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.