Another juicy tidbit from the paradox devs over at the official forum regarding the 3d unit models:
That’s at least double the triangles!
They said something like that for HoI IV, and yet the 1939 start date appeared pretty quickly after release.
The start date given falls just after the second Samnite war, so Rome is well established in the Italian peninsula but has a war with Greece and several smaller wars with local tribes to go before it can claim hegemony over the peninsula and start to intrude into Carthage’s sphere of influence.
That’s a great start date for the Roman experience, for sure, but I can see players wanting to start at all sorts of dates, either to simulate a particular war or to experience defending against Rome as another regional power.
Suppose I want to be able to play as Egypt trying to hold off the Romans. First I’d have to play through hundreds of years before I get to the correct time period. And given the way Paradox games usually go, by the time the Romans should be attacking, my Egypt would own everything as far as India and be able to bat Rome out of the way without breaking a sweat.
Anyway, I can see from a development point of view exactly why they don’t want multiple start dates for release: I imagine it’s a vast amount of effort to get things correct and roughly balanced. I think it’s short-sighted to rule out the possibility of extra start dates post-release though.
HOI4 is a little different, since it’s a WW2 game. Some people don’t like the buildup phase and just want to get straight to the blitzing. There’s also not a significant number of tags in HOI4 and probably wasn’t an insane amount of work to put back in the 1939 start.
Given what they’ve said about the number of provinces and tags in Imperator, creating a new start date sounds like an enormous amount of effort.
But tell me you wouldn’t love a Palmyra start date.
Just me?
It is all really weird, because if it is character based, with a single start date you flat out miss the most interesting characters popping up, so either they hard coded those, or they are banking on mods doing the hard work.
I mean, let’s be honest, it’s a Johan game, so it’s mostly a map painting simulator and everything else is there to improve the setting, not as the focus.
This weeks dev diary is about the primary resources in the game. Very similar to the EU4 system. Gold, manpower, and 4 types of power(as opposed to the 3 in EU4) that are primarily a result of your ruler’s stats. However, unlike EU4, your tech progress comes from your citizens rather than spending ruler power. I appreciate that last part, as tech always seemed like the primary thing to spend monarch power on in EU4, which made the system much less interesting.
I wish they came up with some innovation on the power system, but disentangling it from technology seems like a good improvement. I hope they make some improvements to the National Ideas system as well.
Some applications of the power system certainly do hint at some cool features for the game, like: move pops around (!!), unique unit abilities, and endorsing parties. Hopefully the first and third of those are implemented in a more interesting way than they were in Stellaris.
Something that puzzled me was the mention of ‘fabricating claims’, a concept borrowed straight from EU4. If you’re Roman why would you need to fabricate a claim against barbarians? Even the proper states in the game constantly fought against each other in this period, and it was my understanding that it could be done for any reason. I don’t really see how the hints of an international diplomatic order that necessitates fabricating a cassus belli for war makes any sense in this period. I can’t remember how the first Rome game did it either.
I suppose there were times that Rome expanded into a region because of a ‘request’ by the local populace to intervene in some conflict, so maybe that is what they are hinting at. I just hope there are different rules for government types where fabricating claims have no reflection in history (from my understanding, correct me if I am wrong).
Fabricating claims? Eh, the concept is vague enough to work. The Romans did require internal justification to go to war, even a thin one. Especially during the Republic days.
Now there should be certain war justifications always available. And it would be neat to see different justifications have different impacts post war. See some of the ability to improve provinces, relocate, cultural adoption and the like be impacted by the why of the war.
For example one thing the game should have is the ability to extend citizenship. Take a page from Victoria’s reforms and have there be a cost to adopting, one that is lower or higher depending how the population joined. You declare a border securing war with some Germanic tribes? Then trying to adopt them as citizens should be very costly and take a long time due to internal resistance. Basically short of Attila honing in the people should reject it. But some Greek prince invites you to come rescue his kingdom from the Macedonians in exchange for fealty? That should be easier.
But the people of Rome certainly did care about why they went to war, so I hope they use the mechanic for some historically and mechanically interesting reasons.
New dev diary about unit types:
It looks really good to me. It seems like there are interesting trade-offs between the different types of units that will really have an impact when warring.
I also really like that the production of units, other than light infantry and archers, rely on access to trade goods. If you start as an OPM you’ll only be able to produce these weak units, and give you a strong incentive to expand into strategically important areas. I hope it isn’t binary, i.e. you just got access to one province with horses, so you can now make half of your army cavalry units.
I also like that modders can easily create new unit types (will be important for the Star Wars mod among others).
Lastly, next weeks diary will be about pops woohoo!
Has anyone else been following the dev diaries? This is looking really good.
https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/index.php?threads/development-diary-archive.1103330/
I have, yep! Just trying to keep it low key until I have an idea when the hell the game might be out. :)
One Consul that last 5 years…
Ok, I guess…
I’ll probably wait for the inevitable political expansion, then.
So many islands. I weep for the blood of young men that will stain the seas of the Helenes.
Well boys, hop to. Last one over the long walls will be decimated.
You know how I know I’m an uber-nerd? Because I “ooh” and “aah” over maps in video games more than I do the latest RTX ray-tracing shenanigans that Nvidia is showcasing.
What if the map used RTX?
Mind. Blown.
That is a beautiful interface.