After I finished typing out my thoughts on Imperator: Rome, I put it out of my mind and went back to playing more enjoyable things.  But my friend who bought it for me wanted to play games together, and since we’ve already played to death every other game in our libraries, why not try Imperator multiplayer?  I wasn’t keen, but there’s a new mod called Invictus that’s supposed to make the game way better, so we downloaded it to see.

Invictus doesn’t really change anything, to be honest.  It adds more nations, sure.  It adds more missions, fine.  It gives each and every nation a completely unique tradition, making them 5% better at one thing and 5% worse at another.  Those are all very pretty things that likely took a lot of work, but they don’t fix the fundamental problems of Imperator: Rome that I already talked about.  War is still boring, peace is still boring.  In other Paradox games, I feel like I’m always working towards something, in Imperator, I feel like I’m always waiting.  Just waiting for aggressive expansion to decrease, waiting for truces to end, waiting for enough PI to fabricate more claims. Other Paradox games include plenty of waiting but they also include a lot of doing.  And Imperator just doesn’t have enough to do.

So in our Multiplayer, I played the Etruscan republic and he played the Carthiginian republic.  Two Republican enemies of the Roman Republic got their revenge on Rome within the first 5 years.  But after we got our revenge, we found that playing as Republics in Imperator was still pretty boring.  There just wasn’t enough to do, not enough that was fun, and the challenges Republics present you with are neither challenging nor interesting.  Over the next few posts, I hope to outline what the problems are, and then what my proposed solutions would be, as well as some other stuff that’s on my mind.

I know it’s fairly onanistic to write posts about “how to fix X game,” and I’m not a games designer or even a modder who can put my thoughts into action.  But this is the streams of my consciousness, and so this is what I’ve been thinking of.

There’s two ways that playing a Republic in Imperator can go, and neither are really interesting.  If you don’t know what you’re doing then you quickly lose the support of the Senate, and once they hate you, it’s almost impossible to ever make them like you again.  Low Senate support lowers Stability, and low Stability lowers Senate support.  You enter a state where the only way to do anything is to gain Tyranny, and since Tyranny also lowers Senate support, you quickly enter a death spiral of decreasing Senate support, decreasing Stability, and increasing Tyranny.  Eventually Senate support goes so low that you can’t do anything at all, your nation is paralyzed, and you can’t play the game.

We can make funny political jokes about how this is very realistic of what happens in a Democracy.  But Imperator is a video game and games should be fun.  Realistic as this may be, it isn’t fun.

The other way things can go is if you do know how to play the game.  In that case you quickly pass the “anti-piracy” edict to make everyone love you.  Then you ensure that your favorite faction holds all the positions of power in society.  Once your faction is the only one in charge, they’ll all love you forever and the other factions become too weak to ever do anything.  Your Senate support skyrockets and you can do anything you want, and once you make your elected rulers reign for life, you’re basically playing a monarchy with a different coat of paint.

Again jokey jokey this is all realistic in certain Democracies.  But again, it isn’t fun.

There’s an apocryphal quote from Sid Meier of Civilization fame: “games are a series of interesting decisions.”  I want Republics in Imperator to be fun and interesting.  I want to feel like I’m making choices and weighing up my options throughout the entire game, not just once at the start of the game when I turn myself into an elected monarchy.  

In the following series of posts, I’ll try to outline what changes I’d make and why, to at least make Republics in Imperator play better.  But before that I’ll need to discuss governors and civil wars, which are also incredibly undercooked in this game.  This will be a long series, but if you read to the end I hope you’ll get a better appreciation of what Imperator Rome could have been, even though it will never get an update or likely even a sequel.  Trashing or praising dead games is a time honored tradition on the internet, and I hope you’ll join me for this.