When people say that UI is improved they don’t tell you how uneven it is. You can understand some new broken things (like research being unusable if you happen to not have middle mouse button, or how it’s a puzzle to figure out why can’t you set a Legion commander) but things like this city UI makes you think there was no playtesting at all.
I meant focus on developing the province to increase the pop types(integrated culture and freeman+, I think?) that contribute to army size. The size of your legion is limited by that. Since you can only have one legion with the royal guard and you have a penalty to levy size with it, you want to get that legion big enough to carry you in wars. At least that’s my understanding of the system, I haven’t found the numbers behind it to be very transparent at all.
Or if you want to game the system, you’d switch back to a levy focus and go for the inventions to get your starting experience up to 100%. Then all of your levies spawn with 100% experience, which means they’ll perform better than your legions that get stuck at a lower experience level due to decay. It’s a really dumb design issue with the new system that I hope they solve sooner than later.
This is very much true. It feels like they had the rest of the update ready to go and decided the UI rework was good enough despite actually needing a month or two more worth of iterating.
Looking at some twitter posts, I guess that’s a fair part of what they’re doing and why the hothotfix is taking a bit of time. Good stuff so far, though, but, eh, still waiting for the final version.
Thanks for this. I will watch them.
I’ve been tempted to start another game but keep holding out for this next patch. Probably won’t start one until I see they fixed the civil war bug that ruined one of my games.
I’m about 20 hours into my game. It’s been slow going because I’ve made a lot of mistakes, and I’ve had to look up a lot of details and rules as I went. So far this game has really sucked me in. I have my eyes set on Etruria before they get too much larger. I’ve unlocked legions and plan to build up a huge army over the next few years. This is such an awesome game now.
Is this game now at the point where a dummy like me can jump in and play?
Have you successfully played other Paradox games in the past?
Stellaris I’ve put 100 hours or so into.
I think you can probably manage to jump in and have some success. You’ll certainly need to look up some things that aren’t well explained, but I think you can feel your way through the important stuff.
Thanks for that. I’ll give it a whirl. Do I need all the DLC’s?
I’m hoping to jump in and try the new update and expansion this weekend as well. Excited about seeing how this has transformed since 1.0. I did mess with the tutorial a bit but not long enough to form any sort of opinion.
Nope! Nothing critical in the DLC. See how much you like the game and then you can start picking up DLC from there.
Paradox have gotten much better with their DLC with this game at least, making it about content not mechanics.
I’m not sure if that was a customer-focused move or if putting major mechanics into DLC bit them in the ass one too many times in other games and they discovered that putting content + smaller side features into DLC is far easier to maintain and work with.
It’s, like, the same? Customers whined about disjointed mechanics in CK2/EU4 and how some of the DLCs were critical to the enjoyment of the game, but you will only know it if you read some guides. Not to mention the fact that you open a Steam page and see more than a hundred DLCs costing hundreds of dollars. I think even Stellaris and HoI4 are much better in this regard but I don’t play those games so it’s hard for me to judge. Imperator: Rome goes a long way to make DLCs feel like somehting I want to buy to enrich the experience, not a part of full experience that I have to buy separately.
It may have been a misjudgment on enacting that law, I don’t really need them (BK starts with a few small Greek republics as neighbors but is primarily surrounded by tribes and uncolonized land.) I just wanted a HA/LC army. :) Got a good general though (11) for them.
Also aside from taking some early techs (+1 trade route, census) I’ve beelined for cohorts (one tech shy now) but my income isn’t great (just shy of 5/mo). No one is a threat yet nearby either. I’ll just plug along with the current game though to learn more of the mechanics and start fresh once the patch hits.
Everything I’ve heard points in the direction of it being too limiting for them. They put a mechanic into an expansion, and now that mechanic is both not available to many customers and it’s really hard for them to rework later on. These game has so many optional mechanics and location-specific mechanics that they keep finding that earlier stuff wasn’t that great. You then get customers who paid for a DLC to get some specific mechanics, which Paradox now wants to scrap but cannot.
2.02 hotfix is out! Seems to have lots of good changes and fixes.
Started up a Bosporan Kingdom game at lunch and I can confirm they made some UX improvements in this patch! Import pop-up and city view are both better. For the city view, they now show a population happiness breakdown everywhere, which is extremely useful when looking at the building tab. Prior to this in 2.0 you would have to click between the building tab and the population tab.