Played an Empire campaign, after completing Clan Angrund.
It’s… really not good. I can see what they’re trying to do and really like that (basically, play around with the core Holy Roman Empire conceit), but it really, really doesn’t work at all. Particularly annoying, because I don’t really think they’d have to do much to make it work a lot better:
- More ways to spend imperial prestige - e.g., maybe make it the currency to buy state troops (rather than having them “refresh”)
- Allow the player to intercede in any war involving imperial states by spending prestige (and gaining better relations as a result)
- Give the player/Emperor permanent rights to travel through any imperial domains.
- There should be a deterministic system for increasing imperial authority, rather than having to hope for luck. Since one doesn’t want to fall into negative, the current system just drags out the thing horribly - because the only sure way of gaining IA is to refuse confederation and wait 20 more turns. At the end, I was at 50K IA and just waiting for the game to allow me to finish.
As it is, even carrying out the constant “buy mercenaries to defend X” can result in worsening relations, and in my game at least before Chaos arrived, I had a ton of imperial states who hated my guts, while having 10 loyalty. It made absolutely no sense at all.
Since they all hated me, getting any kind of military access was out of the question, so helping to prevent them being conquered always required marching into their lands without permission, making them even more pissed off. Even better, returning a lost city to them would… also piss them off, because now I’m trespasssing in their lands as I leave.
Good ideas. Awful execution.
Also, one aspect of Mortal Empires that is no fun, is when you have to chase down a lone Chaos army at the other end of the world because the AI is incapable - or uninterested - in finishing it off.
Hoping they fix some of these things in TWH3.