“Evocation” is the general magic-y word for “big spells that do damage.” Fireballs, shockwaves, if it directly hits someone, it’s usually evocation. I think the separating of magic spells like this first came from D&D, but the tradition has carried on in Dominions.
In Dominions though, not all Evocation is created equal. Some spells really aren’t worth it, and casting “retail evocation” aka low level tiny spells is a sign that times are desperate and you don’t have the mage firepower for Big Boy spells. But one of those Big Boy spells, indeed a spell so powerful it people might build their pretender specifically to counter it, is Thunder Strike.
Let’s start with the good: Thunder Strike deals a boatload of armor negating shock damage to a square, and then a smaller amount of shock damage to all the squares around it. That means any units sitting where the Thunder Strike hits get instantly deleted, no matter how good their armor, while surrounding units can still be stunned by the small shockwave that surrounds the big strike. So this spell not only deals with ultra-powerful enemy units (like the physmoss mage from last post), but also ties down large enemy armies by shocking their units and stunning them for a turn or two. It may not seem like a lot, but stunning some troops can break apart their formation and allow your own army to defeat them in detail.
The only counter to Thunder Strike is Shock Resistance, which is a very hard resistance to get. This is why some nations will specifically build their pretender around defeating Thunder Strike: if the pretender has high level Air or Earth magic, they can bless their sacred troops with Shock Resistance. That will help immensely against the large stunning shockwave, but still may not be enough to save units from the big Thunder Strike at the center.
But now here’s the bad news: Thunder Strike requires a mage to be Air 3. Remember that Hordes of Skeletons from before required just Death 2, higher levels of magic are much less common than lower levels. Mages with magic of Level 1 are everywhere. Level 2 is usually doable. Level 3 and above is exceptionally rare. So while it’s easy for your enemies to amass the Death 2 mages needed for skellyspam, it’s hard to find the Air 3 mages needed for a Thunder Strike counter.
But there is one hope for an aspiring Thunder Striker: and it’s called Storm Power.
Storm Power is an Air 2 spell that adds +1 to a mage’s Air Magic. In essence, it turns an Air 2 mage into an Air 3. BUT it can only be cast when a storm is already raging. And creating a storm on the battlefield requires… Air 3 yet again. So Air 2 mages alone can’t make this work, but everything can come together if they can get just a single Air 3 mage.
The trick is that the Air 3 mage will cast Summon Storm, then the Air 2 mages all cast Storm Power. And now that everyone is an Air 3 mage, they can start blasting out Thunder Strikes like there’s no tomorrow. This is a huge ability, and Thunder Strike plus Storm Power is a key tech level for most air nations in the game like Vanheim and Caelum.
The best part is that summoning a Storm will also power up Air Elementals, who Air 3 mages can also summon. Air Elementals can fly directly into the enemy’s lines, barely take damage because they’re Ethereal, AND ignore shock damage. So you can also summon a few of them during the storm and let them tear apart the enemy army while you’re dropping Thunder Strikes on their heads. It’s a brutal strategy.
This is why Air 3 is such a key breakpoint for mage power. Air 2 is OK, but Air 3 is key. The ability to summon storms and turn everyone into a Thunder Striker overturns a lot of strategies and forces your enemies to come up with effective counters to deal with you.
One fun nation I love is Ur: The First City. Ur gets Gudus as a mainstay mage, and 1/2 of Gudus are Air 2. Unfortunately, Ur can’t natively recruit any Air 3 mages, so it seems they’re out of contention for Thunder Striking. But they can use a national spell to summon an Ugalla, which is an Air 3 mage in its own right. So by summoning an Ugalla, Ur can turn itself into a Thunder Striking powerhouse on par with any other.
And Thunder Strikes have a huge range as well. They can hit well into the back-line and destroy an enemy’s mage corps. So if the enemy sets up skellyspam, Thunder Strike can be a legitimate counter, as you delete their mages to slow the tide of skeletons.
So that’s yet another tactic I really enjoy. It’s stereotypically done by the “Elven” nations (Vanheim, Helheim those sort) but I’ve also made it work with my favorite nation, Ur. Feel free to try it yourself when Dominions 6 comes out.
I’ve been writing a series of posts about the fun strategies you can use in Dominions 5. I hope my posts inspire someone else to start playing the game, either now or when Dominions 6 launches in January of 2024. Last time was skellyspam, this time it’s physmoss.
To begin with, lets understand what happens when one unit swings their sword at another. They first roll to see if their attack skill beats the enemy’s defense skill. Then if so, they “hit,” and get to roll for damage. Their Strength + Weapon damage is rolled against the enemy’s Protection, and if they roll higher then they deal damage according to how well they rolled.
Already we can see the strategy developing, units with high Protection are difficult to harm. But having lots of Strength, powerful weapons, or just an overwhelming number of attacks can still be used to take them down.
But what is Protection? It’s the sum of your armor value plus whatever “natural protection” the unit may possess, so a being made out of stone will naturally have high “natural protection” even if wearing little, while a squishy human can still get a lot of protection from a suit of plate mail. This is step 1 of “physmoss,” having a very high protection. Mages normally wear robes, but you can craft them a suit of armor. Then they can cast something like “ironskin” on themselves to bump their natural protection into the stratosphere. The sum of that armor plus their ironskin makes for one tough nut to crack.
But some units have high strength, and crits can roll for high damage anyway. Just having a lot of protection isn’t enough. We can get further by having “physical resistance,” which halves the damage taken from all weapons. This is the “phys” of “physmoss,” and spells like “liquid body” or “temper flesh” can both give physical resistance. Then on top of that we add a bit of regeneration, either with a ring of regeneration or with a nature mage casting a spell. That means after accounting for high protection and physical resistance, what little damage the mage does take, they can regenerate at the end of each combat round.
But the pièce de résistance is the “mossbody” spell, the “moss” part of “physmoss.” You see, after all the protection and resistances are subtracted out, mossbody then subtracts a flat 15 from any damage taken. In a game where most units will be lucky to deal 15 damage against unarmored enemies, that’s huge.
So with all this put together, the mage has high protection, physical resistance, mossbody, and regeneration. Their protection is so great that barely anything with every harm them. What little harms them will have its damage halved by physical resistance. And after physical resistance, mossbody will reduce the damage even further. And the tiny slivers of damage still taken are then regenerated by regeneration.
This combination of spells can make a mage absolutely unkillable. You can send them against hundreds of units and they won’t die. They’ll barely kill, but they definitely won’t die. And eventually even a squishy mage with just a mean left hook can KO enough enemies that the rest get the hint and run off, leaving the mage victorious on the field. A single mage with physmoss can defeat an entire army that forgot to pack a mage of their own who can cast protection-bypassing spells.
And that’s what makes the combination so powerful, it’s not completely invulnerability, but it lets a single mage take on armies, forcing the enemy to bring all their resources together if they want to take the mage down. It’s a hilarious tactic when it works and is really fun to boot. So try it yourself if you ever give Dominions a go.
I recently wrote a post about how I’m always thinking about Dominions 5 but I’m never playing it. In writing about why I like it, I realize that a lot of it comes down to the sheer number of cool strategies to employ. But it’s hard to get across the huge depth of strategy in a single post, so why not do so in multiple posts? In the next few posts, I’ll give you a taste of all the cool and awesome things you can do in Dominions, and if you think it’s interesting you can do some of them yourself when Dominions 6 comes out in January.
In Dominions, armies clash in great battles. The army with better weapons, better discipline, or better strength may win, unless the other army has bigger numbers on their side. And what’s a bigger number than infinity? That’s the idea behind skelly-spam, have your mages raise an infinite horde of undead to fight for you, overwhelming the enemy in sheer volume until even the strongest soldiers are ground down by weight of numbers.
There’s a lot of ways to do skelly-spam though, it isn’t just a button you can press to win. The mainstay skelly-spam spell is “Horde of Skeletons” which can be cast by a Death 2 mage after you’ve researched Enchantment Level 5. So to use skelly-spam, you need a nation with lots of access to Death 2 mages, Death 1 won’t cut it. Death 3 is also good, because higher level mages cast the spell using less fatigue. If mages are casting constantly, they’ll reach 100 fatigue and fall unconscious, no longer casting until their fatigue returns to 99 or below. But a Death 3 mage can cast a lot more “Horde of Skeletons” spells than a Death 2 before reaching that point.
So to TRULY overwhelm the enemy in skeletons, you need lots of high level death mages to cast it non stop. Some nations can easily recruit lots of death mages, but others may have trouble. Fortunately, there’s a second option.
Nations with ok death access but lots of astral or blood can also use communions to level-up their skelly-spam. When mages form a communion, the Communion Masters cast spells more easily and transfer the fatigue to the Communion Slaves. Those slaves don’t cast anything, but do regenerate fatigue. However, if their fatigue goes above 200, they start taking damage and quickly die. So in a communion, the masters can keep spamming out skeletons so long as the slaves stay below 200 fatigue. This lets death mages unleash even MORE skeletons than they otherwise could.
But it doesn’t stop there, because you can level up your communions into “turbo communions.” When a slave’s fatigue is above 200, they take damage, but what if they could regenerate that damage? Then the masters could keep casting for even more skeletons as long as the damage to the slaves is less than their regeneration.
Jotunheim is the poster-child for turbo communions. They have “Skrattir” (plural of Skratti) who naturally regenerate 1/10 of their massive HP each turn. They can then have their Gygjas be the communions masters, while the Skrattir are communion slaves. Not only that, one of the Gygjas can cast “personal regeneration” on themselves, and that benefit will transfer to the slaves as well. Now the Skrattir regenerate 2/10 of their HP per turn. Now the Gygjas can cast “Horde of Skeletons” until the end of time, safe in the knowledge that the Skrattir can tank the damage.
The battlefield effects of this are awesome. Most mages will use their power to buff up (increase the power of) their own troops, then quickly fall unconscious after a few spells. The Gygjas are meanwhile raising an army of the undead. Then, the two armies will meet each other, Jotunheim with an army of the living plus the dead, and the enemy with their army of the living. Jotunheim may be ground down by the enemy’s superior power, but the Gygjas will still be raising the undead. For every Jotunheim soldier that falls, 2 more skeletons will take its place. Eventually, the enemy army will be overwhelmed with numbers and will run away, chased off the field by a tidalwave of skeletons.
So I hope I’ve impressed upon you one of the fun and awesome things you can do in dominions. Skellyspam may seem simple, but it’s a fine art of combat and deathly effective when used well.
Dominions is a strange series of video games, and with Dominions 6 coming out soon I thought it might be good to reflect on my strange association with these games. These are games I spend hours thinking about, but far less time playing. That’s not because the games aren’t fun, they’re really fun. And that’s not because I don’t have time, I have lots of time. It’s because these games are strange and playing them is even stranger.
Dominions puts you in control of a god and a nation and tells you to conquer the rest of the world and assume the status of pantokrator, All-Mighty God. Your “god” is really only a pretender god until they become All-Mighty and subjugate every other god in the land. The nations you can lead are incredibly varied and interesting, from Amazonian dinosaur-riders to Incan Bird-people. From enormous Frost Giants right out of Norse Mythology, to Bandar Log monkey people right out of Hindu mythology. You can be big, you can be small, you can use 8 different types of magic, and each nation plays almost completely differently.
Then on top of the nation, you pick your god. While the nation you choose is the base, your god is the spice, and can change how your nation plays all by themselves. They can have powerful Death magic and give some of your units invulnerability. They can have powerful Nature magic and give some units regeneration. They can have specific magic paths to cast specific, highly useful spells. Or they can be the boring but probably most useful type of god who makes your nation better at making money and staying stable. You get more troops and income that way but it’s less fun.
Once you’ve picked your god and nation, you duke it out with other nations in an incredibly complex strategy game. And how well you can research spells, script magic casting, and summon the right troops will determine whether or not you win. There are so many strategies and tactics you can choose here, that it’s hard to even give a small overview without going overboard.
You can have death mages bring forth hordes of skeletons to overwhelm your opponent with sheer numbers
You can have astral mages pick a specific enemy and slay their soul
You can have fire mages rain fire on the battlefield, or air mages rain thunder, or water mages rain rain (water is a bit less impactful than the other schools of magic).
You can summon an infinite horde of tiny imps to help you. The imps may be tiny and weak, but an infinite horde of anything is tough to deal with
There’s so much to do, so many strategies, and it’s all so fun and I haven’t even gotten to the higher level stuff you can do! Equip a powerful Titan with a bunch of hand-crafted gear and they can kill an army of thousands all on their own. Cast “Ethereal” “Ironskin” and “Gift of Flight” on a group of war elephants and see your flying circus tear through the enemy’s units. Or summon a legion of wolves from the edges of the battlefield to attack your enemies from all directions. There’s a lot of choices to make, a lot of ideas to implement, and a lot of fun to be had.
But I spend more time thinking about this game than actually playing it. That’s not because I don’t want to play. Its because a the sheer complexity of the game prevents me from playing in really weird ways.
The game is way too complex for its own AI. I’ve said before that in other strategy games like Civilization, the AI isn’t good at playing its own game. Well in most games the AI is at least competent enough to give you a good time, but the Dominions AI just isn’t. So playing against the AI… isn’t really as fun? I mean it is fun, but when I play against the AI I always have this thought in the back of my mind that “this isn’t good enough.”
So play against humans, right? That’s the standard fair when you’re tired of playing the AI. The problem here is that Dominions is so complex that taking a single turn could take hours. And in games that can last 60 turns or more, that isn’t sustainable. So the classic way to play Dominions is a variant of the old “play-by-email” system where players will have 1 day to complete their turns and send them in, then at midnight the turns are processed, the game state is updated, and players now have another day to play their next turn. This leads to a single game lasting months, although the vast majority of that time isn’t spent playing. But still, a months-long investment is a big ask to play a video game.
I do want to play Dominions in multiplayer, it seems really fun and I enjoy it in single player. But I’m of course not very good at the game (since I have no multiplayer practice) and with a community as small as this one it can be very insular. That in turn makes it harder than it should be to time help and get better. It’s also hard to even find games. The community only seems to congregate on discord, which is a wretched hive at the best of times and even more parochial in a niche community like this one. So I haven’t played even though I want to. Usually I’d ask friends to play, but few of my friends even play strategy games and even fewer would have any desire to ever play this strategy game. I’d like to play more, but for now I’m stuck. So I spend all my time thinking about the game, dreaming about strategies to use, and just wondering if I’ll ever play it for real
I’ve decided I want to start reading again. I used to read a lot as a kid, but fell out of the habit once I left high school. Now the only things I read are scientific papers. I feel like reading would be good to get back into as a fun thing I can do anywhere that doesn’t require a computer (like most of my video games). But I don’t really know what to read.
I used to read a lot of science fiction, especially from the so-called “golden age” of science fiction. Things like War of the Worlds, the Invisible Man, the Time Machine, that sort of thing. But I don’t know what other sci-fi has that same “feel.” I’d also put the Picture of Dorian Gray in that category of book even if it’s not sci-fi per se.
The other thing I read was mystery novels, but all the authors I used to read are passed and I’ve read most of their books already.
So I need to find things to read. Does anyone have any suggestions?
I want to take you on a ride through the life and times of one of wrestling’s most notorious villains. It will be long and windy, but by the end I hope we’ll both have learned something about the wrestler and perhaps ourselves.
For those of you who don’t know, “New Jack” was a wrestler played by Jerome Young who was quite popular in the late 90s. Or rather, he was the opposite of popular, he was hated because he was a bad guy wrestler aka a “heel.” The character of New Jack could be charitably described as “racially charged,” promoter Jim Cornette created the New Jack character as a black “bad guy” who could be easily hated by the mostly white, mostly racist audience of his Smokey Mountain Wrestling promotion based in Appalachia.
To this end, New Jack would do a lot of bad guy things to make the fans hate him. But New Jack (and his tag team, “The Gangstas”) brought a novelty and an edge that made him stand out from every other bad guy around. For example, a wrestling match usually ends when one wrestler pins their opponent to the mat for 3 full seconds. The Gangstas demanded that they be allowed to win after holding their opponents down for just 2 seconds because of affirmative action. Also in wrestling, the punches and throws are usually fake so neither wrestler ever gets hurt. But New Jack is best known for his time in ECW where a large part of the allure was the wrestlers genuinely maiming each other, such as when New Jack threw Vic Grimes off a 20 foot high scaffold and onto concrete.
ECW is what made New Jack famous, gone were Jim Cornette’s racially-charged stipulations, in was New Jack stabbing and mauling his way into superstardom. Or at least “superstardom” as far as wrestling is concerned, 99% of people have never heard of him. But if you like wrestling enough to talk about it online you will eventually be told about New Jack and just how good of a heel he was. Because when he wasn’t hurting people for fake and for realsies, he was also a charismatic and innovative talker who could make you believe that he was a real sociopath who would do anything at any time just because he could.
Unfortunately his ability to make people believe backfired on him after the “Mass Transit incident.” In 1996 New Jack and Mustafa Saed (his tag team partner in the Ganstas) faced D-Von Dudley and Erich Kulas. Kulas was a 17-year-old fan who had lied about his age and credentials in order to live every fans dream of wrestling in the ring. To make the match look more “real” Kulas asked to be bladed, which is when a wrestler gets cut in the forehead to release a trickle of blood. The nick barely hurts but the stream of blood covers the wrestler’s face and makes them look like they’ve been beaten to a pulp. But when New Jack bladed Kulas, the knife cut far too deeply and Kulas collapsed, bleeding profusely as medical assistance had to be called.
If you know about wrestling, then you can see one side of this story. It’s really nothing more than a stunt gone wrong. Wrestlers blade themselves often because making things look “real” is part and parcel to wrestling. Kulas was completely untrained however, and so while almost all wrestlers cut their own face, Kulas asked New Jack to cut him. Whether due to Kulas moving at the wrong moment or just a mistiming, this led to what is normally a painless nick becoming a near fatal wound.
If you don’t know about wrestling but saw the news afterward, you can see another side. Kulas was underaged and undertrained, and New Jack is a sociopath who likes to hurt people. While blading oneself may be common, Kulas asked for New Jack to blade him, which is rare. New Jack took this opportunity to genuinely hurt someone because he enjoyed doing so.
And unfortunately, the second side is what most people saw. New Jack was eventually arrested and charged for the incident, although he was acquitted when his fellow wrestlers took the stand in his defense, saying that blading was common and this was just an unfortunate incident. New Jack passed away in 2021, but even up to his death he defended himself on twitter and in interviews saying Kulas was at fault and he meant no harm.
But what if it was all real? If you don’t remember the beginning of this post, New Jack’s real name is Jerome Young, and Jerome Young has also given numerous interviews (sometimes calling himself New Jack, sometimes calling himself Jerome Young) where he instead claims that he hated Kulas for being arrogant and disrespectful, and cut him deep to intentionally hurt him. Many of these interviews have been so called “shoot” interviews, in which wrestlers will drop their persona and talk about their real lives, real families and the truth behind the cameras.
So if Jerome Young gives a shoot interview saying he was an actual sociopath, where does that leave New Jack? Now it could be said that even “shoot” interviews are often “in character.” New Jack still had an audience and was still working as a wrestler even late into his life. Leaning on his notoriety to maintain image, fame, and a bit of money just makes sense. And saying “it’s all real” and then showing you something fake is the oldest trick in entertainment. As far back as the Epic of Gilgamesh, authors have gone to great lengths to ensure the audience that everything is real. The epic even implores the reader to go to the walls of Uruk and see the stone tablets where Gilgamesh himself recorded his autobiography.
So perhaps Jerome Young is still playing a character in those interviews, he’s still New Jack only now people want to hear the “real truth” so he tells the life story of Jerome Young but from the perspective of New Jack. But if that’s true, where does New Jack end and Jerome Young begin?
A lot of wrestlers seem to “become the mask” over the years, or maybe their mask was just their real face. How much of “New Jack” is also Jerome Young and vice versa has captivated fans for years. Wrestling is *clearly* fake, the punches aren’t real, the spots are choreographed, but there’s a real person going up there to play the hero and the villain. And while some lifelong heels love the fact that they can get genuine hatred from fictional acts, some of those same wrestlers use the idea of “it’s all a character” to defend their real life horribleness.
Jerome Young was an actual felon who actually stabbed a wrestler during a match. Not the kid Kulas from above, a different wrestler. And not during a botched spot, he pulled a knife out during a match and stabbed his opponent 15 times (though New Jack says it was only 9). Stabbing people may be central to the New Jack mythos, but it’s also something Jerome Young has done on multiple occasions.
So when New Jack would go on shoot interviews and talk about how he’d bladed Kulas on purpose and wasn’t sorry for it (only to in other interviews defend himself saying it was an accident) how much of that is him staying in character and how much of that is the genuine feelings of Jerome Young? The Jerome Young who also stabbed a wrestler in the ring on purpose and then would later say “hey it’s all an act” and “yeah I stabbed him because he pissed me off” at various times? How much of this is a genuine psychopath who uses “it’s all fake” as a defense vs a wrestler who really takes it way too far? And does he say both at different times simply because he’s “in character,” or does he sometimes tell the truth and sometimes lies to defend himself?
Because really, if you’re always in character, you’re never in character. And when you do something terrible on purpose only to later say it was just a mistake… that’s called being human. Everyone does that. It’s easy to believe that New Jack made a genuine mistake, he even asked Kulas if he was ok during the incident and this can be seen on video. It’s also easy to believe that Jerome Young wanted to hurt someone but didn’t want to be punished and hoped that Kulas wouldn’t die and cause a murder investigation.
I did this long intro on New Jack because I actually wanted to talk about someone else but needed my audience to understand wrestling before I did so. Nathan Fielder is a comedian with a few popular TV shows that I’ve never watched, but a friend of mine showed them to me and when I didn’t laugh at the joke, he spent the next hour explaining Nathan Fielder to me so that I could more better appreciate or “get” the joke. He also told me I had to watch this video by SuperEyepathWolf in order to see the “real” story.
Nathan Fielder plays a character who is socially awkward, uncomfortable around people, and doesn’t pick up on cues. He plays an autist. But he is also an actual man who in interviews and unscripted segments also has all those traits.
My friend loves watching Nathan Fielder not only because he finds the cringe-inducing humor genuinely funny, but also because he’s fascinated by the artistry and “mythos” if you will of an autist playing a comedian playing an autist. Part of the magic of the show is that it isn’t a “show,” it’s reality TV. The plot of every episode is Nathan Fielder trying to help a struggling business, but his ideas are things like “sell TVs for 1$ to abuse Best Buy’s price match guarantee” or “shame children into buying a toy by saying they’re babies if they don’t.” The insanity of the situation is only heightened when the business actually tries implementing these ideas.
The show has genuinely made the news because sometimes those ideas actually work. As with all reality TV, it may be scripted but it’s also “real.” This episode may have been chosen specifically for Nathan to have a wacky idea and cringe-inducing interactions, but he really used those ideas and didn’t script those interactions. The names, places, people and events are all true, only the facts have been changed.
And yet when you go deeper you realize that everything is an act. Nathan has has many interviews in which he’s far more relaxed and sociable. And you can even see elements in the TV show where something so funny and unpredictable happens that he momentarily drops the act, and it feels like the “real” Nathan shines through.
But even when you see the “real” Nathan, whether in interviews or in moments of the show, you still see a lot of the character of Nathan Fielder. A somewhat awkward man trying crazy ideas because he thinks they will work and doesn’t understand why people would object. Is he playing it up for a laugh, or does he just know that people laugh at what he normally does?
I think from what I’ve seen and heard, Nathan Fielder is bringing the art of wrestling to another medium. Wrestling was always about making you believe that what you were seeing was 100% real. In the modern age, part of that reality can come from the kinds of interviews or backstage segments where the wrestler admits “OK, all that was fake, but here’s the real me,” and then just keeps playing the character. Being “always in character” is a hard thing to do, but it’s made that much easier when the “character” is still the real you.
Sometimes a person seems to become their character, and sometimes a character is just a real person given a microphone and an audience. The allure of “it’s all real!” is a strong one for fiction, and making most of it actually real is one of the strongest ways to keep that allure. I don’t know about the “real” Nathan Fielder, or the “real” New Jack. But it’s fascinating to look at someone’s actions and not be entirely sure whether what you’re seeing is real or not. And I think that’s what makes wrestling and Nathan Fielder so popular.
We’re finally at the heart of my suggestions to improve Imperator: Rome. I’ve discussed how Republics are boring and aren’t differentiated from monarchies. I’ve discussed how there’s nothing fun to do during peace-time. I’ve also discussed how civil wars are too easy to avoid, and when they do happen they’re too easy to win. Now I’ll discuss how Imperator could make things better.
As I said in my first post, Republics in Imperator Rome are just short-term monarchies. But they don’t have to be. Wheeling and dealing was a big part of the Roman republic, and it should be a big thing here too.
When the Consul of a Republic dies or ends his term in Imperator, another is elected in his place. The new ruler always comes from one of the 3 main Republican factions: Democrats, Oligarchs, and Traditionalists, with each faction having its own bonuses and its own agendas that they want to get passed during the next Consular term. The player has very little control over this process, and so sometimes the factions will demand goals that the player doesn’t want.
If a faction wins the election, the only way for the player to prevent them from implementing their party platform is to tank their Senate Support and gain a lot of Tyranny. But there are other times when the parties will want to implement something that the player also wants. The lack of player input during this process means you really can’t have any sort of strategy or planning around it, making it a poor mechanic for a strategy game. But maybe we could change that.
When an election is about to occur, why not let the player have some input on it, in exchange for tying their hands down the line. I’m envisioning the equivalent of a 3-way treaty between the 3 Senate factions that the player can bring up at any time to influence the outcome of the election in exchange for making promises to the other factions.
Say your Consul is a Traditionalist and it looks like a Democrat will be elected in his place. You, the player, really don’t want the Democrats in power because their party plank is to implement shorter term lengths and you don’t like that. So you bring up the 3-treaty and try to figure out “what can I do to avoid this?”
The Democrats can’t be swayed to vote against their own party member, but perhaps you can change their agenda by offering some concessions. What if you installed a Democrat as the Governor of Cisalpine Gaul? You make it so that for the next term the Governor of that province will be a Democrat and you can’t remove him for any reason. This placates the Democrats, and in exchange they’ll agree not to force shorter terms, and instead will work towards a Manumittance law which is also something they support. It just happens to be something you support too since it increases the number of Freemen pops and therefore the amount of manpower in the nation.
The Oligarchs then are incensed. You’re giving things to the Democrats and not us! We won’t stand for this! Your Traditionalist allies also aren’t happy with this, so you need at least a little Oligarch support to get this one over the finish line. So now you deal with the Oligarchs: what if they received the Governorship of Magna Graecia? Fair’s fair, the Democrats receive a Governorship, the Oligarchs should too. The Oligarchs say fine, but also next term they’ll demand that more land be handed out to their own people as well.
But now your traditionalist allies are angry. You gave governorships to the other parties and left nothing for us! So OK, you have to give something to them as well. They already control most of the political positions that aren’t governors, but they’re demanding that their Party Platform from the last election be enforced. They ran on a platform of stripping citizenship from the newly conquered Gauls. Now, your predecessor gave citizenship to the Gauls in the first place so they could fight in your armies, and stripping their citizenship will greatly reduce your nation’s fighting power. But the Traditionalists don’t care! They ran on this platform, they’re demanding it. So if you want your 3-way treaty to go through, then you’ll have to take away citizenship from the Gauls.
Strangely, stripping citizenship can actually be a useful tool of course. Citizenship is mostly useful for obtaining the military traditions associated with particular cultures, once you have those traditions you can revoke it with no consequences. And each additional culture you give citizenship to angers your primary culture, so if you plan to Romanize the barbarians anyway then keeping Romans happy at the expense of the Gauls just makes sense. So from the player’s perspective: this treaty actually enforces 2 things that they already wanted, that being a new law from the Democrats and new citizenship status from the Traditionalists, at the expense of giving out governorships that can’t be revokes. AND the player avoided a law that they really didn’t want, that being the Shorter Terms law that the Democrats wanted to pass.
You have a tentative treaty in place, but now you need to enforce it before the election happens. The governors will be people you can’t replace during the next term, and some laws will change. If you really want to limit this via game mechanics, you can even have the treaty cost Political Influence (PI) just like big treaties cost bird mana in EU4. I’d be ok with that as it seems realistic enough to equate PI with political capital in the modern sense. You could also make the cost of the treaty scale with how many things are in it. That would make Grand Bargains a rare thing, while smaller political agreements to hold power are the norm.
In fact, maybe the above treaty is too big, costs too much PI, and gives away too much. It ensures that a Democrat is elected, but prevents the Democrats from enforcing their favored agenda in exchange for giving out governorships and changing laws. Maybe there’s a smaller scale solution?
Maybe instead of going to the factions, you could go to the family heads we spoke about earlier. Each family has members in all 3 political parties, but the Family Head can likely wrangle their clan together to support a shared interests. Maybe instead of some Grand Bargain, you can just bribe the family head?
By letting the player also bargain with the family heads, instead of just the factions, you actually make the Great Families of this game matter. These are supposed to be part of the core concept and unique selling points of the game, that there are powerful families within it you need to keep on your side to maintain and expand your power. But they’re really somewhat meaningless as of now.
But in my system, I’d let you negotiate with the family head in order to get them to vote for a certain canddiate. With enough bribes of both money and holdings, you can get a nice Traditionalist elected, but be warned that giving out money and holdings makes that family more powerful down the line. The upside is you won’t have to give concessions to the other parties, or even to your own backbenchers who are making extreme demands. The downside is you’ve made one of the Great Families more powerful. But that’s a problem for the future Consul. Your current Consul then hands the reigns off to your chosen successor and you start playing as them.
If my system were implemented, I think Republics would have fun and interesting mechanics to deal with that sets them apart from Monarchies. The player would have to compromise with the other parties and maybe those compromises would bite them in the end. Remember, the Grand Bargain discussed above would have appointed Governors of Cisalpine Gaul and Magna Gaecia who couldn’t be removed, even if they were disloyal. The agreement with the Family head will give him more power, and he can never be removed. Agreements like these would be powerful and would let you choose a successor and influence your Republic. But they can also set you up for civil war, and as I said, civil wars should be harder.
Additionally, I think these changes would at least give Imperator: Rome something interesting to do during peacetime. Rather than ignoring policies, you could enact them whenever you wanted so long as you could bargain with the Senate. And rather than ignoring the Senate and removing disloyal governors whenever, you could have a system where gaining the support of the Senate sometimes requires making pacts with ambition people you’d rather not give power to.
I think in the 3-way treaty system I described above, everything in the game should be on the table for the player to give away or gain. Governorships, positions in the cabinet, laws and citizenship, maybe a forced war declaration on a neighbor. Maybe even changing your pantheon’s gods and building specific buildings. Wrangling the Senate should mean having to deal with powerful, conflicting forces, and it should require the occasional compromise to keep things working.
In exchange though, the player could use this system control the senate and pick their successor. Sometimes the Senate wants laws changed that the player also wants to change. But if the player changes it, it costs stability and PI, while doing it through this 3-way treaty should at least not cost stability. In fact, doing anything through the 3-way treaty should have its normal costs waived, as this would encourage players to use the treaties for their benefit while potentially setting them up with powerful enemies for later.
In this way, the Senate becomes an interesting and powerful mechanic for the players to deal with during peacetime. And likewise governors and cabinet members can’t be replaced with yesmen, because they’ll often get their positions through Senatorial compromise. I’ve now written a whole lot of words about a game I don’t really like, and even if all my changed were implemented Imperator would still not be a masterpiece. But I hope I’ve impressed upon you why the game isn’t good and why I feel these kinds changes would improve it. Hopefully next time Paradox tries to make a new IP, they’ll come up with interesting mechanics like these to put into it.
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.
Last time on this blog, I discussed how I don’t like Republics in Imperator: Rome feeling the same as monarchies. Once you have Senate Support, while there are a handful of unique events related to running the Republic, there’s nothing to sink your teeth into. EU4 and CK2 both have very unique republics with unique gameplay loops, and Imperator Rome deserves the same. It will never get the same because it’s been abandoned by players and Paradox alike, but hopefully Imperator’s death will make Paradox think twice before trying to stuff mana into a game that doesn’t need it.
But before we discuss what I do want from Republics, I’d like to tackle another bugbear I have of the game, and that is that peacetime is boring and governor policies aren’t fun.
Imperator desperately needs something interesting to do during peacetime. Implementing policies should be that thing, but it isn’t. As it stands now: every province you own in the game is assigned a governor, and those governors set policies that influence the province. These governor policies can do a lot of things, they can convert their pops to your One True Faith, they can help build up defenses to increase your manpower, they can encourage trade to increase your wealth. But you don’t have control over what policies your governors set. If Imperator is to be a series of interesting choices (in the words of Sid Meiers), then we should start with these policies.
The only way currently to set what policies you want for your provinces is to spend Political Influence (PI), which is a rare currency in this game that is far better spent on other things. PI is needed for everything from changing laws, to keeping yourself stable, to fabricating claims so you can go to war with your neighbors. Everything costs PI, and governor actions are at the bottom of the list of what I want to spend PI on.
To give you an example of the value of PI, that “encourage trade” governor policy provides a roughly 10% increase to the provinces taxes. But it costs about 10 PI to enact. Now, even a small nation in Imperator can easily have 10 provinces, so increasing just 1 province’s tax by 10% is really just a 1% benefit to your overall nation. Meanwhile, for 50 PI you can found a city, which not only massively increases tax but also increases manpower, research, and conversion speed through its buildings.
So you can either spend 50 PI to enact 5 “encourage trade” policies, providing a modest 5% boost to income, or you can spend it to found a city and get way more benefits. But it gets worse, occasionally governors become corrupt or die, and so you have to replace them. The new governor will undo all your policies, and you have to spend that 50 PI again just to get that same 5% bonus. A 5% bonus that is still less than what you can get from just founding a city.
And remember, that 50 PI is also needed to increase your nation’s stability, pass important laws, or fabricate claims on a neighbor. There’s just never a time when I feel I can waste my PI changing governor actions, so I just ignore the governors entirely. There’s an entire game mechanic in this game that is completely wasted because it costs precious mana.
I think changing governor policies shouldn’t cost PI. It should be completely free like national focuses (or foci) in Victoria 2. If changing policies were free, I could actually see myself constantly going around to my provinces and spending time changing what they’re doing. Imperator Rome has the most boring peace-time of any Paradox game, and letting me play around with the provinces would at least give me something to do.
After a big war I could change all the policies to manpower producing ones so I can replenish my armies. This is the same way that Victoria 2 lets me use national foci to replenish my soldiers. If I need to build a huge monument for my own megalomania, I can tax my provinces to hell and back, making them angry at me. And once I build the thing, I can switch to giving them more autonomy so they’ll like me again.
If you limited how many governor policies I had, it would also enforce hard and perhaps interesting choices on my playstyle. Let’s say you limited me to just 2 provinces having governor policies in the entire nation (2 is the same as the starting number of national foci in Victoria 2). In that case, the policies need to be very powerful in order to make using them worthwhile. As a start, let’s make policies 5x more powerful than they are now.
If that were the case, then as I expanded I’d have to make interesting choices about where to use my policies. I can encourage trade in my heartlands, or I can convert pops in my recent conquests to the One True Faith. Encouraging trade gets me money, but converting pops makes them less likely to rebel, where do I need to put my focus? Or maybe I just had a big war and need to replenish my manpower, well if I use both policies for manpower, then I’m not getting more money or converting pops.
I could also see myself using some of the rarer policies in this case. There’s a policy called “social mobility,” which increases the rate at which pops promote and demote. Usually this is kind of pointless, and pops quickly reach an equilibrium state without needing this policy, and once they reach equilibrium they can promote/demote no further. But when you’ve just founded a city, it can be useful to quickly turn the tribesmen who live there into nobles and citizens. I could see myself using this policy in that case for a quick turnaround.
Governor policies should be something that helps keep me interested between wars, the same way national foci help keep me interested in Victoria. Making them powerful, free, but rare would mean I’d be constantly switching things around as the game progressed. But as they stand now, they’re weak, expensive, and everywhere so I usually just ignore them. They aren’t worth the mana and they aren’t worth my time.
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.
Streams of Consciousness 