IS IMPERATOR FIXED? Imperator: Rome 2.0 Marius Review!

i don't think it's unfair to say that imperative rome has had a pretty rocky life so far rejected by many for a myriad of reasons being a lack of flavor and uninspired ui or watered-down versions of mechanics found in much more popular paradox games it has seen a steady decline in active users over its life but credit where credit is due paradox has not abandoned this game and are seemingly convinced that they can turn it around in fact they are so convinced of this that instead of the latest patch for this game being 1.6 it has instead been styled as imperative rom 2.0 due to the lengths at which this game has changed in this overview i'm going to be taking a dive into imperator rome 2.0 seeing what the major changes are and seeing whether they are enough to bring a new life to this alien game [Music] for starters we should talk about the ui as that is immediately the most visible of changes now i for one was never really upset with the aesthetic of the ui certainly not in comparison to the loud minority who complained of it being too much uninspired white marble in contrast i felt that the white marble aesthetic evoked a feeling of antiquity and perfectly suited the theme of the game that is if you were playing in the civilized part of the world at least the new ui has done away with the marble and has instead gone from what seems to me to be a torn or frayed parchment with bright rich colors of red and cyan being present throughout the various ui elements the cyan typically denotes buttons and elements that can be clicked on for further uis to be opened and red serves as borders and headers the richness of the colors may be a little in contrast with the rest of the map as imperative does tend to favor a more washed out palette for nation's colors but i do not think it is so extreme as to be overwhelming it bears mentioning here too that the loud rather grating marble on marble sound when clicking on the ui has also gone replaced with a relatively pleasing paper noise that is much less likely to become annoying after long sessions overall i like the aesthetic of the ui though naturally there is more to a ui than just the aesthetic so we should talk about the other half of that coin the ux or user experience the previous version of imperative had all its main ui buttons on the top of the screen with large really quite non-descript images representing the various tabs that you could open this has been entirely done away with and instead these buttons have migrated to the left hand side of the screen replacing artwork of what i am told represents various greek gods with icons that in my opinion are much easier to read at a glance and much more closely represent what tab they are supposed to open each tab will bring out another parchment tab with the same red cyan aesthetic present in each there isn't much to report in each tab most are internally much the same as they were previously just with the addition of the new aesthetic the information is laid out in a nicer fashion with space being saved in the right places and some information being separated into different internal tabs like we have here with the administration tab to save on clutter and compartmentalize where necessary so let's take a look at one of the most used screens in the game and compare them between imperator 1.5 and the newly released 2.0 to see if the changes here are improvements that screen is of course the province screen throughout the game when interacting with your territory this is the screen that you will most often be interacting with so it stands to reason that this more than any other screen in the game needs to be good in 1.5 it really wasn't the ui was cluttered especially when it came to trade goods where you could only really have a maximum of around 10 different goods before all the panels start to be squished together and barely usable this has been solved with the trade goods being more consolidated into smaller squares while still being easily visible at a glance to know what it is you have in your province while the previous system could have 10 goods before it started to be too cramped to be usable this new one has you able to be seeing 16 different trade goods before there is any overlap happening whatsoever at higher than 16 goods it does start to suffer from the same issue as 1.5 though to a much lesser degree other improvements are a much greater emphasis on aesthetics with art being very prominently displayed to show you what kind of terrain the territory you have selected is what rank of territory it is and even if it is the location of a holy site the addition of this art is very welcome both from an aesthetic and mechanical standpoint the new ui is not all good though firstly there isn't actually any tool tip or panel in the province screen that shows you the population of the province you can do the maths on it by hovering over the various pies and adding them up to get the total but it would be nice to see at a glance what the population is i know that you can see this in the admin tab of the nation overview but it would be nice to see on the problem screen also another issue present in the province screen is the separation of information into the panels in the bottom right if you're going to be constructing a new building especially with buildings having happiness modifiers on different pop types it's a tad galling that one cannot see both the pops of a city and the building's menu at the same time leading you to flip between them so you can make a decision on which building you wish to construct another thing i'm not especially fond of is the use of pie charts to express the cultural religious and strata of your province while i accept the pie charts are the most spacious efficient way of showing this information but not in my opinion clear enough and do not give an accurate view of the information you want from them for example this red color that we see and think of as our culture is in fact only our culture group so you could never at a glance see if your own culture or integrated culture is the majority in a province and as such you need to hover over the pie every time you want to get the information necessary to make a judgment on which governor policy to run at the time of writing this i have messaged our argeo the game's director and passed on my concerns in this manner and with a huge amount of credit to him he has implemented a system in the aforementioned administration tab allowing you to see at a glance what percentage of your province is your integrated culture and change the governor policy on the same screen whether this will be in the game when the patch releases or shortly after in a post-release patch i cannot say but it is a feature i am sorely missing in my pre-release campaigns other improved ui elements are the character screen where the information you need about a character is much more cleanly laid out for you than it was previously it also includes very lovely artwork behind the characters which once again just adds a bit more richness and aesthetic to the game if you're looking at the character screen of one of your generals as he marches through your lens the background behind him changes depending on what terrain he's currently standing in which is a nice touch the one complaint i do have about this though is that especially for monarchs it seems like every nation's ruler has either hired the same unimaginative interior decorator or they all live in the same house as everyone has the same naked spearmen fighting a lion portrait behind their throne i expect more art will be added in the future especially for the big players like the diadoki and maurya as this is just one minor thing that would add quite a lot to differentiate the various nations leaving aside the ui for a while let's talk about new mechanics the biggest one in my opinion is the change made to armies previously for the civilized at least every nation had a standing army just standing around on the map permanently like you would find in eu4 this definitely did not represent the period much at all and as such a levy system has been introduced where you raise troops from the populists in times of war and then disband them afterwards these levies are raised on the provincial level and the size is determined entirely by how many culturally integrated pops you have in the province the culture of these pops also determines the types of units you raise so levees from central italy are going to look very different to those of the steppe or india while these levies don't cost upkeep as they do in ck3 they do have an opportunity cost you see instead of just being raised out of nowhere you're raising the pops of the province and while these pops are out marching and fighting in your wars they're not working the fields leading to a reduction in the income of your province personally i do find the monetary cost to be somewhat negligible but the change to research points can be very detrimental to the point where a nation that is constantly a war will probably start to lag behind in tech compared to their neighbours i do understand that is not quite so simple to just raise the upkeep of these levees as the cost is based entirely on how much those pups would be earning had you not raised the levy but it does feel like there needs to be an upfront cost to simulate your need to arm your peasant army each levy is commanded by the governor of the province in which they were raised which gives even more incentive to paying more attention to your characters and gives an interesting choice when choosing new governors do you go with someone who while not especially civically minded is a god-tier general or do you sacrifice combat prowess for somebody who is good at administering the land under his purview levies are not the only type of army in the game though as standing armies do exist in the form of legions not many countries start the game with access to legions including rome itself but need to first unlock them with an invention and a change in laws for rome this comes from first unlocking the professional training invention which allows them to pass the punic reforms law this lets them raise a single legion in the capital province moving further down the invention tree will let you unlock another invention that will lead you to being able to raise a legion in every province but never more than one per province now legions work quite differently from the standing armies of old in that they are raised as an army rather than as a disparate group of individuals that you then merge together into one force to start with building your legion you must choose which province it is to be raised in and the choice is deceptively important as the amount of pops determines the maximum size of the legion and for every unit you add to it you take one unit away from the corresponding levy beware though because the legion is very expensive to raise and maintain much more so than a levy to the point where you really aren't going to find value in raising one until you have your economy in a solid state the legion as it fights in your many wars and conflicts will accrue a history with its exploits victories and defeats mocked for you to read back later while not mechanically important it's certainly a nice thing to have for the more role-play-oriented player what does have a great impact though is the honors system which is available if you get the heirs of alexander dlc every legion starts with one honor legion dedication this gives the legion a little modifier boost to their morale movement speed and discipline to show how the legion is just that much more well trained than the levees but over time the legion can earn further honours based on what they do for example if you find yourself using the legion to siege many fortifications you may earn yourself poliocraties making the legion much more capable at sieging in the future if you fight many battles in the plains you could earn cam pesta and so on and so forth not every honor you earn is a positive though and these honors are permanent so you're going to want to protect your legion's image and avoid desecrating holy sites of your own faith lest you become empire these legion honors are very powerful and are a great way of giving the player connection with the armies he leads and caring about them in a way that you just don't get in previous versions of the game due to the honours and the fact that you can tailor make your legions to be exactly how you want it they tend to end up much much stronger than levies come the mid game and this is certainly an issue that tribes will have to contend with as the uncivilized nations of the world are unable to raise legions at all until they have civilized into a monarchy or a democracy their levies work a little differently too instead of each levy being raised from a specific province the tribal levies are raised from the tribal chieftains and will because of that outnumber a levy raised by a democracy or monarchy with the same population this advantage in levy numbers is going to be a very strong boon in the early game but when it comes to the point that nations are regularly fielding legions you will find that you struggle quite a bit and it may be time for you to try civilizing yourself now when talking about legions i mentioned that you have to unlock specific inventions and for those of you familiar with 1.5 you may have grounded this thinking that unless the inventions are very early in the tree you may not get them at all or that by the time they pop up your nation will be huge and the cost of unlocking inventions will be prohibitively expensive well fear not because this system has gotten a large overhaul too for starters inventions do not cost money instead they now cost innovations you earn one innovation every time your technology increases and these can be spent on any advanced path you wish so it matters not whether you advanced in martial or civic you can spend that innovation point on a religious invention if you so desire if i would have one critique of the new system it's that you will have so many inventions that you can take in four different tabs with what you take being sometimes less important than what the invention leads to that it can get a tad overwhelming the developers have clearly seen that this could be an issue as they've introduced a planning mode and a search function where you can go through the tree and highlight a path of inventions or highlight the must-haves that you want to work towards this is a nice feature to have but it does require you to pause the game and spend a good few minutes looking through the various inventions and bonuses to see what it is you want to take the inventions are not all modifiers though with some inventions unlocking various buildings wonder effects and even the ability to turn your republic into a dictatorship but more on all of that in just a bit overall this system is a massive improvement on what came before it and can help to make each run somewhat unique as you will never have enough innovations to unlock absolutely everything you'll have to make choices throughout your campaigns so let's move on to buildings we touched on how buildings were a tad awkward as you could not see what pops you had in a city on the same tab as where you construct the buildings but putting that aside for the moment i feel like the building aspect has been improved for sure to start with your cities will be much more diverse in pop types thanks to the limitations placed on buildings that have a desired ratio modifier for example previously if you built 10 forums your desired ratio for freeman would skyrocket to the point where you'd have very few citizens at all this building has now been locked to a maximum of three which i can see some people complaining about but for me personally this is a great change the modifiers that each building give have been somewhat tweaked so there is as far as i can tell at least no building that is an absolute must-have at the expense of all others and none that are relegated to never builds i am not a meta player though i don't particularly care for eking out the absolute maximum from every possible modifier so perhaps i'm missing something but to me the building system seems to be a lot more balanced than he used to be jumping back to inventions for just a moment there is one very interesting choice to make in the civic path where you must choose between urban and rural planning this either makes your cities more prosperous with urban planning as you increase their population capacity and building slots or you can choose to have a second build slot in every single settlement with rural planning settlements are naturally limited to just one so personally i find this to be a much more appealing choice but the fact that these options are available is very nice indeed another change to the building system is the ability to build ports in every single coastal territory now some have been clamoring for this ability for a long time but personally i am much less enthused i felt that the previous system of only having select predefined territories having ports was a much better one as it gave imperator a sense of uniqueness to it as no other paradox title has this restriction it also made sense to me sure there is a stretch of beach on every coastline where you can build a boat but a dock a harbor is a very different beast i feel like imperator has lost a little bit of its spark with this change and it's one that continues to disappoint me from the moment i saw in the dev diary some months ago to as i type this now two wonders now and another feature that when i first saw it did not make me happy i was when this feature was announced rather disheartened and really didn't like it at all but i have come to warm up to it a little in any territory you like you can design and construct your own great wonder you can design a tower a building or a pyramid and customize it in three different areas both in terms of the model that will be placed on the map and the material that it is made out of these are extravagantly expensive ranging from a little over 5000 gold to over 13 000 depending on the material and design you choose they're also not purely aesthetic as you will be able to select three different effects for your wonder to have ranging from increasing research points to the happiness of your pops you start with many effects possible from the start but can unlock more via inventions as you go through the game these bonuses start out relatively weak but as the wonder stands for longer and longer the prestige of owning them grows and the modifiers get stronger when it passes certain thresholds i can understand the desire to have this in the game allowing the player to customize an on-map model is really something that has not been done in a paradox game before but i do find myself dismayed by it the fact that the bonuses you can get from constructing your own wonders far outstrips the ones that you can get from established wonders of the world like the mausoleum of halicarnassus or the temple of zeus really doesn't sit right with me and having the wonder designs be so unrestricted means that you as a player can build some solid gold pyramids on the isle of man and have them be prestigious enough to give you bonuses better than the pyramids of giza this smacks of a neat idea that has been taken much further than it should have gone now these are the most visible changes the ones that can be seen with a cursory glance but a lot more has been changed that while less visible is certainly not lacking an impact to start with there's been an overall reduction in the amount of pops in the world this has been balanced reasonably well between historical accuracy and player satisfaction as numbers getting bigger does trigger that monkey part of our brain to give us the happy juice sieging the provincial capital or all forts in a province will now pass the entirety of the province to your control so we won't be needing to go through the arduous task of carpet sieging every minor village on our way to glory this is something i have seen people complain about as they want to carpet siege every territory to get the maximum amount of slaves in every single war but i vehemently disagree with those metagamers and i see this as only a good move there is however an issue when it comes to special war types such as the legacy of alexander diet doki wars or more commonly civil wars as every siege territory is immediately added to your nation in these wars sieging the provincial capital merely results in said capital moving to another territory and as such the really rather tedious carpet siege system makes a return the developers are certainly aware of this issue as a new automated army objective named carpet siege has been added with the descriptor of this can be useful during great conquest wars and civil wars but i really hope we will see further improvements in this area in the future the ai has gotten a lot better at deciding what it wants to conquer civilized nations will tend to prefer conquering areas with higher civilization and this generally leads to rome conquering greece or carthage and a die dokie making real headway into reforming the empire of alexander i have a feeling that players are going to be pleasantly frustrated at the challenge awaiting them in the mid to late game from the likes of roman carthage that they really never needed to worry about before there have been many twitter teasers posted by argeo of his overnight ai only run where the borders of rome specifically have been very logical with very little random german conquest like we had in 1.5 and previous i was skeptical that such a thing could be pulled off without a judicious amount of hand-holding and railroading the ai but it seems this is an entirely natural part of the way the ai values certain territories and it really is a joy to see considering how often you see complaints about the ai doing dumb things like the aforementioned germanic conquest it's entirely refreshing to see this change speaking of conquest and warfare and all that another change that i was initially skeptical of but have grown to really appreciate is the ability to spec into military traditions of your geographic and integrated neighbors if you are playing as rome you will have both roman and italic ideas to choose from but say you go ahead and conquer greece like any good roman should well if you integrate one of the cultures there for example macedonian you'll be able to dip into the greek military traditions and get yourself powerful bonuses to your heavy infantry or say you win the punic wars but don't quite feel the need to be salty about it well you can now integrate the punic culture and spec into their traditions giving you powerful boon to your navy again i was initially very skeptical of this but in practice i do find it to be a very welcome and flavorful addition these come alongside a myriad of other changes like the absolutely delightful atlas mode which while isn't designed for gameplay looks great for taking screenshots of your campaign to share it shows off your cities holy sites and also your road network which is really handy for planning out how to expand your roads in the future speaking of holy sites now you can freely remove treasures from holy sites without burning them down being able to select the air if you're a monarch new elective succession type the increase in importance of statesmanship in republics further differentiating their play style from marquis changes to the integration of subjects even a brand new subject type the league city all of this puts 2.0 in the running for the biggest update yet it does have stiff competition from the 1.2 cicero update as that was the one to rip mana from the game and introduce cities and settlements and life to pops but it is definitely a worthy contender for that crown now with all this said what do i think what is my verdict you've heard me be both positive and negative in this review but what's the conclusion is imperative saved it's a hard one to answer if i'm being honest i think the reputation hit the imperative suffered with its really rather disastrous launch is a hill that imperator has yet to crest and there are many potential players of this game who have no interest in giving the game another try no matter how much marketing and rebranding the game has i don't think crusader kings fans will find what they're looking for in imperative as it is very true that the characters in ck3 are much more detailed and fleshed out and have more personality than an imperative i would argue that this is perfectly reasonable and doesn't make imperative lesser but it matters not if characters are your thing then you should probably stick to crusader kings for eu4 fans however i think the argument to give imperative a try is much much stronger while it is very true that eu4 has much more content and content that makes runs of the game in different regions of the world distinct and unique mechanics like the holy roman empire the holy see islamic schools etc the list definitely goes on but the game is built on what is in my opinion inferior bones where imperator has the population system with pops that dynamically migrate promote higher strata die off in wars and now are directly raised as levees eu4 has development and i know i'm a bit more anti-development than the average eu4 fan but i really cannot take any argument of it being better than imperative system seriously as it's simply not the case similarly while eu4 still uses a mana system imperator is able to shake this and a transition to a more logical and dare i say it superior system where imperative has a character system eu4 has uh well um well nothing of note what i'm trying to say is that the bones of imperative are much much better than the ones in eu4 while the meat the the fleshy bits of e4 are stronger it's harder to improve your bones but the meat can be added over time imperative does have a ways to go i think before it is truly accepted in the pantheon of paradox grand strategy titles but i absolutely believe that is on the right track and heading in the right direction for this i won't give a score out of 10 for this review but i do encourage you to give imperata another shake i think it deserves at least that this has been my imperative roam 2.0 marius update review i hope you enjoyed it i hope you found it informative and i hope to see you next time bye you

Channel: Lord Lambert

Views: 25,883

Rating: 4.9657536 out of 5

Keywords: Lord Lambert, Lambert2191, Lambert

Id: giwxXOPOsm8

Length: 25min 44sec (1544 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 16 2021