YMMV / Imperator: Rome

• Broken Base:
  • On one hand, you have a number of players who feel the game is fine on its own, with many having faith that Paradox will make the game even better than it already is when they get around to releasing expansions, just like they did with Stellaris. On the other, you have many who feel the game was a large disappointment and only the expansions can save it. And from 1.4 "Archimedes" patch onward, there is also another part of the base that's completely disillusioned by the state of the game and how it seems to tread water without fixing or improving anything, to the point where even streamers are dropping out. 2.0x finally stopped the rot, with general consensus being that the game should have been launched with the patch, and that the future is bright if Paradox builds upon the patch for future updates.
  • Patch 2.0.x, which significantly altered the game. Standing armies are now harder to get (rather than being universal), but at the same time are far better than levied troops. Meanwhile, research was altered in such a way, so that Money Is Not Power. Some find it a nice compromise and good tools for empire building. Others hate the changes, for they completely neutered the option of playing "tall"^explanationDeliberately staying as a small state, usually a Local Power (<25 territories) and focusing on a high-income, high-quality realm, rather than Space-Filling Empire and enforce a sprawling empire that is at the very least a Regional Power and aims at controlling as many regions as possible^explanationLegions are not only tied to regions (meaning you must control more of them if you want additional legions), but also their total population (of integrated cultures). Since population growth in Imperator happens at a snail's pace, that means enforcing the conquest of the entire region, to simply gain sufficient population (and to integrate them) to field a proper legion. Thus depending on playstyle, the patch is either perfectly fine, or a total deal-breaker - to the point a fraction of the playerbase sticks to 1.5.3 build, the final one before 2.0.0 changes rolled in.
• Complacent Gaming Syndrome: Aiming to control entire provinces, since food is calculated on a provincial level. This is especially vital if neighboring realms control food producing settlements within the same province(s) as yours. Also, the only building that makes sense in a settlement which produces food goods is the farming settlement as you can generate more food with the same number of slaves (3 extra units of the food good at 30 slaves instead of 2).
  • In general, if you intend to upgrade a settlement into a city, you'll choose non-food producing settlements with either a fort or a port already built, as these two buildings are not destroyed during construction. If the territory has a holy site, all the better, as the holy site grants bonuses to cities.
  • Enabling the "equal gender" game rule. It allows the player to have more choices for appointments and makes it easier to pack the court and /or military with their ruling family for bonuses.
  • Aiming for full control of the capital region before expanding elsewhere, since the capital region is directly administered by the ruler and is less prone to rebellions as compared to other regions (especially if regional governors are disloyal). Also, all income from the capital region goes directly into the state treasury, while regional governors take their cut first as wages.
    • For monarchies, putting the heir as a regional governor makes a lot of sense, as the salary (s)he draws from the position will become useful once (s)he takes over as ruler. Also, the increase in power base for the ruling family is also very useful.
    • Again for monarchies, once a monarch's health reaches the "Near Death" stage, it's time to grant themselves some holdings. Every holding granted costs gold and increases the ruler's corruption. However, the monarch's corruption dies with them, while the wealth and political power granted by holdings will remain with the monarch's successor.
  • If the state only has one integrated culture, creating an honour guard from that culture grants the culture increased happiness, without other cultures having the "not honor guard" modifier.
  • With patch 1.5, invading realms with many pops of your primary culture as they can become productive immediately after the conquest is over. However, invading realms with the same primary culture causes unhappiness within your primary culture pops, making it important to end the war as swiftly as possible.
  • Killing every character from conquered countries or refusing to admit characters from integrated ones. You used to face no penalties for doing this whatsoever, even if they were a long-standing ally of your country and your ruler was personally friends with those people. At the same time, this avoids displeasing families already within your borders and saves the hassle of placating the newcomers with offices, jobs and holdings that you might not have anyway. ^note For conquered realms, slaughtering characters will incur an increased happiness penalty with pops of the country's primary culture (10%, where normal annexation is only a 5% penalty)
    • To a lesser extent, banishing them works just as well. It provides -0.5 Aggressive Expansion, which is about the value of a single settlement conquered. If the conquest was that of a city-state, it nullifies the negative diplomatic impact it has toward neighbouring countries. In practical terms, it allows conquest of a whole lot of city-states in a single war (when they had a league or an alliance) and gain close to no AE in the process, while easily doubling or tripling the size of the country. The only downside is that the rulers are still out there, but in most cases they won't find a new court and they don't carry any claims with them like in CK2.
  • Using high Tyranny to reduce Aggressive Expansion, if you can get characters' Loyalties in check.
  • When playing as republics, siding with the Oligarchs and Traditionalists against the Democrats. The Democrats hate it when you pack the court and /or military with members of major families; the Oligarchs, on the other hand, love this. Incurring tyranny (which is very easy if you don't have enough support from the Senate) again pleases the Oligarchs and angers the Democrats. Republic games often boil down to packing the court and military with members of major families who are affiliated with the Oligarchs and Traditionalists, and then smearing the reputations of Democrats, which pleases both the Oligarchs and the Traditionalists.
    • It is possible for Democrats to gain seats in the Senate due to the heads of powerful families aligning themselves with the faction. Should that happen, revoking holdings from said heads will increase support from the Democrats, while angering the now politically-insignificant Oligarchs.
  • Beelining for an innovation which allows a legion to be raised in the capital region or simply passing the related law right at game start if it's not enabled yet. Legions are just so much better than levies; having one from the get-go will carry the rest of the game and there is nothing better to do with starting innovation points anyway. However, the player should read up on how the legion is superior (read: understanding the rather-complex military and combat system).
    • The legions themselves have just one composition that's so vastly superior to anything else, every single country is going to form the same legions over and over and over again. Said composition is 2:1 ratio of heavy infantry and cavalry, with 4 units of light cavalry and 1 unit of engineers and supply per 10 combat units inside the legion^explanationSo having something like 5 heavy cavalry, 10 heavy infantry, 4 light cavalry, 2 engineers and 2 supply wagons. For longer campaigns inside enemy territory, double the number of supply wagons. Set light cavalry to be on 2-units wide flank, put heavy cavalry in the front and infantry in the back row... and short of Horse Archers, nothing stands a chance against such an army. A legion like this can effortlessly curb-stomp an army four time its size with minimal casualties, unless countered by either huge number of horse archers (restricted almost entirely to Scythia) or identically composed legion (which AI will never create), while being able to build roads and siege at maximum efficiency.
• Critical Dissonance: While the game received generally-favorable reviews from many critics, the user-base has ultimately not received it quite as well, with many feeling as though the game was far emptier than Paradox's previous entries. Indeed, Metacritic's critics give it a score of 81. The user-base? 5.3^note And a year later, it's respectively 76 and 4.7. Steam? 6/10, 42% positive rating - and that's after the extensive rework of game mechanics.
• Game-Breaker: Have their own page.
• Game Mod: While standard for Paradox games, Imperator mods have a "heavier" duty of trying to keep the game afloat after developers stopped further development in 2021. The Invictus mod is the go-to one for players who want an enhanced vanilla experience.
• Good Bad Bugs: A specific bug in handling generic economic missions allows to recycle them for the same region over and over (rather than being one-time only), technically allowing to get it n-3 times^explanationYou must control at least 3 provinces to get an economic mission, where n is the number of provinces in said region. It persists since the earliest builds of the game to the final one and never got properly addressed. The biggest advantage it offers is having both benefits to population growth^explanationEconomic missions offer a granary bonus for specific province, allowing it to store far more food than normally, which in turn translates into a population growth modifier and directly granting new pops^explanationIf province has at least a single territory where mines can be build, the mission tree will include "buying new slaves", creating new pops if conditions are met. This further snowballs if a given country has its own, country-specific missions, potentially allowing more economic missions than there are provinces in the given region.
  • Another more widespread one: once a culture is allowed to be promoted to citizens, a bug will trigger, allowing pops of that culture to be promoted to nobles. The bug was finally fixed in patch 2.04.
• Harsher in Hindsight: This game is a Remake/Creator-Driven Successor of much older Paradox title, Europa Universalis: Rome. EU:Rome was somewhat a punching bag for jokes about being just regular Europa Universalis with ancient paint job over it, offering bland experience without anything interesting going for it, boring gameplay mostly decided by modifiers and lacking any sort of content to encourage playing as different countries, since everyone played the same. Comes Imperator: Rome, and it gets the exact same kind of reception, only this time around, it was intended as a big hit game, rather than a throw-away experiment with a new game engine. And unlike EU:Rome, which got quickly abandoned, I:R is going through one overhaul after another, each of them failing to gain any favour from the playerbase and shrinking number of active players further.
• Hype Backlash: To say Paradox greatly overestimated the readiness of the game for launch, while doing nothing but hyping it as the best thing since sliced bread would be a severe understatement. Then the rave reviews followed, praising the game for its design and content. All of which lead to a volatile reaction of players once the game hit stores and they've got a game that not only was barely playable (kind of a standard for release states of Paradox titles), but repeating by that point ancient design mistakes from previous titles and barely having any content inside of it to play at all. Over the two years of post-release development and countless massive reworks later to salvage both the game and the resulting PR disaster, the resentment remained strong and nothing seems to alter it; 2.0x finally stopped the rot for a while, only for Paradox to announce "temporarily suspending development", which fandom took as the final straw to simply declare the game dead.
• It's the Same, Now It Sucks!: To many players, it felt more like EU4 but with a Rome skin than a new game. Ironically, this was the same complaint thrown at the previous attempt at an ancient-themed game, Europa Universalis: Rome. And to make it even more insulting, there is an EU4 mod covering the same period, which was considered far more playable than an actual game from a professional developer studio.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • In the run-up to the game's release, when it was revealed that HotRod had coded an avatar NPC into the game (which is standard practice among Paradox devs), "Flog Rod" became a popular cry in the Dev Clash chat, to the point where even Paradox's mods found it hilarious.
  • "Aggressive Expansion is just a number"^explanationAggressive Expansion is a set of mechanics to counter players and AI from just going on endless conquest sprees and doing all sort of nasty things. Any show of aggression, along with various underhand actions and slave raids, cause the counter to rise up. The higher it is, the more the rest of the world is terrified of any given country, until counter-alliances are formed and/or containment wars are declared. Meanwhile, at the home front, foreign culture pops are mounting a revolt and eventually, prestige rating will start to decay, as even loyal population will consider the ruler to be an insane conqueror. However, this is all theory. In reality, if one decides to go on a conquest spree, short of running out of money or warm bodies for the grinder, there is nothing slowing you down, and the fact nobody likes you makes it all that easier. Revolts? Just garrison adequately. People declaring wars on you? Less time waiting for a truce to end. Alliance of a few different countries? More land to grab in a single war. While the meme originated from Europa Universalis IV as "X is just a number", Imperator refined and mastered the AE version of it. So far, no amount of game re-balances managed to change the trend.
    • However, aggressive expanding has been tuned to become a double-edged sword; as long as the expansion is outside the state's capital region, the region's governor benefits more than the ruler. If enough governors become powerful and disloyal at the same time...
  • "It's a new modifier!"^explanationThe gameplay as such is identical for every single country presented in the game, with same buildings, units and internal mechanics. The only difference is set of modifiers, which are slowly unlocked over the gameplay - and grand majority of them are universal ones, rather than specific to a culture, not to mention single country. Thus it's a running joke whenever Paradox announces "sweeping changes" to the game, only to introduce new set of percentage modifiers to it - but nontheless presenting them with giddy excitement as if taking bold leaps in game design.
• My Real Daddy: Peter Nicholson, more widely known as Arheo, the game director assigned to Imperator since early patches. Fanbase consider him the mastermind responsible for gradual fixes and improvements in gameplay. To the point Paradox' decision to move him away from the game was taken as a declaration of simply stopping any further development.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • The construction UI is just terrible, with no means to tell if that building was already constructed or not in the given province and if so, what level it is at. The only way to see that is to check manually and thus defeating the purpose of using the construction tool in the first place.
  • The UI in general is dreadful at times, requiring sickening amounts of micro-managing on a regular basis, while going from territory to territory and doing everything manually. Slave relocation (they accumulate during war in your capital and bigger cities) is particularly tedious to do, while having no tools or tooltips to know where they were allocated and where you have free space for them. Not a problem when you barely control a single territory, but once your nation is spread over a few regions, you are going to spend hours looking for all issues, with everything on a province-to-province and territory-to-territory basis. Now, imagine doing it in multiplayer.
    • Slaves can be relocated within a single province. They can also be relocated to different provinces, but only when they are in a border settlement. So after a war, if you want to move slaves from your capital to other provinces, you are going to spend a lot of time and money moving them first to the provincial border, then over the border, then to the settlement you need them. Or to next border and continue the process.
    • Slaves can only be moved over land. You can't move them to or from islands. This is already bad, but if your capital happens to be on an island, you are screwed - anything you conquer will be depopulated, while the capital island is going to be overpopulated and there is nothing to do about it, short of moving the capital to another province before the original one gets overpopulated. ^note which by the way consists of a few territories, some of which you can upgrade to cities to further mitigate the issue, but it never fully goes away.
    • The Marius update, which introduced a complete overhaul of UI, made it somehow worse, especially on the level of a singular territory (the basic unit of land division). That despite the ostensible goal of making it more transparent and easier to access. The only real gain seems to be that the game no longer requires a widescreen display, but that's about it.
  • Everything involving pops is done at a "one at a time" pace for that one specific territory. Cultural conversion? Single pop. Population growth? Single pop. Natural migration? Single pop. Class conversion? Single pop. This often leads to a tedious situation where the game at the same time decides to affect the exact same pop in more than one way, completely clogging the capacity of territory to do anything at all for the next few years. A particular annoying situation is to have a conversion of tribesmen into freemen, but said tribesmen being picked as a "parent" pop for population growth, so in the next xteen years, the new pop that will grow will be tribesmen, restarting the process, likely of the wrong culture and/or religion.
  • You are going to spend more time managing your food production and imports than your armies, politics, diplomacy and statecraft combined. There is never enough food. And means to procure more are far from sufficient to even sustain the population, while ability to move any surplus from one region to another is near impossible^note So, say, Rome using Egypt as its bread basket like it did historically not only isn't going to work, Egypt isn't going to be a bread basket to begin with. And lack of food isn't slowing or stopping population growth or even discouraging outside migration into any given province - it simply causes famine as a means to kill population above the sustainable level. Famine leads to riots, fall of stability, discontent populations and a whole lot of problems, so about twice a year, you are going to face food riots within the same region, with no means to prevent it. Gaining more food locally or importing from outside? Population is going to grow to the new sustainable level and then riot again. The actual bottleneck is population capacity, but that's making it a bigger problem to manage, as you can't increase it that much in rural provinces (where food is being made), while cities by default, without any improvements toward it, have a population limit of a few dozens.
    • Later patches alleviated this issue by allowing the player to create extra trade routes so that they may import surplus food goods. Also, knowing which foods to import is also important. ^note In the example of Egypt cited above, the region actually has many settlements producing grain, livestock and fish, food goods which give a flat increase in food. Honey, salt and vegetables only give a small percentage modifier and so has a lesser impact.
• So Okay, It's Average: Compared to other Paradox games, it really has nothing that makes it stand out. To many in the player-base, it's not that the game is bad, only that it's not as good as some of Paradox's other standout titles.
• That One Achievement: Pax Aeterna, achieved by conquering the whole world. Unless you start the game as some Space-Filling Empire, you can forget about ever doing this. And it's not due to difficulty of the task itself, but rather the amount of time you have for it - the game doesn't last 300 years. To get the achievement, you need to control everything between Morocco Atlantic coast to Bengal, not to mention such far-away points like northern Scotland and the Central Asian steppes or Tibet and Sudan.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot:
  • The ancient world was a world rife with intrigue, especially in the Hellenistic kingdoms, especially in the period depicted at the game's opening. Politics here can almost be ignored completely. You please a couple of families, which mostly start out loyal anyway, to make sure they won't rebel right from the start and then just keep them in check with no effort. Other than that, there is very little politics to do in the game other than influence elections and parties - if you have those at all - with the single press of a button to get them to let you declare war on things.
  • The game ends in 29 BC. Roman Empire was established in 27 BC. Yeah... And if you play as Rome, then you are likely to end up with all of Gaul conquered by 200 BC, since it's considerably easier than fighting against Greek states in the east. ^note Easier, but pops in Gaul are less useful than Greek pops as Greek pops at least share the same Hellenic religion as Romans.
  • Good luck trying to get any of the Diadochi strife going as it did historically, since the game doesn't even suggest to the AI to aim for it. Aside of a literal handful of scripted events, the whole struggle of Alexander's successors just won't happen, period. This was somewhat alleviated with the release of the Heirs of Alexander DLC, which gave the Diadochi unique and shared mission trees.
  • The Punic War (note the singular) is so one-sided for Rome (once she gets big enough to crush Carthage), it's very likely there will never be a second or third one.
    • This is even more true on the flip-side: Carthage can crush Rome rather easily with an alliance web once Rome gets entangled in her first war, leaving Carthage with no real rival in Western and Central Europe. In addition, integrating Italic pops (plenty on the Italian peninsula) allows Carthage to access Italic traditions, which have some rather powerful effects.

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