May 27, 2019

Development Diary #52 - Characters and Internal Management

Imperator: Rome - Para_Rod

Hello and welcome to another Development Diary for Imperator: Rome!

One of the things that we want to address in Pompey Patch is that we want to make the internal life of your country more visible. Today I will be talking about that, together with a number of improvements to internal management in the patch. :)

Preferred Clan Retinue Units

While Clan retinues are a tool for your Clan Chiefs to assert their own authority, as well as a resource for your tribe when at war, it can at times be a problem that the Chiefs get to pick what unit types they recruit themselves. Since unit types are so important to the general balance of warfare tribes will in the Pompey Patch be able to specify which units that your Clan Chiefs are allowed to recruit to their armies (as well as how they deploy them) in their government view.
Overall Clan Retinues have also been adjusted to be smaller than they currently are in release.

Holdings Rework

One thing we were looking to improve in the 1.1 Pompey Patch is Holdings. In release Holdings are currently things you hardly interact with. While they provide income for your characters you have little control over how they acquire them and you have little reason to get invested in where someone currently owns holdings.

In Pompey we want holdings to be more relevant. They should be the base of power for many of your characters, and they should be the means by which those with no government employment get their income. They are intended as a way to reward characters or harm them, should you take them away. They will also tie a character more to the cities on the map in your empire.

A Holding in Imperator is an estate in a city, with associated slaves, and a holding is always owned by a character. This provides the character with both income and increases their power base ( as described in this diary ).

For it to be possible for a character to have a Holding in a city, the city needs to have at least 10 slaves. An additional Holding in the same location can be added with every additional 10 slaves.

Once a holding exist the 10 slaves associated with it cannot be moved, or promoted. But they can still starve.

Characters will over time use their wealth to purchase holdings themselves, but you can also grant them directly to characters for a large loyalty boost. The number of holdings each character own at the same time is limited by their finesse skills, and when they die their children will inherit it.

Privately held holdings can be confiscated using the existing Proscription interaction, if you have imprisoned a character.

Events, civil wars and other content will make use of a character's holding going forward.

New Governor Policies

In order to make it easier to redistribute your population, Pompey update will add two new governor policies, which will let you impact your population in your province in a way you prefer.

Centralize Population
This Policy reduces output from the province by 10%, as it will move one pop every 3rd month from a random city in the province, and put that pop in the capital city of the province, if the capital is below the population cap.

Decentralize Population
This also reduces the output from the province by 10%, and it moves one pop every 3 months from a higher populated city in the province to a lower populated city in the province, evening out the population in the province over time.

Trials

A big change in the Pompey patch is that Disloyal Employed characters such as office holders and commanders can no longer be dismissed. Instead there is a new character interaction to bring someone to Trial. The starting chance of success will be dependent on a number of things, among them how corrupt the character is, or how large their power base is.

The actual trial itself however is an event chain in which your actions will affect the outcome. Bringing someone to Trial may also misfire and a failed trial may lead to the accused character using their power base to ignite a Civil War.

Create Mercenary

In a monarchy you can at any point send away a loyal member of the Royal Family to be a mercenary in foreign service. This potentially gets rid of family members that could be troublesome in the future, but it is not a permanent fix. The mercenary prince may well return one day with expectations on their new home life after their foreign adventures.

With that I will leave the word to @Arheo to talk about the new Schemes system:

Schemes

Character events in Imperator have been a great source of fun from the inception of the character system. A surprising amount of events occur for characters in a court or country, and can have a variety of effects from murder to jailbreaks.

This said, it became clear from feedback after launch, that these events were rarely being experienced, and when they were taking place, did not provide enough (if any) feedback to the player. In an effort to make these more visible, as well as to provide a framework for additional and future work on the character system, we have reworked the Ambition system to act as a tool for expressing a variety of character-focused content. You may not have realised, for example, that a number of your more brawny characters engage in underground pit-fighting on an occasional basis; or indeed, that your powerful senators have been stealing from one another behind your back.

Mechanically, schemes are a type of ambition that a character can perform, having a clear goal (for example, to assassinate a political rival, or purchase a holding), and a finite duration. The target and duration of a scheme will be displayed in the character menu, and be visible in the character tooltip.

The outcome of a scheme can vary, and you may find yourself responding to more character events than before, however the frequency of this is being closely monitored by the system to prevent being constantly bothered by popups.

Whilst primarily a vessel for displaying the web of subterfuge that goes on in a court, the player will also be able to interact with certain schemes to assist or interfere, or in some cases, convince a character to drop their scheme altogether.

In addition to this, a player’s Ruler has a selection of schemes available to them, accessed through the character interactions menu. These are designed to address existing issues, and enhance some of the new features coming in 1.1.

Ruler Schemes
Since your ruler is a character more closely tied to your country you are able to pick what schemes they pursue. Including:

Siphon Funds:
The ruler will attempt to divert state funds to enlarge their personal wealth.

Influence Character:
If there are characters in your country that are more gifted than your current monarch you may attempt to influence them to put their expertise to use.

Assassinate Character
Among the schemes you can adopt for your ruler is one to assassinate someone, either abroad or in your own country.

Prove Legitimacy:
In monarchies the ruler can try to improve their legitimacy by researching their lineage. While any type of research will increase the perceived legitimacy of your ruler there is also a small chance of discovering a long lost link to one of the blood lines in the game, if you are Hellenic.

May 20, 2019

Development Diary #51 - Trade and Provinces Improvements, Barbarians and Heritages

Imperator: Rome - Para_Rod

Hello and welcome to another development diary for the Pompey update! This time we’ll talk about new benefits to playing tall, and also discuss changes to barbarians, slaves and much more.

Trade Changes
We have done some changes to trade that may not seem that impactful to you at a glance, but gives us more tools in making the game deeper and more flavorful.

We removed the sources of easy extra trade routes in all provinces, as it was too powerful, and was a no-brainer to always go for those, and they also made for a huge snowball of trade.
We also made trade entirely handled as a province activity, and not a city activity. While each city provides some commerce from its citizens, the income from commerce is handled at a province level, so you can see the income from a trade-route at the one place it happens.

We removed the hardcoded benefits on a trade that were going to be exported, and instead we have 2 unique modifiers increases the value of your foreign imports and your foreign exports. The economic policy for commerce is now used for whether you want to strength your benefits from exports or your benefits from imports.

Improving your Provinces
One problem we identified was the lack of options at times when playing tall, and that you had too much resources that you had no use for when you were not busy conquering. Now he have added 4 new province level abilities, that each cost 400 power of its given type, and starts a process that 2 years later will give you a permanent bonus to that province. These can then be repeated as much as you like, but you can only have one process going on in a province at the time.

Install Provincial Procurators - Military Power for 2% Population Output and 0.01 Monthly Province Loyalty
Promote Infrastructure Spending - Civic Power for +1 Building Slot.
Entice Business Investments - Oratory Power for +1 Import Routes
Make Religious Endowments - Religious Power for +3% State Religion Happiness in Province
There are also other ways to do these State Investments, other than spending lots of power. There are events and decisions, like country-forming, that will give you an amount of free state investments, which is then used instead of the power cost.

Also, there are three different abilities you can do in each city.

Move Capital - First of all, you can move your capital to that city, for a large cost of civic power cost, where it becomes cheaper to move to a bigger city, and more expensive to move to a smaller city.
Relocate Provincial Capital - You can change which city is the capital city of a province for 50 civic power . Province Capital will be set at start of the game, and only change otherwise if conquered by another nation.
Coordinate Urban Development - Pay 100 Civic Power to start a process that at the end of 2 years time, you will get +1 local civilization in that city until the end of the game. This can be repeated as much as you want, but you can’t do it more than once in a city at the same time.

Buildings have changed with the population rework mentioned earlier, and by the trade rework mentioned today.

Marketplaces : +10% Tax Income from City
Training Camp: +10% Manpower
Fortress: +1 Fort Level
Granary: +5 Population Capacity

Now some of these may make you go “what the hell?”, I like to point out that granaries just don't give +5 pop capacity in most cases.. As there are modifiers like Grain giving +10%, Adjacent to Major River +50%, Warm Climate +90% etc...

Barbarian Rework
A lot of things regarding Barbarians work similar to have they did in the original EU: Rome, and that was just not good enough anymore. In Pompey you will now see the following changes to barbarians.

Paid off barbarians will no longer loot your territory.
Barbarians that have not fought in a battle will never accept to surrender.
Barbarians will no longer care about “potential strength” when you negotiate with them, only about armies in the same general area.
Barbarians are no longer clever enough to use zone of control propagation, even if they do take a fort.
Barbarian have no longer any attrition in unknown provinces.
Barbarians reinforce twice as quick when not siegeing.
Barbarians will now grow in size as they take over provinces containing tribesmen.

Zone of Control Changes
There have also been two major advantages to friendly zone of control in Pompey. First of all, they now protect against all the nasty things barbarians do on your territory, but most importantly, friendly zone of control now protects against the attrition you get from bad climate. This makes is so that you don’t lose half your army because you live in a desert, nor will you take a huge hit every single winter as a German tribesman.

Slaves Distribution
We did some changes to slave distribution in Pompey, in that each time you take a city, the amount of possible cities getting slaves are far larger, and not weighted towards 50% reaching your capital. Now it will consider more provinces the bigger your nation is, and also add in ports, and not just provincial capitals, and cities where the commander has holdings etc, to get a better spread.

Heritages
One of the biggest complaints we had with the release was that nations felt the same. While we had a wide variety of countries, with different populations and governments, there needed to be a bit more of identity to them. Even if any city state on Crete would have a great number of similarities with other City states on the same island, there were also differences. This is why we are adding Heritages to the Pompey Update.

A Heritage has 2 benefits and 1 drawback, so give a sort of identity to your country. There is a dozen different generic heritages that depends on your geographical position, for instance you would get Seafaring Heritage if you start with a port, and Desert Heritage if your capital has desert terrain.

Over 20 countries will have unique Heritages in Pompey, and we will keep adding more in future patches. Some are for powers that have their glory days behind them while others are for countries that would rise to become influential in the future. As an example here are some that we have added for Egypt, Carthage, Syracuse and Athens:

May 13, 2019

Development Diary #50 - Political Changes in Patch 1.1

Imperator: Rome - Para_Rod

Hi everyone and welcome back to another development diary! This time we look into some of the political changes for the Pompey update that will be out in June.

Eligibility in Republics

Different republics will have different age-requirements for who can be elected to become ruler. Rome for example, require its rulers to be at least 35 years old.

Co-Ruler/Dual-Rulers

In the Pompey patch (v1.1), Aristocratic Republics will have Consuls & Co-Consuls. When elected, the one with highest support becomes Consul, and the one with the second highest number of votes becomes Co-Consul. This often means that they come from two different parties.

When it comes to power generation, the stats of the Consul with the highest attribute will be used, giving a nice benefit to the country.

The loyalty of those of the same party as the Co-Consul gets a positive impact if he is loyal, and negative impact if he is disloyal. We simulate the friction between the two consuls by the loyalty of the co-consul. Also, if the Co-Consul gets low loyalty, the power costs increase by up to 25%.

The Co-Consus gain popularity by the same factor as the first consul gains popularity, and the ruler popularity that other characters look at is the average of both Consuls.

Any ruling trait that a Co-Consul has will also be added to the country.

A major drawback for Aristocratic Republics is the fact that impact of ruler corruption could be doubled, as both Consuls corruption is added together for the country.

Consorts

In some types of monarchies, the consorts have some sort of supportive abilities. In such a monarchy, the consorts works like a co-ruler for how you gain power each month, ie the highest score of an attribute of the ruler and his/her consort is the one considered, so the capabilities of who you marry to your ruler is important.

Consorts also get a loyalty-hit over time, if they are not the parent of the primary heir of the current ruler, and if they become disloyal, they will increase the power-costs by up to 25%, scaled by how disloyal they are.

Government Abilities

In the Pompey patch we have added some extra abilities for each of the three government forms, where you can strengthen yourself.

Republics
Each party has a specific action connected to it, where the cost is halved if that party is in power, and also increase the populist popularity.

Civic Party - Pay Civic Power for cheaper building costs.
Military Party - Pay Military Power for more discipline .
Mercantile Party - Pay Oratory Power for cheaper trade routes.
Religious Party - Pay Religious Power for cheaper conversions.
Populist Party - Only if populists are in power, pay money for reduction in corruption and populist support

Monarchies

War Council - You can Summon a War Council once every ten years, where your important courtiers will propose different places where you should start wars, giving you claims on adjacent areas.
Demands Oath of Allegiance - Spend lots of oratory and religious power to increase the support for your Primary Heir over time.
Hold Games - Spends money of both the country and the ruler to increase his or her popularity.
Patronize the Arts - Spend Civic Power to gain Primary Culture Happiness and Civilization Increase over time.

Tribes

War Council - Same as for monarchies
Assemble Raiding Parties - Spend Oratory and Military Power to get a boost in Enslavement Efficiency.
Encourage Tribal Migration - Makes you lose 5 tribesmen pops, for a tick down in centralization.

(And there is more new things for tribes, mentioned in a later development diary.)

Power Base & Civil Wars

In Pompey each character in your realm can have a potential power base. This is both an abstract gauge of how influential they are in a country as well as a meter for how many troops they could raise in a civil war. The total power base in a country will range up to around 300 and it is scaled within that country.

Power base is primarily derived from:

Loyal Troops
Owned Holdings
Titles
How much of the country’s population that is ruled by a character who is a Governor or ruler.
Ruler Popularity (for the ruler)
Character Wealth

It can also be modified by interactions, events and other script content...

For purposes of Civil Wars the game will no longer count Loyal Cohorts but instead the Power Base of all disloyal characters.

The threshold for civil war is 33%, with positive stability increasing it, and negative decreasing it.

Character Interactions

We will go deeper in a later developer diary about the new abilities we will be adding, we can now mention that we are rebalancing the costs quite heavily for them, removing the power costs, and using the new abilities to impact Aggressive Expansion, Tyranny or Stability from it. Recruiting a character from another nation wlll increase your AE, while bribing will be done with the rulers own personal money.

Next week we’ll talk about playing tall, changes to barbarians, trade & slave distribution, while going into more detail about heritages.

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