Prayers have been answered
Having a lot of fun with my Bosporan Kingdom game. Macedon has been the big obstacle most of the game(after Scythia and a very large Armenia early on) as they controlled almost all of Greece, Thrace, and the west coast of Anatolia. Just finished a war where I piggy-backed on a Seleukid vs Macedon war and managed to hit them with a crushing defeat and was able to continue my expansion around the Black Sea. I still really hate how the missions are structured in this game. I’m not sure I hate the mission system as a whole or just how they’ve implemented the mission trees. I could only had the Greek Black Sea tree available at game start and I’ve been stuck on the first tier of those missions because I HAVE to take over the Anatolian Coast in order to move on. Unfortunately, that is controlled by Pontus who has been an excellent ally for much of the game, so I’ve been go after everything else on the coast I can take before turning on them. Newly released Athens will be an easy target next, but after that it’s down to just Pontus. Probably will have them help me against Macedon again before I turn on them, but if I take down both Macedon and Pontus then I’ll be alone if the Seleukids decide to come after me or if Rome decides to come further east.
Mega Rome, wow.
How are you prioritizing your buildings? That’s a healthy monthly income you got there :)
For that first mission I usually declare on Sinope* ASAP, take them and the city state surrounded by Pontus. If the war hasn’t been going on too long I feudalize their allies (those 2 unit stacks come in handy. *I use the free war council CB to take Chersonesus first on Nov. 1st.)
However in a current game I just did the left side (the port and the barbarian ally; the only one that works to complete it I’ve found is Albany.) Then abolish mission. After that there are two different mission choices.
Yeah, seems like a lot of the old Rome AI behavior of going way into Germany before taking more prosperous lands. Also find it funny that they keep a few tiny vassal states in Italy.
I built a great wonder with the commerce boosting effect and I think that vastly increased my income. For my buildings I’ve largely been focused on the Grand Temple and Grand Theater with my new lands and then some combination of the other bottom row buildings and libraries. Very few economy buildings. I have Scythian and Colchian integrated, but all my new lands are different cultures at this point, hence the need to convert and assimilate. It does seem as though the AI builds a lot of the settlement buildings, especially farms and mines, which makes those territories extra productive for trade goods.
Things have gotten very interesting in my neighborhood. Broke my alliance with Pontus and was trying to find the right opening to declare war on them when I noticed that the Seleukids had declared on them. Took that opportunity to swoop in and go after Pontus too. But then disaster hit when the Seleukids decided to take a province on the Black Sea as part of their peace agreement with Pontus. So I had to reassemble the successor kingdoms and ally with Egypt and Macedon in order to have a chance against the Seleukids. Egypt didn’t honor the alliance but so far Macedon has been a huge help and I’m just trying to go for a bigger reward in my peace settlement here. Just before I took this screenshot I got notified that a bunch of my trade routes got cancelled. I zoomed out to discover this pink blob where Rome had been.
44K levy from Tuarica? Wow. Is your population growth primarily from wars?
I’m attempting a tall-ish strategy (I only took over Scythia, and a slightly expanded Olbia is a feudatory) while colonizing the lands to the north for a mission tree, but I am doing something fundamentally wrong. My pops and my income are stagnant despite having happy people and fairly uniform religion. 40 some years into my latest attempt and my monthly income doesn’t get much above 9/mo.
(edit: typos)
Wars and I assume migration. As always, I focus my province investments in my capital province, so I get lots of buildings and population. I did my capital city up to a metropolis, and for some reason Tanais(Scythian is an integrated culture) has always been at max population. I’ve also got the law that gives the most to +levy size since the good one for legions is locked behind being a Great Power, and I’m pretty much done with a run by the time I hit that size.
Aside from using the free ones from techs for additional trade routes, I haven’t needed to do any province improvements as my capital city never hit max (44/46 is as high as it got before losing six pop to an event.) 75% of my income is trade (11 trade routes so far) while taxes are low. My research is at 150% as I have academies and libraries in the capitol province cities. I haven’t done much in terms of food (I can’t tell from the city screen how long natural population growth takes but in previous versions it took so long as to be useless.) My export income is > my import income and I’ve thought about switching to export trade to see what happens. My biggest expense by far is the navy from pirate hunting, about 50 ships. I only have 3 forts in my entire kingdom.
I’m trying to do a game where I don’t expand much but perhaps the lands around BK are too poor for that. Maybe I’ll try making client states and tribal tributaries to bump up my income and invest more in the civics tree to increase commerce income (colonizing new territories has resulted in almost no income gains and instead is a money sink from moving slaves around, which continues to be a pita.)
I’m enjoying these updates; I coincidentally started a Bosporus game in Field of Glory: Empires last week. Taking it very slowly - no choice really as all the regions around are poorly populated potential burdens with environmental penalties and so on, and I have very little manpower for armies.
All I’ve done so far is concentrate on health and population growth, and fight off the Alans, though relations with Skythia have degenerated so far that it seems I should preemptively declare war and take some of my objectives in Chersonese from them.
And founding that trade settlement off to the west will definitely come back and bite me.
I kept trying to remember what other strategy game set in this time period had them as a playable faction. Temped to jump back in to that game now too!
Tried to find an appealing achievement run game(with the mission system in Imperator not being my favorite, I find achievements nice goals to shoot for) to try out next. I didn’t want another game as a Hellenic nation and I’m largely trying to hold off on anything tribal or in India in hopes that those areas get some special attention in an upcoming DLC. That didn’t leave me with a lot of options. So I went with a really tough one and settled on the achievement to start as Heraclea Pontica and form Persia. It’s a pretty tough start as a two-territory nation in northwest Anatolia and I think I’m on my fourth attempt but I’ve finally managed to survive the early game and bide my time to make some gains. That being said, the clock is ticking and I’ve got a long road ahead of me to get strong enough to challenge the Seleukids and form Persia. Rome is also a monster approaching from the west. I think this is the worst I’ve seen the Antigonids do, but Zanthia and Egypt have both eaten into Seleukids and, I think, might have made conquering Persia doable. The last twenty years have more than doubled my territory and you can mostly see(stupid navy in the way) that I’ve acquired the whole Black Sea coast in Anatolia.
My big decision point right now is if I should try to consolidate power in Anatolia or if I should try to head for the tribal nations in the Caucasus to get closer to my ultimate goal. I’m thinking I likely need to try to continue to nibble away in Anatolia as it’s the only real way to grow my power base. Egypt is a Great Power so there is no chance to ally them. I could try to split Anatolia with an ally and hope we can go after the Seleukids together? Right now I’m allied with Pergamon, Kios, and the Antigonids, with Pontus as a client state(although that civil war isn’t looking good for them).
Does anyone know if there is a way to view the tech level of opposing nations? One thing starting small allowed me to do was tech at nearly max speed. I beelined for all of the inventions that increase max research efficiency which is sitting comfortably at 250%.
There’s a small button with the ledger, but most of what you get is pop and territory count. I think. Because I have no idea what’s goes on in the game yet.
After dabbling a couple of hours before, I’m having my first campaign and, while I like that things are simulated without me, it’s still a bit much too grasp. I wanted to pick something medium sized that wasn’t too easy, so I went with Thrace. Turns out, it’s fairly easy, because it’s not just Antigonid that collapses, Macedon is a lot more precarious than it seems, with an unhealthy line and prone to get stuck in Asia Minor, after Antigonus downsizes their army. The vassal swarm is nice, too, and so is just conquering primary culture pops. To make it sillier, as a civil war approached and I had to figure out what do to about it, a rival event with a special skill option let me neuter it with a click. With the advantage of, for some reason, disloyal armies returning to normal.
Lysamachus is the true successor to Alexander, lucking into conquest not having a clue how to rule. Not particularly true to history, I know. Gatea, err, sure, do some raids, sugar, whatever.
I think you need to take the espionage invention to gain intel on other nations. Other than that afaik it’s just military level that you can see on the diplo screen.
Heraclea Pontica is probably one of the harder starts, good luck (maybe get a province that borders Seleukids and use the entice governor option - make friends, encourage disloyalty and for a cost of 20 AE, gain a province. That, and/or try to start a civil war. I:R is particularly prone to snowballing, and once big countries tend to stay big.)
A YouTuber I watch from time to time is obsessed with the Jewish pantheon, and I can see why. Holy Cow their omens are incredible. Judea is the only place that starts with it, but you can switch state religion to Jewish if you have the decision. (BK in 2.0 can get it. I reverted and started a game but haven’t decided if I’m going to play it out.)
I like the idea of trying to undermine the Seleukids from the inside. I think a big issue with the snowballing thing is how reluctant the AI seems to be to take advantage when one of the big powers is in a tough spot. Before I went to bed last night, my alliance kicked the Macedons back across the Bosporus with almost no resistance because I waited to declare war until they were deep in a war with Rome(and their own civil war). All too often in this game I see a great power struggling for a couple reasons and none of their neighbors do the opportunistic thing. As the player in EU4 it seems like I could largely count on the AI to punish me in these situations, but I almost never see it here in Imperator.
Based on my observations of the AI, the Antigonids are almost always losers(but I’ve seen them come out of the wars fairly strong), and then one of Macedon or Thrace will almost always end up in a weak spot. I’ve seen both Thrace grow very large and Macedon grow very large, but they don’t seem to coexist for long.
Played a bit at lunch and just quit in a rage after Rome declared war on me. I had done everything possible to keep relations up with them, but I’m pretty well screwed at this point.
(Eventual) RIP?
You might have noticed that Imperator: Rome isn’t assigned to any of the studios mentioned above. The reason for this is that on a regular basis we analyze the projects we have in development, where they are at, what they are trying to do and also what people and resources we have working on them. As part of this analysis we realized that there was a need to bring reinforcement for a couple of the projects at PDS, and given where Imperator was at in the run up to 2.0’s launch, we decided that after the launch of the update we would move people from Imperator to these other projects. Right now we’re working on plans to regrow the team for Imperator and continue development, but for the short term we needed to focus our efforts on these other projects.
I wanted to break the news now to manage everyone’s expectations: don’t expect much Imperator news at PDXCON, or any new content coming out in 2021. We’ll of course get back to everyone with news about it as long as we have something to share!
I appreciate Paradox honesty. If I was running Paradox, I’d probably pull the plug also. I tried a game or two after 2.0. While I think the changes were good, it is still a very complicated game. I’m certainly willing to play complicated game (e.g. Shadow Empire and HOI IV) but I just never found IR to be particular fun or rewarding. I’ve fallen asleep playing the game more than once, and that generally only happens watching dull but important news shows.
The Imperator team did a phenomenal job in improving the game with each and every update. Given the poor reception, the fact that they’re sitting at “Mostly Positive” (from notoriously cranky Paradox fans no less) for recent reviews is telling.
I’m not surprised by this news at all but man, I loved where Arheo and his team were taking this game. Plenty of other Paradox games I wish they would just move on to something new already (Stellaris, EU4) but this one I wanted to see more content for. At least they seem to have left it in a good spot with 2.0.
Huge props to the team there. I loved Arheo’s vision for the game, I hope he gets the reins of another project.
Also, I really don’t believe this, but Paradox is insisting the project isn’t dead.
Still, I’m sure Arheo and others will be involved in other projects. Even if they rebuild an Imperator team, it won’t be this Imperator team. And it was this team that was really knocking it out of the park.