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.
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.
I’m not sure if everyone calls it this, but to me “ironman” games are those that don’t let you save and reload whenever you want. 30 years ago these games were the norm because most gaming was done either at arcades (which demanded quarters, so letting you save and reload anywhere hurt their business) or on rather weak computers (which didn’t have the memory for dedicated save slots). But for the most part, “ironman” seemed like a quaint 20th century style of gaming that was thrown own when computers got stronger and arcades died. Recently there’s been a resurgance of games that don’t let you save and reload, not for technical reasons, but for the personal reasons that the devs or power-gamers think it’s “cheating.” I normally don’t play ironman games, my time is worth more than that, but I received For the King as a gift and so decided to give it a go.
I decided to try For The King single player. It was going ok, until I tried to fight my first battle 1 level higher than me (level 5 vs my level 4). First turn, the boss enemy confused my whole party. Confusion rarely “wears off” in this game, so from then on the battle was auto-piloted into a total party kill. And a total party kill would have been game over, 3 lost lives.
I don’t like ironman because it heavily discourages experimentation. I decided to try this fight because my friend had told me that For the King doesn’t have the Divinity 2 problem of “battles at a higher level are impossible.” And yet the way this battle went heavily teaches the player “never ever fight enemies higher level than you” because I barely scratched the enemies and the entire battle was decided on a single move from the first turn of the boss.
Of course, I said to hell with that and End-Task’d the game instead of letting it end in defeat. And since the autosave was right before I tried the battle… I just went and tried again.
The battle went a hell of a lot better the second time. The total-party-confuse still happened, but this time it didn’t occur until the enemy’s 3rd turn. And also one of my characters switched to his gun, fired, and then snapped out of confusion (as I said, a rare occurrence). I was actually able to reload and fire to kill the enemy myself.
This single battle teaches the player 2 entirely different lessons based on a single dice roll. If the confusion comes out first turn, the lesson is “gtfo, high level enemies will kill you.” If confusion comes out later, the lesson is simply that some enemies are powerful and have party-wide attacks. In a normal game, the player can reload when killed and try again. They can see how the game “really” works, ie “are higher level enemies impossible or was I just unlucky?” In ironman games, the player cannot learn how the game works in game. It heavily encourages meta-gaming (looking everything up online) and discourages experimentation.
When you load up the game, it starts immediately with what feels like a developer having a hissy-fit over people complaining about randomness. When I loaded the game for the first time, it forced me to accept what was essentially an in-game EULA saying “don’t think you’ll defeat the evil your first try, more powerful heroes than you have tried and failed.” That same sentence loads up every time you start the game. It REEKS of a dev being very angry at people complaining about the randomness and lost runs, and so trying to force the players to accept the “correct” way of thinking, ie that the game will happily waste your time with a bad roll.
I on the other hand will continue to think my time is far more important than any game. This is the kind of game I will never buy for myself, I’m a busy man and don’t want to spend hours on a game only to get kicked back to the beginning by a single bad roll.
But I can still see the appeal. The systems are quite good, the focus is fun, and I’m loving my little cross-classing that I’ve been able to do. I got a Goblin Bow in this game and handed it to both my Bard and Scholar at different points because it was stronger than their normal attacks and had pierce. I handed the Bard a Magic Book weapon later because I hadn’t found good bard weapons and she had decent intelligence. There’s a lot to like here, but the game would definitely be improved by having a non-ironman game mode. It doesn’t hurt the ironman people’s fun and lets folks like me enjoy it too.
I wrote before about how I prefer real-time-with-pause to turn-based gameplay in RPGs. I wrote that post with Divinity 2: Original Sin in mind since it’s a turn-based game that I did not enjoy. I tried replaying it this week… and I still don’t enjoy it. The first island was a bit more enjoyable this time since I knew all the little places to get experience points, but honestly this game has some terrible mechanical decisions that make it an unfun slog that punishes you for exploring around the second island.
The first decision is that characters’ power is almost entirely based on their level. Power and level always go together in all RPGs, but in Pillars of Eternity I could beat some encounters well below the suggested level just by mastery of the systems and a bit of luck. Divinity 2 doesn’t have this. A fight at 1 level below the enemy is very difficult. At 2 levels below the enemy, it’s nearly impossible. At 4 levels below the enemy I was still pulling off victories in Pillars of Eternity, and I’ve never had a chance to do that here.
So you NEED to be at the correct level to have any success whatsoever in beating the fights. But the second terrible decision was to scatter the content for different levels all around the map with no rhyme, reason, or communication with the player. You might be wandering around completing a level 9 quest and suddenly get dropped into a level 11 fight. The quickest move here is to just reload, which also takes far too much time for a simplistic RPG like this one. There is no way of knowing if you’re heading towards content that is level appropriate or towards certain demise and another minute of looking at loading screens.
Taken together, the game is unfun if you’re underleveled and it doesn’t do anything to make sure you’re appropriately leveled for your challenges. The game is also unfun if you’re overleveled by the way, as enemies can barely scratch you. But with nothing done to make sure I’m finding level-appropriate content, I spent most of the game not having fun because I’m either over- or under-leveled for what I’m facing.
I recently wrote about how the AI in Civ 6 seems to be worse at its own game than previous Civ games. I want to give a shoutout to the youtuber Sulla whose “AI survivor” series put this into sharp contrast for me. Sulla sets up games of Civilization 4 that pit the AIs entirely against each other, with no player involvement. He then looks to see how it all turns out.
In Civilization 4, the AIs will usually manage to conquer each other. The games start with 8 AIs and it’s never been the case that they all survive to reach the end of the game. On the other hand in Civ 6 I rarely see even a single AI get eliminated unless I’m doing the eliminating. It just goes to show how passive the Civ 6 AIs are, and how utterly incapable they are at using 1upt and the rules of their own game.
Playing Civ 6 made me nostalgic for Civ 4, so I made it my project to get better at it. I’ve been watching videos from Sullla’s channel (a big Civ lp-er) and have learned a lot of good stuff that helped me in Civ 4
Now to start with this victory wasn’t exactly easy. I took the most broken, OP leader in Civ 4 (Huana Capac) and used a map-type that the AI does really poorly in (highlands with dense peaks, AI pathfinding screws up). Even then I did a tiny bit of save-scumming at the beginning to fight off the barbarians. But once things were going, I found that a Civ 4 game can be really easy… when it acts like a Civ 6 game. Let me explain:
The reason Highlands map is so easy is as I said the AI’s pathfinding screws up. I never got war declared on me during my Emperor level game, my only neighbor was Charlemagne who loved me because I adopted his religion, and my other close neighbors fought inconclusive wars amongst each other with no territory changing hands. This let me sit back and tech away, *and that’s also how I won my Civ 6 deity game*. It’s made me definitely appreciate that one of the big things holding back Civ 6 difficulty is the AIs’ inability to conquer each other and snowball out of control. In a normal Civ 4 game one or more AIs will declare war, conquer their neighbor, and suddenly roll right up to the player’s boarders with the world’s largest army in tow. A successful conqueror loses relatively few units to gain a lot of territory, and unsuccessful one throws away all their production producing units. This helps AIs snowball when they focus on conquest. I don’t know exactly why Civ 6 AI is unable to conquer each other (OK I do, it’s 1upt) but this failure is a large part of the reason why I think they aren’t able to challenge a player once you escape the early game and are in the midgame. No single AI will be so far ahead of everyone as to be unstoppable, everyone is usually around the same size.
So that’s a bunch of random thoughts, but it’s what I thought of when playing Civ 4.
Streams of Consciousness 