Recent reviews by Mr. Green

So finally after 70 hours of playing this game, I now know what some of the issues are.

This game on the surface seems to lack a lot of features, which it does, and therefor I understand why people don't like it. However, when you get deeper into the game it gets really enjoyable. And sure, a lot of features from CK2 and EU4 are missing in this game, but even though they are missing, it still makes for a very fun game to play.

Because I want to give a review of the current game, I'll not include the Paradox 20$ DLC spam that is sure to come.

My campaign experience:
My first campaign which I almost managed to "finish" aka conquer the world, was very fun, until the end.
I, as almost any other, started off as Rome, because I wanted to play the nation that seemed most fun to me. First I conquered the Italien peninsula, followed by my advance into the Gaul and Germanic territories. However, a little way into the Gaul territories, I had a civil war, beacause I had been too hard on my pops, the civil war was somewhat fun, and I managed to defeat them. The territory the revolt took was about 1/2 of my current territory, keep this in mind for later. After this I finished my Germanic and Gaul campaigns, and moved on to Greece and the Iberian peninsula, that I also, quickly finished. Let's fast forward a bit, cause nothing interesting happens for the next 200 years or so. But, then I reach Egypt, which I've finally decided to invade, and this is where an issue that I've found in the past, reappears. In Egypt, I take massive attrition, and my mecenaries and standard 20k stack armies completly fall apart. What essentially happens, is that my 500k armies I brought in, end up like a 150k army, with no battles being fought yet. However, I manage to win. After I win the war, I start to notice something really interesting. At this point I have 3000 cities, and my closest competetor is Phrygia coming in with 900 cities, but our two armies are almost the same size, including the economies. So, I check the pop sizes of our two countries, and I have 4 times the population of Phrygia, and still our economies are almost equal. This made absolutely no sense to me, so I checked other countries, and sure enough, other countries with way less size, had an insanse economy, for their size, in comparison to me. At this point I start getting really confused about what was going on, but I continue anyways. A bit of conquest later, I run into a new problem. At this point the Roman Republic has been the Roman Empire for many years now, and I'm facing a succession crisis. My primary heir, is being neglected for my secondary heir, which apparently is a "pretender", and therefor I start loosing legitimacy at an alarming rate (-1,89 per month). And all of a sudden, 40% of my cohorts are disloyal, because I don't have enough legitimacy. 12 months later my 2nd civil war sparks, and almost as soon as it sparks, I quit the game. I do that because 50% of my entire territory (which is around 3000 cities), has been handed to the revolt. 1500 cities has been handed to my new enemy. Not only that, but they have also taken more than 60% of all my armies, leaving me with 600k troops. Then they really start picking up speed, and they make so many armies, that they have around 3m men in their armies. And because of another issue in this game, I can almost not do anything about it. Because this game has a massive atrittion problem, all of these 3m men are split into 20-60k stacks, which is so many legions, that it would take ages hunting them down, not to mention that my own legions are of a 20-65k stack, with the majority being 20k stacks. With this civil war being on at least 10 fronts, I decide to quit the game, because it would simply take over 10 hours to make everything right again. Now you might think that I could just have avoided the civil war by doing some hokus pokus ingame, but no, there was absolutely nothing, nothing I could have done. I cannot interact in anyway with a pretender or heir, other than mariage and befriending them. So overall, I was pretty pissed at how it ended.
Because I know a lot of people like to see what that looks like, I'll provide a little picture: https://gyazo.com/7bcb815757a07b79322df0693b37bd03

Primary problems I discovered:
1: "Mana" is actually not too much of a problem to me, however, I did discover that you get way to little of it to keep everything running at the same time.
2: Colonization takes ages, and requires too much mana to be done properly.
3: "Royal Mariages" between two nations does not work, and is completly dysfuntional.
4: In mid-late game, all offensive armies are mercenaries, and legions are just for showoff. Not to mention that mecenaries also cost mana.
5: The AI gets buffs because you've become too powerful, which is a pain in the ass when you're fighting against a total of 100 20k stacks.
6: Too much attrition. I feel like EU4 did this well, but Imperator: Rome failed hard, you simply have too many armies to keep track of.
7: Late game civil wars... just quit the game when they happen tbh, so you don't waste 10 hours of your life.
8: Agressive expansion is completely broken. AE increases too fast for you to conquer the IRL Roman Republics territories within the game's timeline.
9: The game ends without you being able to play onwards, like in EU4, and leaving you unsatified. You can change this by changing some of the game files.
10: Families are broken, nobody gets children, and half of your population does not get married before the age of 70, so eventaully you're gonna run out of families to supply your armies.
11: It is too hard and unclear how you're suppose to reform the Republic into a Monarchy.
12: Slaves stack up in your capital, personaly I had 2000 (2m) in Rome. And if you want to move just 1 out of there, it's gonna cost you 20 civic points (mana). The reason why this is a problem, is because your population is starving so hard that 10% of 1 pop is dying every month, and this is when you have 200 granaries.
13: Stability, completely useless, and has no impact on your country.
14: Too little character interaction, and personality.
15: Some modifiers also lie. I got an event that explained I'd get a 10% tax boost of my 3300 tax income, but my tax income was only boosted to 3400 which is less than 33% of what I should have gotten.
16: Not enough events. There are almost no events or formable nations in this game, which is really sad.

Conclusion:
Somewhat of good game, great idea, great graphics, but some of the execution is horrible. If you want to play this game, then just play the first 150 years of the game, and quit. After 150 years issues start to pop up like crazy.

Rating: 3/10

Enjoy :)

Good calssic strategy game

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