I said in my last post that I could give a laundry list of grievances for why I didn’t like most of the game. So here they are in no particular order.

The Republic mechanics are terrible, offering no real long term strategy and consequences. You either set up your Republic well in the first few years, in which case you spend the entire game with zero problems, or you stumble early and can never recover, and you might as well just restart. If you get the factions on your side, they’ll stay happy forever. But if they hate you, then every new election sinks your country lower and lower into anarchy and you can’t do anything about it. We can make jokes about how this is accurate for a democracy, but the problem is that it isn’t fun. There’s no actual haggling or politics in a republic, no real interesting choices. You can easily ensure that your favored factions retain all their power and influence and ignore the other faction, and from then on the republic just doesn’t matter, you’re basically an elected king.

The mechanics for levying soldiers are too gamey in many respects. The game does a good job of realizing that for ancient Rome, military service was the job of citizens, not just everybody. Because of that the game only lets you levy a full compliment of troops out of pops that are your correct culture. In all other territories without your pops, you simply get 4 cohorts of light chaff. However you get those 4 cohorts no matter how many (or FEW) pops reside in your new territory. So conquering a new territory with just 1 pop in it expands your army more than conquering the remainder of your home territory containing 100 pops.

Why does founding cities require mana to begin with? And why is there a limit on the number of mercenaries you can raise? These two things together just mean that by mid game, there’s nothing to spend your money on. I quit my games with 1000s of denarii in the bank because I just couldn’t spend them, having already build all the buildings I wanted, being unable to found more cities due to the mana restriction, and being unable to raise new mercenaries because you have a hard-cap to the number of companies you can raise regardless of your size. This is a game that has made money absolutely useless outside of the first 10 years of the game.

Speaking of useless money, the AI plays the same way. Every single tiny tribe in Europe is sitting on a Consul’s ransom of gold and the moment you go to war with them they’ll raise their maximum allowance of mercenaries against you. This means that expanding into 5 Gaulic tribes ends up being more painful than fighting large empires such as Egypt or Carthage because those 5 Gaulic tribes actually end up with more armies to use. It’s nonsense and it just shows that this game is balanced horribly, since both the player and the AIs can’t find anything to spend their money on.

You set up trade routes by importing goods from a foreign province. Then when that province gets conquered, you have to restart the trade route manually even though the new owners will still accept the trade. Just let the route have continuity unless the new owners would forbid it, stop giving me pointless busy work.

Trade in general is underwhelming. There are a tiny number of nice capital bonuses (stone, for the early game) and then a whole lot of boni so minor you won’t even notice.

Every civ feels exactly the same. Defenders of this game will wrongly claim that the Roman classical period just isn’t popular (ignoring Rome: Total War), and will likewise claim that there isn’t enough history to put in any real flavor. That’s just nonsense, the game is just bad at flavor. Playing as the King of Armenia shouldn’t feel identical to playing as the Consul of Rome.

Let’s go further with the above point: base-game EU4 actually felt very different depending on where you started. You could play inside the HRE with Austria or Brandenburg, which gave you lots of bonuses but also limited your expansion and forced you to comply with HRE laws. You could play as an HRE neighbor like Poland or France, in which case your expansion into the HRE was limited but the small states within it were unlikely to hurt you. Or you could play somewhere far away from the HRE like the Ottoman Empire or Muscovy. Your expansion was unconstrained, but being next to high-tech neighbors does help you boost your tech, and so you might find yourself falling behind on tech due to lack of HRE-neighboring bonus. Finally you could ignore Europe and go colonizing with Portugal or Spain. In this case you played the colonial game instead. All those types of games did feel very different from one another, and they were all played in the same game-map covered by Imperator: Rome. And that was base-game EU4, no expansions or patches which brought Japanese Shogunates, Chinese Tian-zi’s, or native American confederations. Just straight out of the box EU4 in Europe.

NOTHING in Imperator:Rome feels different or unique in this way. Nothing has its own unique flavor or game-play benefits. There’s just no reason to ever play a second game after you’ve played your first. And I think that’s why this game failed.