Author Archives: theusernamewhichismine

It’s official, we’re now being taxed to pay back Peter Thiel

I posted a while ago about how the Biden administration was bailing out SVB without calling it a bailout. Basically Silicon Valley billionaire and hedge fund managers (like Peter Thiel) put all their money in a bank well in excess of the 250,000$ FDIC insurance limit. That limit is a known risk. If the bank you use goes bankrupt, and if you exceed that limit, the FDIC is only obligated to give you back 250,000$. Doesn’t matter if you had 250,001$ or 999,999,999,999$, FDIC is only obligated to give you 250,000$.

But that would be unfair to the billionaires. After all, why should they ever suffer the consequences of their actions? So instead the administration promised that every single depositor would be made fully whole. This was spun as them protecting the little guy, but the little guy was already covered by the 250,000$ insurance. I don’t have more than that in the bank, neither does anyone else I know. If my bank goes bankrupt, I will be fully paid back because my deposit is far less than 250,000$. If you have more than that amount, then you are solidly rich and do not need a government bailout.

But the bailout came anyway. The FDIC handed out money to cover the billionaires and hedge funds. Now that money has to come from somewhere. Biden promised it wouldn’t come from the taxpayers of course, but it still is coming from the little guy. It’s coming from our bank accounts.

Every person who owns a bank account is paying a small amount of tax into the FDIC insurance program. It won’t show up as a line item in your bank statement, but it’s there all the same. But for every bank account held by a bank, they have to pay a little bit into the FDIC. That cost naturally gets passed on to the holder of the bank account, just like every other tax. When the tax on cigarettes rises, the price of cigarettes rises. So too is it with bank accounts. You won’t see the tax as money rushing out of your account, but you will see it as less money going in. The bank will pay you less interest on your deposits because they have to take some off the top to pay for the FDIC insurance. And if there was no FDIC insurance, you’d get more interest.

You can see this exact same scenario if you look at big bank accounts. There are some banks with accounts which hold millions, even billions of dollars. The FDIC is only obligated to pay back 250,000$ in the case of bankruptcy, but a responsible billionaire who does not need a government bailout will pay for deposit insurance which covers more than the 250,000$ FDIC limit. That deposit insurance will decrease the amount of interest paid on the deposit, or even remove the interest entirely to pay the insurance. If you have to pay for insurance, you get less interest.

Everyone with a bank account has to pay for FDIC insurance, we don’t even get a choice. And now we need to pay for even more insurance to refill the FDIC’s account since they emptied it to bail out Peter Thiel

The FDIC plans to hit big banks with a tax to refill its account. This is being spun as a progressive redistribution from the rich to the poor. It’s the opposite. If a tax is levied on Walmart, Walmart just raises its prices, and the Walmart customers pay that tax themselves. The vast majority of Americans have their money in a big bank like Bank of America. So the big banks are going to pass this new tax onto their depositors, just as they pass the FDIC insurance tax onto us. You and I will be receiving less interest on our deposits now, because the FDIC spent all their money on Peter Thiel and co. Take from the poor to give to the rich, socialize loses and privatize profits. It’s 2008 all over again.

I know the amount is small. It’s probably going to be no more than a few dollars in lost interest in my account. But a few dollars times the 100 million or so Americans who bank with big banks makes the few billion dollars needed to bail out Peter Thiel and co. And it shouldn’t be this way, we should not be paying for their mistake.

And I know I keep harping on Peter Thiel, but it’s because a bunch of so-called “progressives” are refusing to even contemplate that this is a bailout taking money from the poor. By ignoring the context you can see SVB and its depositors as “the little guys” and Bank of America as “the rich” so taking money from Bank of America to give to SVB depositors is re-distributive. But it isn’t so. SVB was the bank of billionaires and hedge funds, Bank of America is the overwhelming bank of America’s poor and middle class. Taking from Bank of America to pay back SVB’s depositors is taking from the poor and middle class to pay back the billionaires. And reminding those “progressives” of exactly who is being paid back is just something I feel I should do.

Final thoughts on Crusader Kings 3: A distinct lack of place

Some final, disjointed thoughts on CK3.

Crusader Kings, more than any other game in Paradox’s library, is primarily event-driven. The game lets you set up as the king of England, and then set up schemes to go to war with your neighbors or build up your finances, or whatever else. But the primary way you’ll interact with the game is actually random events. This is where the problems start, and they don’t stop.

Some of the events are quite fine, there are a lot related to the “lifestyle” you choose for your king that are honestly quite good. If you’ve focused on a war education, you’ll get events where your king trains in mock battles, or debates strategy with his marshal. If you’ve focused on learning, you’ll get events to translate old books.

But many of the events have no sense of time, place, or consequences. And those annoy the hell out of me. There is an event where a cult believes that the head of a saint has rolled down into your castle. Nevermind that most castles would be built on high ground, the cult wants to be allowed to search your castle and find the head. If you tell them no, then a few months later the cult leader will break out, hold your king at knifepoint, and if you still refuse to let him search the castle he’ll decapitate you.

Let’s break this down:

No sense of time. This game is set in the middle ages, your character is a king. Kings don’t just walk around on their own like it’s a Hollywood movie. They have guards, servants, and hangers-on at every point in time. Why can a cult just barge into a castle and confront the king? Why can the leader then sneak into the king’s bedroom? If security is this lax, then why are peasant revolts in the game so unsuccessful? This event makes it seem easy to barge in and kill the king whenever you want. This sort of thing breaks the illusion that the game is a living, breathing world because the event runs contrary to the actual logic of its setting and to the logic of the rest of the game!

No sense of place. Again, this is an event that happens in the castle of a king. Those things tend to be located on high ground and are heavily fortified against invasion. This is because both foreign kings and disgruntled peasants would love a chance to kill the king and either take his land or get reprieve from his taxes. Yet these facts are ignored to create and event where a head rolled into your castle and a bunch of cultists have barged in.

No sense of consequences. If the cultist does succeed in killing your king, there isn’t any reaction from the rest of your family or friends. You just start playing as your heir and the cultist wanders off. And if you weren’t happy at the cultists barging into your throne room earlier, you aren’t allowed to just have them all arrested and thrown in the dungeons, even though that’s the logical action to them breaking into your castle and demanding to break into it further. The actions of this event have no consequences outside the event itself. Either they search the castle and you get some small bonus, or they kill you and you play as your heir. In a game that gives mechanical benefits to you hiring bodyguards and hangers on, none of those things matter as the cultist will just waltz in and cut your head off because the event demands it.

This is just one event out of many, but it is very indicative of all of them. If you’re studying a foreign language, far off kings will teleport across half the map to knock over all your notes, even though again you’d be presumably studying in your own damn castle. All this because the game wants you to develop rivalries but can’t do so based on the actual conquering that happens in the game. If you have a cat, a foreign king may sneak into your catapult armory to launch the cat out of a catapult, again despite that making no sense in the time and place and this presumably happening on your army grounds where you should have soldiers capable of subduing him. The game desperately wants to spice things up with a small handful of events, but none of those are written well enough to be in any way meaningful or interesting. So instead they try to go over-the-top and just completely break the spell that this is an actual game about medieval kings and such.

More on Crusader Kings 3 and inheritance

I wrote recently about how it feels CK3 was made for the Devs to have fun and not the players. I’ll add a few more final thoughts on the specifics of my Gavelkind/partition gripe.

So to reiterate, Gavelkind aka Partition was an inheritance law in Crusader Kings 2 in which your children each inherited a title on your character’s death. Since you then played as one of those children, each generation you would end up weaker than what you started with. Players didn’t like this and so the first thing anyone did in a game was change their succession laws to “not Gavelkind.” Primogeniture, Seniority and Elective were all different choices with interesting drawbacks but they solved the problem of getting weaker every death quite nicely.

In Crusader King’s 3, the dev team decided that rather than improve Gavelkind so it was more fun, they would just lock people into Gavelkind as the only possible option. Now it’s impossible to switch out without either being a Bohemian or having some very late game tech (games often end early when they player gets bored however). Even elective monarchy doesn’t stop Gavelkind anymore.

I feel this was entirely the wrong move. Gavelkind isn’t fun, they should have made it more fun instead of locking you into it. CK2 had a very weak way of trying to make Gavelkind be viable, by increasing how many holdings you could have without penalty. But it was rare that a character could actually conquer or inherit enough holdings to made that useful, so it didn’t actually matter.

I’d much prefer it if CK3 made this succession law useful in a way that would be interesting to the players, then went back to allowing us to pick succession laws early.

Here’s an idea: since in Gavelkind every child inherits equally, maybe make it that under this succession law the player can pick who they will play as next. Not pick their heir, just who they will play as. You often get into a situation where your eldest child is a moron whereas your second oldest is smart, strong, handsome, and highly skilled. Without doing game-y shit like killing off your own child, their is now no way to play as that second son instead. I’d make it so that Gavelkind lets you play as them.

The eldest child would still inherit the highest title. Your older brother would still be the king or emperor while you’d be stuck as a count. But since you’d now be playing as a character with tons of good traits, you’d have to resources to climb your way back up. Even better is this would create a dynamic way for the player’s power to scale down during the game. The game becomes very boring very quickly once you created an empire, created your own faith, and are now too strong for anyone to challenge you. Players also don’t like losing wars, so they tend to just rage-quit instead of continuing play if something bad happens to them. This creates a dynamic where the player’s power goes exponentially up forever, and nothing can challenge them besides very boring and arbitrary RNG.

This Gavelkind change would change that. All the player’s heirs are equal under this succession law, so having the player choose who they will play as would be perfectly fine. And yet it would let the player lose a lot of power without rage quitting. This would be especially fun for players who play the genetics game, as choosing to continue on as a minor noble with all the good traits would be more rewarding for them than continuing as a powerful emperor or king.

In CK2 as a republic you could even choose your heir this way. Normally your heir was the oldest member of your Dynasty as a republic, but there was a special minor title called “designated heir” that let you get around this. You could do something similar in CK3 (although minor titles have been removed). Just call it “father’s/mother’s blessing” and draw parallels to the story of Jacob and Esau (it is a game all about catholic royalty, remember).

Mechanically I’d like to stress that my idea wouldn’t change how the inheritance works. If you choose to play as your youngest son instead of your oldest, you’ll still be choosing to play as the weakest successor. But it gives Gavelkind an actual reason to exist and be fun. If you want to stay powerful every generation, you pick Primogeniture. If you want to play the election game, you pick Elective. If you want to reunite your family lands after handing out vast tracks to your uncles, you pick Seniority (and for god’s sake don’t limit Seniority to only Bohemians!). But if you want to choose your future, you can stick with Gavelkind, the “historically accurate” inheritance law.

Crusader Kings 3: Should the players have fun, or the devs?

I can’t find the quote right now (and I have a headache so I don’t want to), but a quote attributed to Sid Meier is that in a video game, the goal should be for the player to be having fun, not the devs. I think of that a lot because one of the reasons I hate modern Paradox is because they think it’s the other way around. The player should dance to the dev’s tune, and if they’re not playing “right” then the devs need to “fix” that.

I say this because I recently posted about playing Imperator: Rome, and one of my friends thought it would be funny to gift me Crusader Kings 3, since I said in that review that I didn’t plan on ever buying another Paradox game. And when I started playing my gift, the first thing I realized is that CK3 is definitely a game that looked at CK2 and decided “the players weren’t playing right, we need to fix that.”

There’s a ton of things I could say about CK3. I’ll briefly mention that the lack of a ledger, most UI elements, and a MINIMAP make this by far the most tedious Paradox game to play. There’s some good ideas but it’s way to hard to get to any of them, pointlessly so. The whole thing needs a UI redesign from the ground up, but that’s not what I’m here for.

In CK2 and CK3, you play as a feudal family through the generations. From lord to lord you get to take the reigns of some feudal noble and expand your kingdom, fight off rebels, go Crusading, and what have you. As it’s a dynastic game, decisions about succession and titles are paramount. To cut to the chase, the primary inheritance law is called “Gavelkind” or “Partition,” in which the realm is divided among the ruler’s children. So if you hold 3 counties and have 3 sons (assuming male-preference), then each son inherits 1 county. This makes it difficult when your character dies and you start playing as the eldest son, since you’ve become 1/3 as strong as you were before.

This means that Gavelkind succession in CK2 was an endless loop of getting strong, realm partitioning, and working your way back to square 1. Most players hated it, and so the first piece of advice given to new players was always “get rid of Gavelkind.” It was fun to choose different succession laws for different occasions. Seniority let you reunite family lands as elderly, title-holding members of your dynasty were the primary inheritors. Primogeniture meant only your eldest son inherited. And elective meant you could choose your heir as long as you could game the election. It was pretty fun.

Then the devs saw this and decided that the players were playing “wrong.” They needed to be spending more time in Gavelkind as it was “historically accurate.” So now Gavelkind is renamed “partition” and it’s almost impossible to get out of it. Elective succession laws only apply to kingdom level titles, so your counties and duchies still get split on death even if you’re elective. Primogeniture has been relegated to being only available at the tail end of the game. To add, they’ve removed the ability to actually start at the tail end of the game, so you can’t even get any use out of Primogeniture since most people’s games will end much sooner when they get bored. And finally seniority succession is now locked behind a cultural tradition available only to the Bohemians. Because I guess no one else is able to just study the idea and decide “hey, we’d like to do that too.”

The game still isn’t historically accurate by any means. Succession was never this cut and dry. But the devs are having more fun now and the players less, so that’s really all that matters, isn’t it?

I’ve bought my friend Kenshi in return for CK3, and I feel I’ll quickly fall off of this one much like Imperator. It’s definitely not bad, but it’s moving in a direction I don’t appreciate.

Kenshi: A better game than Rimworld

Like I said in a previous post, I like Kenshi a lot more than Rimworld. The two aren’t actually that comparable, the title is just a dig at a friend of mine who called Rimworld “a better Kenshi.”

Kenshi is a brilliant mix of fantasy RPG, post-apocalyptic survival, and real time strategy. The game is also dipped in a more fantastical flavor that makes it a lot more novel than the scores of Fallout-lite clones where we fight through ruined 1st world cities. Instead, this is a world where wandering ronin have sword battles with skeletal robots, where 20-foot-tall “beak things” fight giant gorillas, and where a death-cult race of Foglanders capture and eat anyone who wanders into their domain. There’s a lot to love here and I’m glad the setting isn’t generic like so many others.

As an aside, I love the implication that this world has had multiple apocolypses. Nobody knows who built the skeletons or where they came from, as well as a number of other giant mechanical monstrosities that litter the world (like an orbital death-laser). In turn there are a number of libraries scattered throughout the world. They apparently come from the “second empire” and post-date the skeletons, but by game start they have all been abandoned and mostly destroyed. What few that remain are poured over by wandering tech hunters to regain their lost knowledge. This wasn’t a simple apocolypse that destroyed this world, it was a long-multistage affair, and it gives you a lot to think about as you wander across the wastelands.

And wander you shall because that’s the primary gameplay loop of Kenshi: running around and trying to not die. But the game lets you keep and train up a party of a few dozen dudes to do that with, and it can all get really fun. Putting your guys on different jobs, sneaking around if necessary, building up a team, this is where the fun of Kenshi is. And the part where it gets a bit Rimworldy is that you can eventually create a base of operations and have all your murder-hobos do manual labor like they were Rimworlders. Unlike Rimworld, the game doesn’t give you progressively harder challenges but gives you the hardest possible challenges pretty much all at once. If you want to settle down anywhere you’d best be ready for a war.

But having a war is also fun because the gameplay isn’t about numbers. You can have 100 guys, and you’ll still get wrecked by a single gate guard. That’s because during combat, the game takes a martial-arts movie approach of having all allies and enemies pair up for one-on-one combat. And if there’s 100 guys and 1 master, the 100 guys will patiently wait for their turn to attack, while the master will have such powerful swings that he can destroy 5 enemies with a single slice.

So the game is still enticing you to build up a squad and survive, but it’s not about tricking the AI into giving you easier challenges, but rather about building up the skills of your group until you can take on any challenge. When you finally train up some random schmuck to the point that they can solo and entire squad of Paladins, you really feel a sense of accomplishment.

Sorry, this post was a bit scatterbrained, but I really just wanted to gush about Kenshi. I hope there’s a sequel some time soon.

AI art is fun

I don’t have much to say on the AI art public debate yet, other than to say it feels overly vitriolic. But I can definitely say that AI art has been fun to make. I’d love to have the time to put some of these together into a 1-off RPG campaign, but I don’t know when I’d have the time. I’d also like to use some time to learn how I can use an AI art program on my own computer and train it against specific images I want, rather than relying on the web-browser based programs that are trained on a whole host of unnecessary data. 

But that’s for another time. For now, AI art is fun to toy around with, and dream of what could be very soon. 

Understanding why I don’t like Mana in EU4

So this is a big topic that I’ve thought about a lot but I’m going to break it down into little pieces to try to get something written on paper.

I don’t like the introduction of Mana in EU4. If you’ve played EU4, you know this is a well-worn topic, but for the others, here goes.

In EU4, most every action in the game will cost one of 3 resources. These resources are called “monarch points” but the community calls them “mana.” Your admin mana mostly deals with stability and integrating conquered provinces into your realm. Diplo mana mostly deals with peace treaties, trade, and the navy. Military mana mostly deals with the military and rebels. The problems with this system start right off the bat with how one imaginary resource is performing multiple completely unrelated tasks. Why will signing a big peace treaty prevent me from hiring a new admiral? And furthermore, why do most actions happen instantly once I save up enough mana, shouldn’t technology be something you research over time? Instead here you just save up your mana and at the click of a button all your soldiers are better.

The unrealistic game-y-ness is the origin of the (originally derogatory) term “mana,” as the system makes your king seem like a wizard casting spells rather than a monarch ruling the country. “I was casting a spell to summon a general, but now I can’t cast cannon spells!” <- I spent my military mana on generals and now can’t afford technology. Diplo mana is the worst by far with how game-y and spell-like it is. Peace treaties, trade powers, naval leaders, espionage ideas, diplo is just the dumping ground for anything and everything that doesn’t neatly fit into either admin or military.

Another big downside with the mana is how it is earned. Every country gets 3 points of each, but the lion’s share of your mana will come from your ruler, who can add up to 6 points in each category. You can also get up to 3 points of each type from advisors, but in the base EU4 game half or more of your country’s total mana comes solely from their king. This brings EU4 back into the “Great Man” theory of history, in that the country of your ruler doesn’t matter a bit. It is your ruler himself who is solely responsible for researching tech, maintaining stability, summoning generals, reducing war exhaustion, and everything else. There are a lot of questions about why some countries succeed and others fail. EU4’s answer is that successful countries just had a powerful wizard as ruler who generated enough mana to research all the tech.

And in a way it’s downright racist to present history this way. Countries don’t just succeed because of their ruler, European rulers weren’t smarter than their counterparts in the rest of the world, making every single action a country takes or can take come down to how much mana their ruler generates just makes it seem like you read Edward Gibbon once and then slept through all your history classes.

This isn’t just ahistorical but it’s bad gameplay too. You don’t have any control over who you get as ruler, so your game will largely be determined by how lucky you get with this. Making pretty much every action a player can take come down to the luck of how much mana they can afford (because of how good of a ruler they got) is just bad gameplay design. Oddly enough it’s pretty clear Paradox even agrees with me, because while they haven’t abandoned mana in EU4, they did mostly abandon it in Imperator:Rome, and in EU4 they have added a number of systems to address the luck-based irregularity of mana.

Pretty much every DLC Paradox puts out mostly revolves around new ways to let the player generate mana. Getting advisors up to level 5, estates, razing enemy territory as a horde, disinheriting bad rulers or heirs, it’s clear that Paradox knows that the mana system is unfun and too luck based. So every DLC lets players pay for the privilege of ignoring it more and more. But it’s too much work to change EU4 now, and Johan is too stubborn to admit that he’s wrong, so mana is going to see out the remainder of Paradox’s EU4. Fans should hope they see the light and remove it for EU5.

Not feeling good, but hope to have a post tomorrow

As the title says. Work is stressful when you’re not sure if you’re looking in the right direction. We have a lot of seemingly contradictory data coming in from our experiments, but those contradictions are hopefully pushing us in the direction of new science. Just how the shape of proteins relates to their disease states is still new ground, and I’m proud to be working in it. But it’s a difficult field to get data in.

I sometimes look back and wish I could have worked in an earlier time. You look at say Gregor Mendel’s pea plants and you think that that would have been a scientific endeavor you could do easily. Or discovering new elements in the 19th century when all you needed was an atomic mass and the mass ratios of an oxygen and fluorine salt. I think back and that research seems so much easier, since high school kids replicate some of those experiments today.

But I know it isn’t so simple. It’s easy to replicate those things first because we know what we’re looking for, and second because our technology is so much better. Finding the structure of benzene is a classic case, students learn how to draw benzene very early on in an organic chemistry class, but its structure confounded the best and brightest for decades in the 19th century. They didn’t have the accuracy of scales we do, the easy access to light-based detection methods, or nuclear based detection methods, hell they didn’t even have a theory of protons and neutrons. They knew Carbon and Hydrogen existed, but they weren’t in any way sure how to fit those onto a periodic table yet, and weren’t certain there wasn’t some new element hiding around in Benzene. Putting together an experiment to prove the structure of benzene, using only 19th century knowledge and 19th century technology, is a lot harder than it sounds, and me wishing I could have worked on that discovery instead of my current one is “grass-is-greener-ism.”

Another good one for any discussion: we often laugh at those silly medievals who believed the sun goes around the earth. I mean, even some Greek philosophers proposed it, but alas the medievals were just too closed-minded, right? But actually the geocentric theory did seem to be parsimonious for a good long while. Here’s a fun thought experiment: how would you prove geocentricism using only what you could find in the 10th century? No telescope, no pictures from orbit, just observations of the sky. If you know your astronomy you know there are certain irregularities with the orbits of planets as viewed from earth, and that is a good argument against geocentricism. Yet it was also noted that there is no perception of movement when one is standing on the earth, and that was taken as an argument against heliocentricism. It wasn’t until Galileo’s theory of relative motion that a cogent counter-argument was put in place, and so if you want to prove heliocentricism in the 10th century you’d also have to do the hard work of demonstrating relativity like Galileo did. Copernicus’s model of heliocentricism is often seen as revolutionary, but it still had endless epicycles needed to explain it, more even than geocentricism, making it not that much better than Ptolemy’s geocentricism, so if you want to argue for heliocentricism by attacking epicycles you’d also need to do the hard math that Kepler did in establishing how orbits can be calculated based on ellipses. It really isn’t as easy a problem as it sounds.

So yeah, work is hard but I guess it’s always been hard. We think all the easy discoveries have been made, but those discoveries were made when they were hard to make.

Imperator: Rome, a laundry list of grievances

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.