In the last two blog posts, I’ve discussed how Imperator: Rome needs more fun things to do.  In particular, Republics don’t do anything interesting and governing your provinces is very boring.  This time I’d like to talk about civil wars.

Imperator’s unique selling point is supposed to be civil wars.  Rome was filled with civil wars, and these are supposed to give Imperator a unique and fun gameplay loop besides just standard conquest.  After all, it’s one thing to win power, it’s another to hold it. But actually civil wars are way to easy to both avoid and win, so they end up being minor annoyances instead of fun gameplay features. 

How civil wars are supposed to work is that every character in your country has a “power base” depending on their job and responsibilities.  And if enough characters with enough power hate you, they’ll start a civil war.  So that governor of a large province?  You better keep him happy because he’s got a large power base.  While that no-name failson who just lives in the senate?  No one cares about him, feel free to do so also.

You also can’t just remove people who hate you from their positions.  If the governor is actively raising an army and preparing for civil war, you shouldn’t be able to just politely bring him back to Rome and put a yesman in his place.

The problem is that it’s too easy to game this.  If your governor hates you, you’ll get an alert saying such.  But if you flip him a bribe he’ll be temporarily mollified, and you can then remove him with no consequences.  Same thing for powerful office holders: your Tribune of the Plebs, your Pontifex Maximus, these are powerful officials who you should need to keep happy.  But you can always bribe them and then replace them with yesmen if they ever get miffed.

So while you should need to work to keep everyone happy, it’s actually way to easy to do so. The player will never run into a situation where there is a character who hates them but is too powerful to remove. You can remove everyone with a bribe and a click, and while they’ll still hate you afterwards, they’ll no longer be powerful.

The only people you can’t bribe and replace are family heads.  They have a magical power base that can’t be removed by removing their jobs, since they largely don’t have jobs (idle rich, you know).  So if a family head hates you enough, you’ll likely be forced into a civil war with no chance of stopping it.  

But then we run into the second problem: civil wars are too easy.  They have some unique mechanics I won’t talk about, but generally you fall into civil war when about ¼ of your country’s power base hates you.  But if ¼ of the country rises up against the other ¾, then it’s really easy for the ¾ to beat the ¼ with no issues. 

I think this is terrible game design, if a civil war is going to happen then it should be a big, important thing, not a nuisance crushed without breaking a sweat.  If a civil war is triggered, then no matter what percentage of the powerbase hated you, the civil war should have at least ½ of your country on its side, just to make things interesting. This would try to reflect how sudden alliances can trigger and people can join the rebels not so much out of hatred for you, but instead as a mercenary desire to be rewarded by whatever side wins the civil war.

But I also think victory on the battlefield shouldn’t be the only way war ends. I’d like it if you could negotiate with the rebels, offering clemency and bribery to turn them back to your side. If a rebel leader turns, they’ll bring their army and provinces back to your fold. And on the other hand, if you keep pissing people off then more armies and provinces should join the other side.

But on top of this, the game shouldn’t end if you lose a civil war. I think that just like in EU4, if they rebels win they can enforce their demands and rule the new nation, but making this end the game just doesn’t make sense. We aren’t playing as a specific family or person in Imperator: Rome, we’re playing as a vague “spirit of the nation” just like in EU4, and the nation still exists even if the rebels win the civil war.

So to sum up, civil wars in Imperator are too easy to avoid and aren’t even fun when they happen. I have some ideas of how to improve this, but it will take until next post for me to finally tie together all these posts about Republics, Governors, and civil wars. So please read on when I next post.