I had no desire to play the new Paradox game Imperator:Rome, but when I received it for free from a friend last Christmas, I thought I might as well respect the gift and give it a go. Besides, they say the game was changed significantly since its mana-infested launch and I thought I might as well give it a go.

It’s not great.

To start with the good, Imperator: Rome does try to have unique concepts. You can play as unsettled tribes, for instance. This allows you to move your people around the map and claim vast tracks of territory, as well as assimilate large numbers of people into your migratory horde.

You can also play as a settled tribe and reform into a Roman-style republic or a kingdom. This is done OK but it does feel mostly like a less-fleshed out version of Vicky 2 or base-game EU4’s Westernization mechanic. It’s just kind of there.

And there’s republics with their own factions and influence. Whatever.

I could give a laundry list of grievances as to why none of these mechanics really entertain me. But the biggest problems with Imperator are much much bigger: there’s nothing to do outside war, and war is boring.

Let’s start with the first, Paradox plays motte-and-bailey with what exactly they are. They proudly coined “Grand Strategy” as the term to market themselves, and push their games as a way to play historical simulators or alternative history. Yet when pressed about the bad history or lack of strategy their games include, Johan, a high ranking Paradox dev who loves to fight and troll on social media, will exclaim that these are wargames, that war is the point and it’s what they focus on. So the fact that Imperator isn’t fun when you aren’t at war is both a damning indictment of Paradox’s claim yet also gets deflected by people like Johan.

With that said, peace is boring in Imperator. You’re supposed to use this time to manage your empire, convert conquered peoples to your religion and culture so they stop being so mad that their parents were killed, and building up your forces and treasure through buildings. This is all done terribly. Converting people is a waiting game that is supposed to be influenced by governor actions, yet those governor actions run on mana, the same currency you need to start wars, change laws, or doing any of the other things in the game. When a governor dies or gets replaced, their replacement undoes all the settings you put in, forcing you to spend yet more mana to fix them. By locking the converting and enforcing (with things like harsh treatment or local autonomy) behind mana, you encourage the player to just not interact with this function at all, lest they waste their precious mana and have none left over for war, the closest thing this game has to fun.

What’s worst is that this system doesn’t have to be here, previous Paradox game Victoria 2 had a genuinely better system with national foci (plural for focus). You only had a few national foci at any time, so for a large empire you had to move them around to get the best effect. And there were always things you wanted to do with your foci, encourage clergy to get more research and literacy, encourage craftsmen and capitalists to get more industry, encourage soldiers to prepare for or sustain a war. You had to make interesting trade-offs between your long-term and short term national interests, and weather what you needed in the near future was a more literate populace or a wealthier one or what have you. And if the national focus system (which DIDN’T use mana!) was just ported straight to Imperator, it would be much better.

But it isn’t. So being in peace costs mana, a scarce resource. And in turn this means peace is boring.

So war, that’s fine right? Well recent design decisions at Paradox have turned war into a boring slog. I wonder if they got taken over by secret pacifists who want to teach us all about the banality of war by making a wargame boring during war.

At some point a few key decisions were reached at Paradox interactive. Now I want to preface by saying that Johan and his social-media trolling ilk will fervently deny this, they denied for years the most obvious Paradox designs such as AIs not taking attrition in many circumstance. It’s very dumb that Paradox lies about their own design decisions, and lying to your customers is just one reason I have zero sympathy for them or desire to give them money ever again. But anyway these design decisions make war a boring slog that isn’t really worth it.

First up is the changes to shattered retreat (SR). I first encountered SR in CK2 and here’s how it is supposed to work. In base-game CK2 and other Paradox games, a defeated army or navy will simply move one province away to rest and heal. But the victorious army is now standing on the province where the battle happened, and there’s no difficulty in them walking to the defeated army and starting an immediate fight. Since the defeated army just lost and is now smaller, it will likely lose again, retreating further and further battle after battle until it’s completely wiped out. This often turned wars into basically 1-battle affairs, where whoever won the first battle would win the entire war as the defeated army had no way to rest, recuperate, and respond.

SR is supposed to fix this as a defeated army marches away and cannot be engaged by anyone until it reaches a point several provinces away. If you chase after it, you’ll find you cannot engage it until it reaches its destination. What’s more, it slowly regains some of its moral as it marches, so when you finally do engage it it will be stronger than what you may expect. This is supposed to allow defeated armies to get back into the fight and mean that the whole war isn’t decided by a single battle. The problem here is that it’s too easy to abuse this mechanics and the AI always does so. If a battle seems like it’s even slightly going the wrong way, the AI will retreat across their territory. You fight it again and it retreats again. Battles have become almost bloodless affairs in Imperator where only a small fraction are lost in any fight. Gone are the days of Darius when a single defeat from Alexander forced him to raise an entirely new army, instead a single army can fight dozens of battles, be defeated in every single one, and the soldiers and generals will never desert, quit, or get cut down as they flee like what usually happened in a Roman-era battle. In fact another small change enforces this: when an army retreated from battle in prior games, the army against it got a few free hits in before it left. This was to mimic the actual circumstances of retreating troops being cut down, but this mechanic is gone.

What the above all does is turn Imperator into whack-a-mole. You have to chase down enemy armies constantly and it just isn’t fun.

A second SR change is the omniscient AI. The AI knows at every moment where all of your troops are. This means there’s no reason to ever be strategic, no reason to ever have forces in multiple places to cover multiple avenues. The AI always knows exactly how many troops you have and where, and isn’t shy about walking half-way across the world to siege down an undefended province. So if you don’t play whack-a-mole with them the AI can walk past any obstacle to annoy your backlines, and will do so even while their capital city is being razed to the ground by your forces. The AI’s armies and soldiers apparently don’t care about the dying of their families back home, but your own empire can get severe penalties from being sieged down from behind. And if you DO send an army towards them, the moment you click the map the AI is instantly alerted that an army is coming their way, even if they have no way of knowing your army is on the move. They will then scuttle back to where they came from. So you either play whack-a-mole or you just ignore them, because you can’t trap them, fight them, or do any of the strategy you’d expect from a strategy game.

Finally, the AI has decided it will never EVER engage unless it thinks it has overwelming odds of victory. This turns them into little McClellans who will retreat from every fight and completely refuse to even engage you if you’re strong enough. I’ve genuinely had wars where I never fought the enemy because they decided I was too powerful and just ran their armies away. Again I guess they don’t care about protecting their homes and families.

All this together turns war into a boring slog. If you are weaker than the AI, you want to get a local concentration of forces and defeat AI armies one by one. But they know your every movement and whether they will win a battle and they always retreat, so this tactic turns into my least favorite game of whack-a-mole ever. And if you are stronger, you want to find their forces, defeat them, and start the siege. You skip steps 1 and 2 because since you are stronger the AI never engages.

It’s just a terrible game overall.