Imperator: Rome

I like China for CK2 as well, but it's more fitting for that time period for them to be relevant. I just don't want them in Imperator because it'll only detract from the setting.

this is what i hate the most on EU4. once you blob there is no way you will ever lose. rebels are easy. getting money is easy.
fucking game is the weakest of all paradox games

>Recommended Nations
>Nations
this is so fucking stupid

Because blobbing and painting pretty borders are all there is to do in EU4, administering your country is trivial as it is and there's no way to make it interesting as long as your economy/population is based on the amount of Mana invested in each province

i want to make a net of periphery vassals but you can only have a base of 4 diplomatic relationships without paying bird mana to maintain more

Yeah, I don't want Imperator to lose it's identity as a Euro/Middle Eastern Classical Era game. CK2 and EU4 started out as games centered on European conquest and politics, but slowly expanded to pretty much the entire world. And that's fine, more options and all, but it's hard to get excited for a DLC focusing on India or Africa when you never play there

Paradox’s recent games were pretty playable on launch tho. Also they’re arguably the most fun during launch and first couple of patches.

It depends what route they take:

>CK2 style
One or two DLC's a year that have serious additions and changes to the game that are mostly well received, with the exception of one alt-historical DLC where the Romans take the Aeolipile and turn into some steampunk antiquity abomination.

>EUIV style
Balance/QoL patches disguised as DLC every three to six months where they balance the game solely off of Dev Clashes and what the top 0.1% of players do. This along with whatever projects they can tie in to their other games results in pissing everyone off.

>HOI4 style
One DLC every year where they try shoving everything down the pipeline to add more actual depth and fuck it all up somehow.

At first, it was because a lot of the original EU4 map seriously needed provinces outside of Yurop because there was no granularity between cultures and shit. Now, it's because of .

The reason everyone plays the first start date in at least EUIV is because Paradox locked 99% of achievements behind it. There's no reason to try another because unless your getting that one American one, you're just wasting ten hours of your life on something that Paradox puts no effort into playtesting.

Because in EUIV and HOI4, your strength and ability to not be utterly crushed is usually tied into how much land you actually own. The fact that both of them are heavily war oriented (One being about WWII) makes peacetime incredibly boring. You can either:

>Sit twenty years, dev up a couple of provinces, and get murdered by a major power because now they painted you red and you have no allies because your force limit's too low.
>Go ham on all your neighbors, get the same amount of development in six years. Wipe the floor with the other major powers because now you convinced Prussia and the Ottomans to be your best buds.

Simplified, but yeah.

India was a mistake for CK2. China being added at least added a bit of flavor but I have literally never played an Indian faction, and the entire region doesn't even do anything.

I thought they added it as a check to help against Muslims blobbing, but they don't even do that.

>become actually good/great after a year or so of updates and $20 DLCs
Won't happen.

You're forgetting
>Stellaris style
Where they decide to rebuild and restructure the entire fucking game every couple updates

India is fun if you like getting subjugated by the Chinese

>BCE

I hope Sweden gets nuked

>Because in EUIV and HOI4, your strength and ability to not be utterly crushed is usually tied into how much land you actually own

Not entirely true if you play outside of Europe. Playing tall during institutions can get you ahead in miltech by 4-5 and you can easily crush 3-4 times larger armies especially during miltech choke points.

fuck paradox, fucking love and hate them fuck

>he plays tall
Well, these games are about conquest all you need from peacetime is more money and manpower for conquest.

mappainter.exe -load "rome"

>Playing tall during institutions
Pls explain.

this game is going to suck ass. everything in this time period was just empires rising up and conquering everything. that's all the game is going to be. conquer the map as rome, conquer the map as macedonia, conquer the map as persia, and so on.

>with the exception of one alt-historical DLC where the Romans take the Aeolipile and turn into some steampunk antiquity abomination.
What? Which one?

If your country is large as fuck, it takes more time for institutes to spread, and makes you more likely to just buy the rest of the remaining progress once you get 30% spread. Of course, if you're a small shit like Ulm, it basically costs nothing

It's the same thing with HOI4 desu
Last DLC was to remake war on the sea, and the one before was to remake war in the air.

The REAL question is: do you play as a character or a nation?
Because if it's the latter, then it's going to be yet another boring as fuck blobbing simulator

If you get an institution to spawn in your country outside Europe many of the major players will be seriously gimped in tech potential.

That's true, but having cannons/shock damage isn't going to save you from Ming/Ottomans if you're an OPM with no friends.

You save and dump all your mana into some grassy place and discover how to make books and shit every fifty or so years. Unless you're an Injun, at which point you have to hope that some Yuropeon plops down right next to your teepee and doesn't immediately want to murder you. They do.

During the first 3 institutions which do not spread to India for example automatically. It's viable strategy to develop the institution for yourself and pump up miltech to be way ahead of your neighbours. You can hit way bigger countries than yourself.

It's not optimal but it's pretty fun especially if you're a republic and can develop massively.

do you spend mana on your provinces?

>no new time periods, that's for sure
Are you retarded? Rome was a monarchy, then a republic, and then an empire. There's plenty of content there for DLC

This unless they make it like CK2 and add a lot of public life stuff like philosophy, politics, career ( going through the cursus honorum for example ) etc

A bit of both
You're a nation, but characters actually drive politics in your nation instead of just be mana generators like EU4. Apperantly each nation has a group families you need to balance

Vic2 had playing as nations but cut down on the blobbing (outside of Africa that is). But when you give players fuck all to do internally then of course they’re gonna blob.

Thanks pham

Important reminder that the best title to look for as a grand strategy set in ancient times will be Field of Glory Empires, not Imperator. That said...
I'm pretty sure there'll be thematic DLC (Hellenes, Romans, etc..) and one extending the end date to 300 AD or so.
The Imperator game doesn't look so bad. Paradox quality, even recently, is wildy variable both for titles and DLCs.
For instance, in CK2 Holy Fury is a great one, and Reaper's Due was excellent as well. Monks and Mystics was terrible, though. Stellaris still has no direction to the game and is fundamentally flawed despite two total overhauls, while HoI IV, despite still being inferior to Darkest Hour, it's getting better, especially after Waking the Tiger.

Disregard this, I suck cocks.

not him but what do you do internally in vicky 2 then?

CK2 had a few hiccups, but Holy Fury and Reaper's Due were great. Apperantly there's going to be one more DLC that'll be free apperantly? Adding shit you can build? I don't know, but I don't think it'll fuck the game over if it turns out shit

kill jacobins

>Monks and Mystics was terrible
I like societies. What's wrong with it?

Focus clergy

I agree. Didn't know about the upcoming free DLC though

You mean the grand projects/monuments thing.

It looks alright I suppose. I hope it's just not generic "big church, big fort', because that's all they've shown so far.

>only 4 buildings which are the same for every faction
>only 6 unit types which are the same for every faction

killed any hype I had. Seen so many fanboys saying it will be 'fixed' with mods or DLC. Fuck them.

When it came out it was a clusterfuck of bugs and playing as a Satanist you could literally Kal Was Flam your way to power by incinerating opponents. Too supernatural heavy. And some societies are still OP (assassins, for instance)

Economy mostly, pops, sphere.

Manage taxes and subsidies, build railroads, shill for the party that actually lets you keep the dumbfuck capitalists from building a goddamn clipper shipyard, kill the hundreds of Jacobin revolutionary units for the 3rd time in 20 years, etc.

Yeah but now there's literally no reason to play as satanists, it comes with too many downsides to be worth it.

The reason blobbing was so limited in Vic2 was because the Infamy system was so rigid. Just taking a single state gave you 11 points, and if you went over 25 then all the GPS would gang up on you, and it took a long time for it to go down. Of course, you could just ignore it toward the endgame if you were powerful enough, but by then you probably won't own half the world

It's an awesome Economic Simulator. You can develop and use market forces and demand to crash another's economy, for instance. Or get ruined by anarch bomb throwers.

so in other words it's a good game and I should get into it as my next paradox game?

you join a society on one character, you see everything there is to see. there's basically no reason not to join a monastic order because you just get constant opportunities for good traits, but the price is that you have to go through the same stupid event chains over and over and over again.

VERY broken on release, too supernatural with shit, Secret Religions would take over entire empires, and overall just a very barebones system for societies. It's clear Paradox was expecting modders to really expand on the system, but it took a good while for any good society mods to come out

Now is better, yes.

Guess you didn't pay attention but there are 9 unit types, and a fair few of their recruitment depends on what resources you have/culture you are. Example being you need iron for heavy infantry.

Maybe you should have read more.

What's the end date for the game? A DLC to push that back could be popular if it's early enough.

Manage your economy. People and armies need goods and the supply of those things is based on global production. If your army needs artillery but you can't produce it domestically or buy it from somewhere then your army is going to suck. If pops can't get their luxury goods they get militant and start rebellions. The system as it exists in Vicky 2 has a lot of flaws but it's fun to work with

Vic 2 was awesome, with Pop Of Darkness it's even better. It's slightly harder than recent pdx grand strategy games, so be warned.

30 BC or something

Most of the shit is automated, it’s pretty boring.

I don't know, but I can't imagine it'll include shit like Barbarian Invasions/Rise of Christianity or whatever. Most players don't reach endgame anyway, so I can't imagine a DLC focused on these things, unless they add more start dates

>we want abstractions Johan
No you want mana.
>we want populations Johan
No you want pops mana.
>we want historical Julian calendar
No you want dumbed down countdown mana.
>we want intricate trade, economy, goods production, agriculture
No you want more mana.
>we want religions and cultures and races and their clashes
No you want oratory mana and magic conversion buttons.
>we want patrician families and intrigues and court plots for power
No goyim you get one consul and you will like it.

Attached: 7Zjcf5K.png (1102x651, 914K)

explain to me the mana meme, I've only ever played CK2

6 or 9, so what? When unit types are categorised as 'heavy' and 'light' variants regardless of culture, weapon type or function what's the fucking point? It's a gross simplification that, like the 4 building types uniform across all factions, will only result in a shallow experience at release until they release more 'culture' DLC to flesh out the game.

>make a mana focused strategy
>still no good sequel to Master of Magic
The game has over 25 fucking years

>6 or 9, so what?
>So what if I don't know what i'm talking about?

Here's your (You)

reworking game mechanics that interact with each other is too hard for paradox when they shit out a new dlc every month so everything just uses arbitrary mana points instead

Dominions is more of a risk style game than 4X but it has a lot of the things that MoM had, from what I remember playing a lot more of dominions than MoM

You get stable income of some poorly explained resource like Military or Diplomacy.
They limit all your actions outside of money and you can't do anything (send envoys or construct buildings) without an arbitrary amount of those.
Since they do everything and have no binding in real world, they are called sword/dove/paper mana because using them feels like casting spells in RPG.

Yeah, but I want some control in battles.
Casters fucking up because Rape Demon stands one square away from casting range gets tiring.

It's not as obvious in CK2 because there are only a few rare situations where you actually spend, say, prestige or piety.
PDX games in general prevent you from just getting shit done quickly by having arbitrary timers that you can't overcome. For example you need to take a decision to convert some land, but you 1 stability to take this decision, and to get the stability you need admin points, and the only reliable way to get admin points is to just wait. Now imagine that but with ten different factors you need to wait for before you can be sure you'll win a war and get away with the consequences of it, all because of arbitrary shit like "administrative points" that mean nothing in real world terms.

Eu4 has 3 official manae.
Bird mana for diplomacy, paper mana for administration and sword mana for military.
But when you look at it there are no abstractions anymore of anything, so province population is development mana, moeny is gold mana, troops are merc mana and can be summoned by using merc summon no jutsu that spends gold mana...

everything in PX games since EU4 is based around dumb arbitrary point pools that have no clear analogue to reality, which people call mana to make fun of it. basically everything you do in the games taps into one of your pools, with seemingly no rhyme or reason. IE increasing naval technology requires spending "diplomatic points" which are also used to negotiate peace treaties.

That's fucking hilarious. And yes now I understand.

Gold/Money is magic mana irl.

>30 BC
Yeah, I'm seeing an Imperial-themed DLC coming already. "Pax Romana" or somesuch being the title.

>Now imagine that but with ten different factors you need to wait for before you can be sure you'll win a war and get away with the consequences of it
Sounds pretty deep though. Why do you hate it again?

Fiat money irl is tied to credit, labor, goods, etc.

HE BOUGHT

I just want for them to eventually run out of ideas with DLCs and add something related to the americas
Pre columbian trans-oceanic contact is my fetish

mechanics that actually make sense are too hard for CK2 casuals to figure out, so most of EU3's management systems got removed in favour of everything costing random amounts of arbitrary administration/diplomatic/military points

How are blobbing sims less casual than CK2?

Because the whole game is just waiting for counters to go up and spending points. That's literally all there is, putting in ten very simple mechanics (e.g. spend gold mana to buy troops) does not suddenly mean you have a complex and deep system just because it has a large number of mechanics.
I would prefer one actually deep and complex currency (apparently EU3 did this with gold) than our current ten very simplistic currencies that basically just go up over time, and sometimes you get to change the rate they go up by.

EU3 had ducats only and no mana, and it worked great and made sense.

Complicated =/= Complex