Imperator: Rome 2.0 - The Best Paradox Game? - Review

hello everybody realm builder guy here and welcome back to the channel and welcome to my review of imperator rome 2.0 the marius update of course came out on the 16th of february i'm recording this on the 18th of february after spending a few hours in the game checking out all the new features and kind of deciding it is time to bring imperator rome to the channel maybe if just as this review or some general updates but i felt like it was needed imperator rome is a game that i really enjoyed uh for a period of time and then kind of fell out with like so many people in fact i haven't touched the game in nearly a year almost i'd say probably about eight or nine months and the reason for that being is just a lot of other things happened and it wasn't a priority game for me now when it first launched i like so many like tens of thousands jumped on it and said ah a roam game as a pdx grand strategy game fantastic and yeah i think after about three hours of gameplay i was i was done with it to be honest i just didn't like it i thought it was uh clunky it just wasn't right it wasn't a it wasn't a great game to be honest um and then with the cicero update and then the menander update it became closer to a truly finished product and became one of my more favorite games but now with the marius update 2.0 i mean it's it's basically a new game in many aspects and so i wanted to give it a review show you guys some of the features that i have picked out as important and that we can kind of talk about and highlight them and maybe why you should give imperative rome another chance as as i certainly will now as always uh likes are much appreciated subscribe also so you don't miss out on any grand strategy content be it imperator rome or crusader kings 3 or other things here on the channel i will have a link down in the description to my nexus gg store where you can buy both the game compared to rome as well as the heirs of alexander expansion pack which is the addition to 2.0 and i will talk about the expansion features towards the end of the video but let's dive in and the first thing we're gonna notice we're gonna start a new game is the fact that it is a completely different looking game you can see it right here it already right here it looks different so let's just pick macdon because i enjoy them we're going to click on start and dive in so what has changed well one of the biggest things and again i'm going to go through this through everything that's free with the update and then talk about the purchase options at the end of course i do have the dlc so or the expansion pack i don't know what we're calling it a dlc i think a dlc right so we're gonna go with that but we're gonna go through first features then i'm gonna talk about some game balance and ai things all that's free and then we'll talk about the expansion pack features towards the end so free free free free uh the first thing you'll notice it looks completely different they have completely revamped the user interface and i like it i like it a lot they also added this little atlas map mobe mode which is really cool and i listened to an interview with argeo who is the head of the design team or the game director for imperator rome and he said the inspiration came from german atlases especially historical ones and that is kind of what i felt but i didn't want to just say that because i didn't know but you can see here obviously the major cities and just it's cool the atlas mode it really doesn't help you much in gameplay but it looks cool it's great for screenshots so anyway so as you can see a lot of things have changed so the the top header has basically moved over here and i feel like these are the icons they use now are more how should i say intuitive that that's a word right yeah intuitive that's definitely the way to go with it so overall fantastic i like almost everything almost everything uh there are a few few little things i'm not huge on if i'm perfectly honest um and i'm gonna kind of stick with what uh lord lambert said in his review uh as well and what he said also previously was just not a huge fan of pie charts but what i like now they did a little hot patch fix where if you scroll over it it'll show you the percentage in all of these so whether it's your culture or um religion as well as your your pop uh your population i guess overview of percentage of what are free men what are citizens tribesmen slaves etc etc so they have fixed that the other thing that i'll quickly mention that i'm not a big fan of if we show opinions that turquoise background with the green and the blue the red you can see but green i can't read it and i'm not colorblind uh i mean you have to scroll over it to see it this needs to be changed um so there those are all the negatives negatives out of the way now it's purely about positives so aside from the user interface changing and just looking great it is a beautiful game now i would say it has the best looking maps period uh you have a bunch of different map modes here of course that you can pick from and add to it it's it's just fantastic um i'm i'm a big big fan um so again that's the user interface now let's go over to some of the changes the biggest change is really how the military operates click on the military you have levees and legions now we are a monarchy in macadam so you have a legion right away the thing about legions are they cost a lot of money this is their current this is the stratos of macedonia or macedonia however you want to call it and they are costing 3.5 so as you can see here the um their overall cost not seeing it in here ford maintenance wages fleet maintenance either way it's i don't see it here interesting um but they they cost money levies don't cost any money these come from it's kind of like think of it as crusader kings three so if you go to war you can raise all your levies or just some of your levies and they will then pop up and pop is the key word so the levees come from your integrated pops in times of war there are no there's there's no maintenance cost for them said it's population cost and those pops then not slaves are taken out of your economy so your production goes down and so on so then your money starts to go down because obviously you're producing less income because there are less people out there plus if you get stack wiped as far as i understand you actually lose a huge percentage of those pops so they are gone so thinking about war in a levy sense is key and being strategic about it because if you lose those pops it could have a huge damaging effect to your economy also if you are focused on levies and you're constantly at war your economy will tank because you don't have the population to produce the revenue that you need conversely if you have legions legions are very powerful compared to levees but they cost you a lot of money so again it'll hurt your economy uh i would say especially if you get into the mid and late game legions are more the thing to do than levees unless you're a tribe because as a tribe you only have levees you don't have legions so if you're a tribe you may want to think about becoming civilized so that you can get legions because early game your levees will overwhelm your enemies but once rome gets legions they can roll you pretty quickly now the other thing is of course monarchies get legions right away if you are a republic like rome you actually have to make decisions unlock technologies or innovations however you want to call it and advance towards that so that leads me to the next topic and those are inventions again these are the key free features in the game so if we go to the invention tab here now you can see you have marshall advances civic advances oratory advances and religious advances so technology advances now provide one innovation so here innovation per level as you can see we've got twos across the board so we have eight innovations available to us you can spend these innovations in new branching trees to specialize your civilization so if you go to marshall advances you see here you've got this really nice tree if you want to move it around press and hold the middle mouse button and you can kind of scroll around a little bit here make that a little bit smaller or larger if you are a republic like rome the professional training is what you need to be able to do the make the decision in your laws to get legions um so going down this one the other nice thing is they have this new planning mode so say you want to go here it kind of it could show you the you know you can kind of plan which way you want to progress through here and kind of check it all out without having to commit to it so there there's all of that so um you can use these innovations say you want to go with military artisans it'll cost one macadon gains one free province investment military provincial investment costs minus 10 percent click ok it gives you the effect and boom now you can start moving down here if you have that planning mode it helps you kind of map out previously which way you want to go now there's so much going on here uh whether it's civic advance advances oratory advances and religious advances i'm not going to go through all of them here this is kind of an overview and a review but this helps you map out the different ways you want to go with your innovations um i tested it and kind of played around and just did the first one for each one of these just to unlock the direction but this will help you map out which way your civilization wants to go and that's a key thing what kind of a game has imperator rome become in argeo the um the head of the game design team said it is a civilization builder game and you are building your civilization but i'm going to get into how you can play compared to rome to really get the most out of it in a little bit so again we have talked about innovations now we've talked about the major updates to the military in terms of legions versus levies but there's more to talk about as far as features go with the military now you can uh with legions you can also add the cohort of engineers now what do the engineers do the engineers is a new unit type which aids in river crossing sieges and paving roads and i'll get into the game battle and stuff when it comes to especially the road stuff so they are an important one tack them on to your legions always do that and you know one engineer per 10 other units negates those river crossing penalties which of course is something to keep in mind then the new legacy of alexander war goal for all the successor kingdoms in which the ownership of conquered territories flipped immediately so that's kind of one of those things if you're one of the successor kingdoms as far as i know that war gold though only exists for the lifespan of the original ruler but i may be wrong there but that is what i think i heard but don't quote me on that one you know if he dies you may lose that war goal but it is a way to expand um then the other thing is if you go to war say we attack these guys down here occupying a province's forts and capital now occupy the entire province you don't need a carpet siege you don't need to go in and siege every single province uh or every single territory within the province to get the entire province if you ceach down the forts and the capital boom you got it it is all yours now the next thing in the free features are buildings ports you can construct ports in any coastal territory now previously it was predetermined where for uh ports could go but you can just plant them anywhere here and if you are a coastal nation like macadam where you have a lot of different options here you can put it anywhere and that's kind of nice that you can you know um you're not limited and you know you're on the coast if you want to develop a certain area and say i want to port here out of strategic reasons then you're able to do so now previously it was predetermined where you could put a port so you had to be a little bit more strategic about how you develop your um your country your provinces according to that now that's less of a case you could kind of plop them down wherever and you say hey on a naval base up here i want to build my navy up over here because then i'm quick out this way that's fine or if you gain a territory say up here and you want to put a port here just so you can build ships here to go through that see then that is fine as well uh the other thing uh quickly about buildings they now contribute to civilization level and territory so keep an eye on that when you go into a province you have your building screen here and you have multiple different ones you can build and it'll tell you for instance the granary here local civilization level of plus two percent provincial food capacity plus 200 and the cost is 66 gold your gulp being up here in your treasury um one thing i forgot to mention about the military combat width has been uh changed a little bit now it is more dynamic and based on terrain kind of like a crusader king's three terrain will determine your combat with so there too you know if you are in a mountainous terrain it's a little bit narrower than if you are in open plains uh how do you know if you're in open plains well look right here they've changed this i love that they added the settlement in here the graphics this is again part of the ui it shows you the planes how things look uh if i go to my general here you can see in the background it's the cut like the the landscape he's in he's in planes and that changes dynamically which is really really cool i love what they've done visually with this game it is absolutely fantastic so now let's talk a little bit about the game balance features that have come to imperator rome so manpower pools up here they regenerate faster which is great so you know you lose a war or even if you win a war but it was costly you're not stuck waiting forever to get your manpower back up so there's that uh free men and tribesmen now provide increased manpower so that's something to keep in mind um the engineers i did talk about them a little bit a little bit ago and they built the build road cost is reduced by engineer cohorts food production is now also possible without a surplus which is fantastic and they were reworked a number of the buildings um i forget you know the the different uh bonuses and modifiers that you have with them they they change some of them i don't know all of them i'm not going to go through them but this is what it is they did change them population growth speed and capacity now scale with civilization values so civilization value is one of your your key um things you need to keep an eye on i can't see that here anywhere but civilization value is very very very important tribesmen now they have changed some things for tribesmen let's find a tribe here there we go uh one of these guys is a tribe and with tribesmen they actually consume less food so aside from the fact that unique thing there is that the levees that you raise as a tribe um populate within the tribal chiefs lands but they also consume less food so that's great because i guess they live off the land a little bit more theoretically the next big thing in game balance has been tweaked is pop migration so the speed has been reduced significantly with the exception of tribesmen again tribesmen migrate that is that is historically accurate all settlement buildings now reduce migration speed from their territory by an additional 25 percent so that brings it to minus 100 so essentially these are the notes coming directly from paradox this will now effectively remove migration unless there are extenuating circumstances occupation famine unrest but migration has basically been eliminated from the game unless there's a major cause and unless you're a tribe civic technology the next thing we want to talk about here um where are we technology so civic technology civic technology now grants one percent population capacity and one percent global food per level so each level you increase here you can see their pop capacity up two percent and monthly food modifier plus two percent so if you want growth in in your population and you want to have more food going down the civic advances is very important but they no longer grant commerce income so that's something to keep in mind then there have been some other changes here to monarchies uh let's see where can we find it so if we go to our government you can name an heir so you have this little anoint button right here monarchies can choose a primary air from their pretenders so we have one here that is phillipos but we could pick antipatros alexandros or plestarcos so you can do that now on top of it they have added the elective monarchy as a government type which is pretty cool actually that's adding another government type is very important in elective monarchies it's kind of that bridge gap you almost have your republics and you have your oligarchs your monarchies and now you have republican uh not republican monarchies elective monarchy so it adds something like that all cultures or cultural groups now have a levy template so let's go here so here you have your macedonian or macedonian and you can see down here it says heavy cavalry 15 heavy infantry 35 light infantry 50 so when you raise your levees that culture will basically you know the pops belong to this culture can raise the following levees that is what those levees will be so if we go over here to the province of europa these are odricians so their levees are five percent heavy calorie 15 like cavalry 20 heavy infantry and 60 light infantry so as i already mentioned levees had no longer have a maintenance cost but their pop sees producing base resources while raised so that's that's a key thing they've also changed something here with uh if we go to trade you know you can still see your different trade um trade goods if you go to a province you can see it's been expanded here and here's the other thing you can enable or disable automatic trade if we go here to the nation overview administration provinces so you have all your provinces listed here and you can either do an automatic trade or do it yourself so if you have a very competent governor that may be something you want to delegate if you're not a micromanager that's maybe something delicate uh i equate this to i play a lot of football manager if you are a football manager player this is basically giving your assistant manager training i mean it's delegating or your director of football contract signings if you don't play football manager that all means absolutely nothing to you but that's that's kind of how i do this or how i view this i messed around with it it's not super great if you don't have great governors but it does lead to certain types of play styles and i'll get to play styles at the end then um strategic i'm saying um a lot i apologize for that make it a drinking game if it bothers you strategic trade goods have no bearing on levy composition which is really cool uh so they just assume that cultures bring their own horses and elephants with them it's just i like the way it should be it's like you raise uh levees here with cavalry and they're gay i'm gonna take my old donkey with me and that is now part of it and you don't have to supply it through strategic trade goods there is also a provincial fortress limit which has been added and will incur costs when you exceed it so that's something to keep in mind there ai they have also tweaked the ai quite a bit so it's significantly better at economic diplomacy it's great get some of the exploitation out of there uh it also changes missions after 60 years if it's been following the same one which is really good so mission trees are there i'll get into mission trees when we get to the expansion features here in a second and the other one that i really really really really really like is that ai nations with republic or monarchy government types will be far less likely to expand into tribal territory without a pre-existing claim so you won't see rome go here and then all of a sudden shoot straight up here to conquer all this instead they will focus on similar government types to conquer first before they go after tribes which is a little closer to the way it happened in history so if you're rome you're gonna try to eat up some similar areas down here and then maybe go over to greece and i've seen some time lapses and overall what you're getting out of this is a more historical of the ai which is something i really enjoy as an historian i like seeing that play out i do like a historical sandbox off and that still happens but just so you know rome ai is still powerful so that that doesn't really change um the antigonids tend to fall to pieces armenia tends to grow well and egypt is also quite powerful uh the salukids often form persia and then of course moria they gobble up all of india super fast so keep an eye on those guys over there carthage i've seen them go either way but that is the key thing is just the expansion the ai has been improved a lot which is huge so now let's talk about the expansion feature so this is the 9.99 heirs of alexander expansion pack that you can get on my nexus gg store link in the description to support the channel i of course paid for it i don't this isn't sponsored by paradox paradox didn't send me a code i pay for all this stuff out of my own pocket now there are a few things to talk about there are 18 new diadokey mission trees have been added so those cover thrace the antigone kingdom egypt macadam and the seleucid empire so these are basically the heirs of alexander hence it's called the heirs of alexander so they have new mission trees which you have to pay for but it's great i'm not see i like mission trees i like to um kind of follow them if we go here to missions let's do perlim uh macedonia start the mission boom here is your mission tree again middle mouse button lets you go through that and you can kind of pick which way you want to go and how you want to expand it's it's a nice guide because obviously it gives you certain goals and completion like if you limia breeding program you know task has unfulfilled conditions et cetera et cetera but uh if on completion macadam loses 800 gold but we'll now produce horses uh you know those are kind of the missions but there are specific ones 18 18 mission trees added that's huge then for legions where's my legion there are stratos you have these right here so you have legion dedication legion primogenia you can look at the history which is really great for people that like to play like i do a little bit more role-playing and according to a recent community poll here on my channel 76 of you are also more role players than men maxers so what can you do you get 24 honors and dishonors can be earned by legions distinguishing or disgracing them with their actions and what does that do look at this right here unit modifier legion dedication morale of armies plus five percent army movement speed plus ten percent discipline plus five percent and you can see this legion has already done stuff pre-game launch um cassandra's led throttles of macedonia to defeat by apollonia at apollonia so they lost so cool anyway that has been added then there are 13 new deities have been added so it makes religion way more interesting so you've got your hermes heracles heracles heracles zeus and aphrodite um everything else is basically the same that i can see you can also now take the treasures away from holy sites and so on if you can take the treasures desecrate things it's it's a lot of fun it's awesome so you can actually acquire 29 new treasures but here's the other one you can do and let's see if i can find it anywhere uh let's go to our province there we go great wonders it's right here in your province screen click on great wonders you can now design your own customized great wonders to be constructed they are expensive they're very expensive let's generate a new a new name here the lantern that's great the beacon of amphipolis so you can window time well let's go portico top boom change stone now let's go ebony looks cool the middle faro's lighthouse let's make it a step tower and let's make that marble boom very nice and then the base stoa let's go with a circular base and make this oh heck let's make a gold baby shining yeah here's the kicker 4623 gold is what it'll cost so then you can pick your effect will it give you military education you know or tax and commerce yeah let's let's go with tax and commerce so you get 7.5 percent national tax modifier 7.5 percent national commerce income and local import routes plus two let's do a side effect here uh cultural so the cultural memorial macadam monthly civilization change plus zero point four percent local civilization level plus five percent and let's do another one let's go to military and military tech investment plus 10 and local research points plus 20 so these are mega powerful and they will pop up like here it'll pop up on your actual game map and that is so cool that is so cool here we've got settlement um great wonders the palace of the argents you can destroy it too which is why would you do that but what a great wonder placement does it actually focuses the ai to try to capture it so that is another thing to keep in mind so great wonders designer is huge so why get the expansion pack the main thing it adds is the great wonder designer which of course is exploitable if you're a min maxer and you make a ton of money uh that's not how i like to play you've got the 18 new diadokey mission trees 24 honors and dishonors for your legions with obviously you've got those different modifiers 13 new deities and 29 new treasures so i bought it of course i recommend you get if you already have the game and you've bought all the dlc so far why wouldn't you spend the extra 10 bucks just do it you you won't regret it and it'll complete it so that is those are all the new features in a nutshell so what is my what's my opinion now of this what do i think of imperator rome 2.0 so my personal opinion is it has become one of the best paradox grand strategy games they've made what do you compare it to and how can you play this of course you can min max any game so that's that's of course what do you compare this to is this eu4 no because eu4 you don't really have you don't have characters here you can role play those characters if you are an rpg type player of pdx games if you that's what you love about crusader kings 3 this is really a game for you because you have so many characters and you can pin these characters to your outliner and if we look at where's the family characters here are characters look at all these characters see scholar victorious tactician so they have attributes and you can play and role play accordingly depending on who they are you've got your different families you can pick from so you can play a true role play almost ck3 like game but again you are building a civilization but you can take multiple directions as things change if you play non-min max like 76 percent of my subscribers say they do then this is a fantastic game is it always going to get you the win no it gives you the experience that's what i say about crusader kings 3 it's about the people because that's what history is i'm an historian i will say this it's about the people the events are dictated by the people the nations are dictated by the people and this allows you to do that eu4 for me is a great game it's not antiquated by a long shot but it is a more min max friendly game um it's this is not ck3 ck3 is most definitely a rpg first realm building game second type game i feel like the rpgears amongst you will enjoy ck3 more the mid maxers will enjoy a little bit less so what do i compare this to i've also been putting in some hours now with stellaris and honestly it reminds me a little bit of stellaris stellaris you can of course mid max but you can also role play you can build your civilization your empire and you can do the same thing here so that is my recommendation if you really want to get the most out of rome 2.0 you play a little bit less mid max a little bit more rpg and it just opens up so many amazing story lines i also believe that if you've bought the game and you kind of fell out of love with it like a lot of people did go back in invest the ten dollars to get the arizona alexander expansion pack again link in the description um or just you know do the freebie kind of see how you feel because the free added features for 2.0 are huge so that would be my recommendation i absolutely wholeheartedly recommend this one now if you are interested in me doing a let's play series on imperator rome 2.0 please leave that comment down in the description let me know if you're going to give it a go if you're new and you've been curious but you can kind of put off by a lot of the negative reviews on steam ignore those those are from the original launch the game has completely changed since then i would say this has the potential of being the best paradox grand strategy game um and that's not by a long stretch they still have a few things that i think they need to work on mainly not mainly but one of the main things here is this this has to change i'm sorry if you are you know red green color blind you are completely screwed here so paradox change change that i'm going to take a screenshot of that when we're done here and anyway i hope you enjoyed this i hope it helps you i apologize for the ums i don't scripts i probably should script more of these reviews but i kind of just go with the flow it's more fun for me but next time maybe i'll script if i do one of these reviews again let me know in the comments your thoughts on imperator rome then and now let me know if you want me to do a let's play series i would love to do one maybe i'll do one no matter what you say and don't forget to hit the like check out the links in description to the nexus gg store where you can obviously buy this game and many other games and support the channel check out patreon where you can support the channel discord where you can join a growing community and of course of course twitch and twitter i promise i will stream in future just haven't gotten around to it yet figure out my schedule until next time i'm realm builder guy and i will talk to you soon bye you

Channel: Realm Builder Guy

Views: 28,625

Rating: 4.8572884 out of 5

Keywords: imperator rome 2.0, imperator rome 2.0 review, imperator rome 2.0 gameplay, imperator rome 2.0 update, imperator rome 2.0 tutorial, imperator rome 2.0 release, imperator rome 2.0 marius, imperator rome patch 2.0, imperator rome, imperator rome review, imperator rome tutorial, imperator rome marius update, imperator rome heirs of alexander, heirs of alexander, marius update, civilization builder, imperator rome 2.0 patch, imperator rome gameplay, realm builder guy

Id: Cok8tCjrO2M

Length: 36min 32sec (2192 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 19 2021