We've just released a brand new open beta for Imperator: Rome, patch 2.0.5. This has been some time in the making, and I'm beyond excited that it's now out in the wild.
This is the final help thread, and will stay pinned indefinitely
Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears!
Welcome to Senātus Populusque Paradoxus, The Senate and People of Paradox. Here you will find trustworthy Senators to guide your growing empire in matters of conquest and state.
This thread is for any small questions that don't warrant their own post, or continued discussions for your next moves in your Ironman game. If you'd like to channel the wisdom and knowledge of the noble Senators of this subreddit, and more importantly not ruin your Ironman save, then you've found the right place!
Important: If you are asking about a specific situation in your game, please post screenshots of any relevant map modes (diplomatic, political, trade, etc) or interface tabs (economy, military, etc). Please also explain the situation as best you can. Alliances, army strength, tech etc. are all factors your advisors will need to know to give you the best possible answer.
Bibliothēca Senātūs:
Below is the library of the Senate: a list of resources that are helpful to players of all skill levels, meant to assist both those asking questions as well as those answering questions. This list is updated as mechanics change, including new strategies as they arise and retiring old strategies that have been left in the dust. You can help me maintain the list by sending me new guides and notifying me when old guides are no longer relevant!
I know that the game is not being updated going forward, but that doesn't mean I won't update this thread with new info if you send it to me. If you have any useful resources not currently in the senate's library, please share them with me and I'll add them! You can message me or mention my username in a comment by typing /u/Kloiper.
As you can see, we are in dire need of guides to fill out the Senate Library, both general and specific! Further, if you're answering a question in this thread, consider contributing to the Imperator wiki, which can always use the help as well. Anybody can help contribute to the wiki - a good starting point is the work needed page. Before editing the wiki, please read the style guidelines for posting.
So I was playing Thrace. My heir had 3000 succession support, and I passed the law that made it possible to always nominate an heir. Yet when my king died, my stability plummeted. There was some support for another son of the dead king, but I thought it was way too little to matter. How much support does my heir need to have to avoid triggering it? My heir was an adult btw
Castor and Pollux were the twin deities who protected Roman sailors on their voyages, and considering how Ostia was the Roman trading port, then it would only make sense to give a holy site dedicated to one or both of those particular gods, there.
I would like to find a way to prevent levy generals from being duplicated when splitting a levy army or detaching individual cohorts. How could this be done? Where are the files responsible for splitting armies located?
Would it be possible to make levies function like legions in this regard? Could it also be possible to combine levies from different governorates into a single army?
Paradox games give the impression of offering virtually unlimited modding possibilities, but I just can't seem to find the files responsible for levy mechanics.
Or am I mistaken? Is this simply impossible to mod?
I kinda feel like Germanicus' campaigns over the Rhine was a case of mopping up the women, children, sick and elderly? Nothing on the scale of his fathers initial campaigns taking revenge for the Teutoburg forest disaster? Can someone help clear this up?
I just think that, since this game can get pretty far with the alternative history, then I think that these historical "what-if" scenarios are very much worth exploring. Including such scenarios earlier in the timeline where the Republic could have been saved, or Rome could've gotten a new King, or the first Emperor could've arisen far earlier in the timeline.
Playing as Tayuan for the first time! Ever since they updated the region, I've been really happy because those old invasions were terrible and extremely frustrating. On top of that, there were new features added for Tayuan—though I don't think I made the most of them, since I read that if you pick the right sequence of options, you can form a different nation (I'm not entirely sure). However, I forgot to write it down and I was playing on Ironman, so I just followed the mission tree path to align with the Eastern Empire, bring Chinese pops into my nation, make Qin the primary culture, and eventually turn everything into China one day.
This Central Asia region is extremely fun to play, and Tayuan was no exception. I even considered converting to Buddhism, but creating a nation of Hellenic Chinese was just too hilarious to pass up!
I decided to expand until the borders looked nice and clean, and until there were enough Qin pops on the map.
10/10, absolutely awesome. Thanks, Invictus!(Also, the family tree in this run was by far the most hilarious one yet!)
I got the game on launch and played a bit but never really got into it. Going back to give it another try as I love the classical period and have heard great things about the Invictus mod. My main questions are
A) are there any other mods that are "necessary" or stongly advised for QOL?
B) What are good begginer friendly countries for learning game mechanics?
I recently purchased Imperator and I'm surprised this one never took off, it's got a lot of potential. I was thinking it felt like a mashup of CK3, Victoria 3, & Total War map.
I decided to try to add things I wanted for myself. I wanted to show some of the things I was working on here.
I started because I was thinking that the laws tab could have more laws & ways to roleplay with laws. And naturally I thought of Victoria 3's law system and I tried to replicate it. So the Government screen increased in width, every law became a clickable card that takes you to a nested page where the choices are located. I got sidetracked by an idea to use the country image for the law columns, and I gave differing images to all 4 law groups that changes based on what culture and in some cases, specific country, you're playing.
Then I felt I may as well do the Offices tab too. I eventually landed on this, I pulled the consuls out of the Government tab, as they are "offices" too. The successors I named candidates and the succession score was reimagined as senatorial votes. I think the best thing I did here was rename Vulneraris? to Aedile and Praefectus Militaris to Quaestor.
Then I thought I may as well do the Government tab... So that became the Senate tab. Reimagined a lot of these things, like the 2 small buttons became large panels of thematically relevant info for the Curia & the War Council. Political parties get colors, details are made more clear. Idk, a lot of stuff.
It's built on top of Invictus & Better UI, but it's just a private hobby project, not distributed or anything.
Political Influence (PI) is one of the most important currencies of this game, so I wanted to share some ways to get more of it quickly.
# Character Interaction: influence stakeholders
Go to your ruling character - your king, archon, tribal chief - and look for the 'Scheme: Influence' button on the right. This will give you an easy +20% PI right off the bat. They need to have enough popularity though. If this is not the case, use the 'Scheme: Popularity' button above or go to the national ideas and in the religious group there is an idea that gives your ruler popularity.
# Office holders
The influence scheme gives you +20%, but the question is, 20% of what?
The base value for PI is generated by the loyalty of your office holders. In the image above, notice how the Prytanis with 85 loyalty generates 0.21 PI, almost double that of the Thesmothete with 48 loyalty. We should get the officeholders loyal first and foremost!
When a character gets a new office, he will get a +15 loyalty modifier for a certain time (I could not find out how long). After this honeymoon time is over and the character is no longer grateful for his new office (well, it is not new any more), fire him and either replace it with a new pliant fool qualified candidate or give the same person the same job again - they will be happy to get their job back and get the +15 loyalty bonus once again.
# Tolerate corruption
Go to the character screen of one of the office holders and use the 'give free hands' character interaction. The officer will be able to do whatever he wants in his job, becoming more corrupt over time, but also significantly more loyal.
Corruption in office holders will increase their wages. While you do not want corruption in your governors or in your King/Archon/Tribal chief, with office holders, this is negligible in smaller states. For example, if you are an OPM, a character getting 2.5% of the nation's income instead of 1% is a small difference.
Long-term, we want to keep corruption low or growing slowly. There are multiple ways of reducing corruption:
* In the economy tab, increase all character's wages.
* In the national ideas, there is an oratory idea that reduces corruption
These stack on top of each other. Using both of these at the same time means your character's corruption will grow only slowly. High wages, for small nations, cost only half a ducat per month, but being able to give a lot of people free hands will make managing characters so much easier since they will rebel less, and also give you a huge chunk of additional PI.
# Caveat
When you play a republic, be very careful when giving people free hands. The traditionalist party will not like you playing around with corruption and will disapprove a lot. You can ruin your senate approval quite easily if you give out free hands blindly! If you give out free hands to traditionalist party members, the party will not complain though, of course... The downside is, many traditionalist office holders means your country will be governed by traditionalists more often.
# Deities & technologies
Cultural specialities have been left out of this guide for brevity. The Greeks have Athena, which gives +10% PI. The Arabian pantheon in particular has a lot of corruption reducing deities which can make all this work without having to pay your characters increased wages.
There are also corruption reducing technologies in the right side oratory tech tree, as well as techs that increase character loyalty (which is our main goal!) as well as a juicy +20% PI at the bottom. The right side civic tree also has some good techs that increase PI.
I was recently thinking about the Etruscan's political organization, and how they functioned, when I remembered an important detail: the leader that the Etruscans elected every year to be the head of the league, was also a priest whose job also had religious duties and obligations. And I realized that its current form as an Oligarchic Republic was not as historically close to how the Etruscans organized their government as it could be in the game.
Good Day, as the title states, I do not understand why the option to Study Ways of War for Scythia is not appearing despite having integrated 300 Pops of said cultural group?
I spent quite a while scratching my head trying to figure out what was happening as to why I wasn't able to raise levies in my capital province, and then I realized what happened. I was playing as Diodotos, my king, who had been playing ever since his father abandoned the kingdom on an expedition when he was 11 years old and left him to rule with the promise that he would one day return. Ten years later, his father Iollas returns from his adventure in the eastern empire and claims that he is the king and that his son had to abdicate the throne. Since he had good stats and Diodotos was the heir anyway for being the eldest son, I figured there wouldn't be any problems. Then I noticed I could no longer raise my troops and, after a good few minutes, I figured out that my former king Iollas didn't even have citizen status in his own kingdom*!* And after granting him citizenship rights, it went back to normal. What a great story.
this is one of those things that feels obvious now but genuinely changed how i play, so sharing in case it helps someone.
my whole approach to character management was sort by loyalty, find the angriest people, throw bribes and attention at them. made sense right, low loyalty = danger. so id be pouring influence into some furious senator with like 10 loyalty and feeling responsible about it.
turns out that senator was basically harmless. his power base was zero. he had no governorship, no army, no real holdings, so his anger had nowhere to go. meanwhile theres this other guy sitting at 40 loyalty, which doesnt even look alarming, but he had a big governorship and a chunk of the military, power base in the twenties. HE was the one who could actually start a civil war and i wasnt watching him at all because 40 didnt trip my radar.
the mechanic is that civil war becomes possible when the combined power base of your disloyal characters crosses a threshold, like 25% of the countrys power by default but tyranny and rank move it. so its not how many people are angry, its whether the angry ones actually control enough of the state. one disloyal governor with an army is worth more than five seething courtiers with nothing.
the timing bit that really got me, once a character drops below 33 loyalty they can refuse to be dismissed. so the move is to act while theyre still at like 35-40 and loyal enough to replace or reduce, not wait until theyre already disloyal and its too late. i was always reacting at 20 when the easy fix was already gone.
also learned the hard way that ignoring a powerful family entirely backfires, they get scorned and you manufacture a bunch of enemies at once. but the fix isnt giving the family head your biggest province and army either, thats just building the exact threat youre trying to avoid. spread the jobs across the reliable members.
so now i sort by power base first, then check loyalty. completely flipped from how i used to do it.
whos the character that actually started a civil war in one of your runs. was it someone you saw coming or did it blindside you like mine did
Thanks to the chaos left in the wake of Alexander's passing, the Caucasian peoples were in a prime position to carve out a kingdom of their own. The Oroduni family, undoubtedly descended from the legendary Lord Arhan, has ruled Albania for 300 years. Under their guidance, the Albanians have gone from a nascent, backwards tribe to a great power. In 1 BC, Greatest Albania stands as the most prosperous and sophisticated state the world has ever seen. Our army's might is second only to Rome, and our academies have carried science to new heights. Metropolises dot the mountains of Caucasia and beyond
---
Albania has a somewhat short, but interesting mission tree. It's in a fun part of the map - it sort of plays out like a harder Armenia. I recommend giving it a try. It also has an alternative path for forming the Albanian Empire
Pretty much just the title. While I like the idea of it being an option, I really hate that you don't have the option to stay as your culture, whatever the reason.
Maybe you played the mission tree late in the game and already assimilated everyone you wanted to assimillate, making it have to start anew.
Or you played with one of the more unique cultures, like Epirote, and wanted to stay Epirote, because you wanted to build a huge Epirote empire.
Maybe your idea of your nation is proud of their culture and wouldn't want to mingle.
Or one of many other reasons - gameplay or roleplay - that make you want to keep your culture and not switch to a new one.
Of course you can always say, "don't do the mission tree / stop it at that mission", but that just feels really bad in general.
Playing the Bronze Age mod again, but this time I decided to play in the Levant region and try to unify the region of Canaan under a single leader. I started my game as a migratory tribe in Petra. After becoming a settled tribe, I was able to take the decision to create an artificial oasis in my capital settlement of Petra. I won't go into too much detail, but it was fun unifying this region because things can get complicated quickly due to other nations growing very fast and becoming extremely powerful, like Mari, Ur, and the Egyptians, so you really have to manage your scarce manpower.