with it and just waiting staring at the screen :p
Click to expand...

To get your normal manpower higher I think you need more freemen on cities with lots of training camps, effectively you need to gear for it.

With lots of cash though you can hire mercs to help you in wars.
 
I've dropped 22 hours on this already :o

Woohoo kicked Carthage completely out of Italy and off the islands as well, expanding down the Slavic coast now and a little into southern France/Switzerland lands. Making a point of capturing lands with natural choke points so I can control the future big wars with a few well placed forts.
 
Last edited:
Been watching Arumbas Youtube series on 'Playing tall with Macedon'. Even if you don't want to play your game 'tall' it still gives a bloody good insight into playing a lot deeper and how things work in relation to each other. I understood a fair bit on my own (like to start off working it out myself) but after watching him, realise there is a massive amount more depth than initially it would seem. Already excited for patches and DLC.

Think I might try focusing a province on one thing, so Capital province will be research, next manpower etc etc
 
dirtybeatfreak said:
Been watching Arumbas Youtube series on 'Playing tall with Macedon'. Even if you don't want to play your game 'tall' it still gives a bloody good insight into playing a lot deeper and how things work in relation to each other. I understood a fair bit on my own (like to start off working it out myself) but after watching him, realise there is a massive amount more depth than initially it would seem. Already excited for patches and DLC.

Think I might try focusing a province on one thing, so Capital province will be research, next manpower etc etc
Click to expand...

Going to have a watch as I'm sure there are lots of bits I am missing.
 
dirtybeatfreak said:
Been watching Arumbas Youtube series on 'Playing tall with Macedon'. Even if you don't want to play your game 'tall' it still gives a bloody good insight into playing a lot deeper and how things work in relation to each other. I understood a fair bit on my own (like to start off working it out myself) but after watching him, realise there is a massive amount more depth than initially it would seem. Already excited for patches and DLC.

Think I might try focusing a province on one thing, so Capital province will be research, next manpower etc etc
Click to expand...


This kind of thing needs fleshing out like in EUIV.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom