I am still enjoying writing about Dominions, especially since the 6th game was just got released. Last time, I talked about overwhelming your enemies in an underwater battlefield, this time I’ll talk about poisoning them in their sleep.
To recap, Dominions is a game series where gods and their armies fight climactic battles to become the one true Pantokrator, the almighty. In the early game, armies are small and tactics simple, but by the mid to late game, armies can be so ginormous that troops have difficulty even reaching each other through the mass of bodies. In these scenarios, “army wipe” spells, that is spells that do damage to an entire army all at once, are very powerful.
Let’s back up a second, the normal way magic works is just as it works in any RPG you’ve ever played. The wizard casts fireball, it travels to the enemy, and deals damage. That’s how most spells in the game work. Some spells however, are *battlefield wide* spells. The wizard casts them, and now the entire battlefield is effected.
Foul Vapors is one such battlefield wide spell. When the wizard casts it, toxic clouds start to cover the battlefield and all soldiers, friend or foe, begin taking poison damage.
Obviously, killing your own troops isn’t usually a recipe for success. But Foul Vapors can be paired with other nature spells such as “Serpent’s Blessing” which make all your troops resist poison, or can be paired with units who naturally resist poison. That way, even if your own troops die, they die much more slowly than the enemy’s.
In this way, Foul Vapors can make for an exceptional army killing spell. You don’t need the strongest troops or the most fireballs, you just need 1 mage and enough troops to keep the enemy busy. After a few rounds of Foul Vapors, you’ll have killed an entire army no matter how many of them came to the fight.
But Foul Vapors isn’t perfect, if the mage who casts it gets killed it turns off, much to the relief of the enemy troops. And it won’t take many rounds for the enemy to reach your mage if you took a truly paltry number of troops. That’s where option 2 comes into play: Rigor Mortis.
Rigor Mortis is another battlefield spell, but cast by a Death mage this time instead of a Nature/Water mage like Foul Vapors. What it does is deal *fatigue* damage to every living (ie not undead) unit on the battlefield. In Dominions, units die when they reach zero health, but they simply fall asleep when they reach 0 fatigue.
But Rigor Mortis paired with Foul Vapors is an *incredible* combination. Rigor Mortis puts all units to sleep, which in turn protects the Foul Vapors caster from ever being damaged. Then Foul Vapors works to kill the entire enemy army in their sleep without your own army even needing to work.
This is extra potent when your own army is made up of the undead. Undead units are immune to Rigor Mortis (they already passed that point), but are *also* highly resistant to poison. Rigor Mortis plus Foul Vapors backed up by an undead army will see the enemy put to sleep, then poisoned, and finally hacked apart by the undead horde.
Battlefield wide spells are some of the most powerful and fun spells in the game. I love watching a battle where I successfully baited the enemy into a trap and killed them with a few battlefield wide spells. These spells are powerful, expensive, and rare, but if you can pull them off you can win wars against almost infinite enemy forces.
Today’s tactic is somewhat unique to the underwater nations of the game, and it has to do with summoning so many creatures of the deep that your enemies will start to think Aquaman is OP.
Dominions has a lot of spells that summon new units, see my post on hordes of skeletons above. But skeletons are undead, and can be banished by a simple priest. The underwater war takes summoning to a whole new level.
First, there’s “school of sharks,” a simple water 2 spell that summons (what else) a school of 10 sharks to attack your enemies. 10 sharks may not tip the battle on their own, these are large underwater armies clashing together after all. But 10 mages summoning 10 sharks each? You’re going to need a bigger boat.
Next, there’s “Swarm.” Swarm is a Nature 2 spell that’s more well-known on land. There, it summons small bugs to harass the enemy. Underwater, it summons fish and shrimp.
Then there’s “Shark Attack.” Shark attack will summon a bloodthirsty shark every time an enemy or ally takes damage. These sharks will then *usually* attack the enemy lines. Sharks still aren’t necessarily as powerful as an armored underwater warrior, but the best part of Shark Attack is that they are *endless*. Sharks will continue to spawn as long as units are taking damage, a constant horde of teeth and jaws to harass and torment your enemies.
The final cherry on top is Water Elementals. Water elementals are summoned alone, and they cost gems to summon too. But unlike 10 sharks, 20 shrimp, or even infinite sharks, water elementals can regenerate underwater. This is huge in an ocean battle, having a unit that can take endless damage, regenerate it all and still pack a punch is a game changer, and before they nerfed Water Elementals heavily, they were the end-all and be-all of underwater combat. They’re still strong of course, just slightly less so.
With these 4 conjuration spells, underwater armies can send forth a tidal wave of bodies in ways land nations could only dream of. It gets better because many of these enemies get summoned behind the enemy’s lines, wrecking their weak support units and throwing their battle line into chaos.
These and other spells let water nations orchestrate a symphony of chaos against anyone they face. Land nations beware, the sea is deadly.
I wrote earlier about Dominions 5 and its many complexities. It’s an incredibly deep game with a lot of moving parts, from sacred troops to magic research to recruiting or summoning mages. And I even outlined some of my favorite strategies in later posts.
If you enjoyed those posts or were interested in trying Dominions for yourself, Dominions 6 is out now. This latest installment brings about 5 new nations to the title, raising to total to I think somewhere north of 80. And each nation is a wholly unique beast so it’s really fun to craft perfect, elaborate strategies for each one.
As it’s just come out, the multiplayer community is at its most active, so now’s the best time to play multiplayer as well. I’ll still be thinking about the game more than playing it, but if you buy it too I hope you’ll realize why even just thinking about it can be very fun.
“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
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.
Streams of Consciousness 