Recent reviews by maybecale

Good fun!!

unique game currently unmatched in its format, very enjoyable

impossible matching times makes this game unplayable without organising a whole 8-person lobby.

Great chill game for when you only have a small amount of time to play.

An endless sandbox of online fun

This game's unparalleled gunplay is worn down by how poorly the rest of the game has been managed, from the introduction of paid currency into an already paid game, to the endless stream of cosmetics and almost no content that actually adds anything to the game in the last year.

Squad lobbies almost always lead to playing solo due to afk teammates or simply not being given any when the match starts. Because of the lack of players, first person mode is unplayable, and any match is filled with woefully incompetent AI who serve as free kills or to give your position away. This leads to endgame positions where the few players face off, usually queued teams against solo people who hardly stand a chance, and an unrewarding early game of mindlessly killing bots.

Strong, strategic game that gets better and better as you keep practicing it. Definitely recommend to people who like thinking before doing.

I’ll start this off by saying I’m not very experienced in Grand Strategy games, and have seen a run of CK2 and played maybe 15 hours of Stellaris 2.2, but other than that I’m pretty new to this. At the time of this review I’ve played roughly 10 hours of Imperator: Rome, predominantly as Egypt, and everything on Ironman mode.

Learning the Game
The tutorial is workable, moreso a set of objectives for Rome to meet as you take over Southern Italy, but it is kind of loose with it. I ended up attacking a Macedonian state that had land I needed, and was promptly wiped by a sizeable invasion force as well as an internal war splitting my nation apart. I then played my first game with Sparta, which lasted about 10 minutes before ending much the same to the hands of Phrygia. Playing as a bigger power and more cautiously, I’ve had more success with Egypt, which I’ve found a very enjoyable experience so far.

Combat
When footage of this game first showed up, I was disappointed we didn’t have combat like in total war games, where you control individual men down on the field. Now I’m realising that that would not have worked, and thoroughly enjoy the combat system in place. Skirmishes and battles are dictated by army size, army morale, leader strength, what tactics are being used and what composition of troops you bring. It provides a satisfying balance and makes winning wars with less troops possible, and a real achievement. It is possible to see the composition of enemy armies and therefore you can plan a tactic that will be effective against them if you can guess what tactic they will use. Unfortunately, I’m my experience you can only see the tactics that your army can do, so it was hard for me to know what tactic my enemy of light cavalry would use if I didn’t have any light cavalry in my army. I might just be missing where to find this, but it wasn’t obvious enough to me.

Mercenaries are another interesting factor. When bought, they have zero morale, and will get crushed by armies a tenth of their size. They are much more expensive to maintain, but don’t cost you any manpower. I used them to clutch wars that I was beginning to lose, as long as I gave them time for their morale to fill up first. As Egypt and with their massive economy, it was always tempting to just buy an army to deal with trouble as it arose, but usually the months it took for the mercenaries to become effective would leave enough time for rebels or barbarians to cause considerable damage. In my mind a mercenary recruitment screen should look a lot like suing for peace: You click a button outlining an objective and they ask for a certain amount depending on the objective and their size, the leaders martial, etc. You can then spend a larger figure if you need them to do something above and beyond.

Barbarians on the other hand, are mechanically frustrating to deal with. My massive surplus of gold essentially meant that whenever they arose from the barren desert, I just payed them 207 gold and they left me alone. They still wanted around my lands clogging up ui space, but they’ve never been a real threat to me, just an annoyance. Them instantly appearing and then instantly being payed off just isn’t satisfying for me to deal with, and its not really feasible to leave a standing army around barbarian areas just waiting for them to spawn. There were also some bugs with them, but I hope they see an overhaul in the near future.

Overall, country-level combat is probably my favourite part of this game, and being able to slowly push an enemy nation to the point where it collapses in on itself is a real treat.

Diplomacy
Turns out, people don’t like it when you take over massive amounts of territory in a short amount of time. Aggressive expansion is a measure of how dangerous people think your empire is based on how quickly you’ve swallowed up cities. High AE means other nations, and even your own people, don’t like you, but it’s relatively clear whenever you’re doing something that will increase it. When you sue for peace, each city or province states the amount that it will increase your war exhaustion by. It also has a value that contributes to the total amount of territory you take, which can’t be more than 100 or the game just says no. I wish this was instead “we can’t take more land than this or the world would hate us”, or let you take land past that at the cost of tyranny, but whatever.

Oratory power allows you to influence other nations, from insulting them to fabricating claims to just increasing your relations with them. Fabricated claims can be acted upon just once after making them, but increasing relations can take years to finish. You can also choose to create feudatories or vassal states that pay you money so that you’ll defend them if they become attacked. I usually just let them defend themselves until I can sue for a white peace though.

High relations let’s you ally with nations of equal strength to yours, and allows you to pull them into your wars or defend you if you’re attacked.

Empire Management
In my experience, this is game is primarily a war game. When you’re not at war, you’re preparing for a war. There are a decent amount of CK2 style plot events that happen, but I spent a good amount of time sitting there on speed 5 waiting for my manpower to tick up and my AE to tick down. There are decisions that let you do cool things, such as building the Pharaoh's lighthouse and some big library, but once those were done there wasn’t a whole lot of goals set by the game for me to do.

Governors are used to manage the larger parts of your empire, and this is my biggest gripe with the game. There isn’t an easy way to manage or influence your governors, and they are all dumb as bricks. Our treasury is overflowing, but our people are all preparing to revolt! Yeah, let’s bleed them dry (+money -civil order). To change this required individually going into every single province and changing the governor's focus, which cost oratory power and increased tyrrany every time.

Each city can receive a number of buildings that increase specific areas, but I rarely bothered placing them down. As across my empire it was expensive and didn’t appear to make much of an impact. Each building improves a city in a different way, from income to manpower to defence to population growth.

Technology is another of the main focuses during peacetime, but is incredibly dull. As your research levels increase you can spend civic power to increase numbers of some aspect of your empire from “naval discipline” to “siege engineer strength”. All any of this changes is arbitrarily numbers and didn’t engage with me at all. As a bonus, levelling up some of them have downsides like increased cost of armies, so I wouldn’t even look forward to my little boosts. While some of the benefits were helpful, none of them were meaningful, and I feel that that is the weakness with this system.

Religion and cultures both exist as well, but they seem to have little impact on overall gameplay. Religious power is only used for increasing stability and omens, so I accumulated around 2k of it with nothing to do.

Government
Families and loyalty are both systems that play into how you run your government. Families complain if they don’t have enough important jobs, and disloyal people can cause trouble or create rebellions. This can usually be alleviated with granting stipends to unhappy people or befriending them with a tiger, and in general was enjoyable to do when not attacking people.

Conclusion
Overall, this game is a lot of fun, and certainly a solid foundation of a game to come. The ui could use some love, as could how technology works, but this game as it is will keep me coming back for a while.

great game such fun for such little moneys 11/10