I swear to god, 90% of my interactions with governors are just:

• Seeing that they are disloyal

• Click free hands (to get their loyalty above 33%)

• Resign the governor with high finesse

It's not a meaningful game mechanic; strangely, governors' culture/religion and popularity have an impact on loyalty. It doesn't even matter what faction governors belong to.

Many mechanics in IMP were essentially testbeds for EU5 mechanics, but EU5 itself has no governors, suggesting Johan considered the IMP governor system to be an unsalvageable failure.

It's a bit sad, because I feel the concept of governors has potential. In theory, governors should be everything. If governors aren't able to handle the challenges of their dominion, the governorate ought to become ungovernable. But because everything is just abstracted into province loyalty, nothing matters.

Regarding Braunschweig's death, it's fascinating how DNT kept 80% of the dialogue from the OVA, but changed the meaning of the scene by omitting a few lines and changing facial expressions.

In both versions, the same sequence of events happens:

• Ansbach is freed from his cell and meets a despairing Braunschweig

• Braunschweig wagers his options, but Ansbach tells him it is futile because Reinhard will kill him regardless

• Braunschweig agrees to suicide and orders Ansbach to kill Reinhard

• However, Braunschweig immediately gets cold feet

• Therefore, Braunschweig force-feeds him poison wine

The main difference is that OVA Ansbach seems to hold Braunschweig in contempt. Most prominently, DNT omits the line:

>Can't you at least die like a man?

DNT Ansbach seems genuinely saddened about it, and he is softer about the lead-up to it. OVA Ansbach is rather cold and seemingly had made up his mind to kill Braunschweig long before Braunschweig ordered him to kill Reinhard, while DNT Ansbach merely gave Braunschweig a little push.

I don't know which one I prefer. Maybe I still like OVA better.

In most PDX games, once you beat the strongest power, you have essentially won. Nothing will stop you, you can just snowball. But Imperator doesn't afford that luxury.

It's 50 AD as Phoenicia; I have by far the largest fleet and high income. Romans outnumber me in pops, but I was able to drive them out of Greece in a series of very expensive wars.

Either way, I could body any of my neighbors in a 1:1 war; however, I'm locked in an endless cycle of defensive wars with second-rate neighbors like Carthage, Greece, Persia, and Blemmias. Because I'm in multi-front wars, my armies are split and actually disadvantaged on every front, so I have to play desperate defense and hope I can secure white peace. Other times, I just surrender territories without fighting because I can't afford to defend a new frontier.

I really love this experience.

So, I had this decade-long imperial challenge war with AI Rome, which finally ended in a white peace. However, only a month later, AI Rome decided to declare war on a minor I had guaranteed, restarting the war.

I'm not sure whether it does.

So, I got 10% Senate approval and 35 tyranny after winning a civil war.

The game essentially blocks you from doing anything if you don't have 30% Senate approval.

You can't:

• Declare wars

• Change laws

• Make new or dissolve diplomatic relations (even if you're over the diplolimit).

The only way I can see to gain support is the agenda, which would give 25 Senate support, but the agenda given to me is "Reconcile", which requires decreasing tyranny to 15. But there is no actual way to lower tyranny, and my monthly tyranny drop is 0.1

That means it will take a solid 16 years (200 months) to complete the agenda and gain back senate approval.

So, in other words, the game has locked me into not being able to do anything for the next decades of the game, because elections don't increase it.

What am I supposed to do in this case?

Edit:

It's even worse than that: every time an election happens, the agenda changes, and half the agenda items are law changes, but I can't change the law because I don't have Senate approval. And I can't get Senate approval because I can't pass the law.

Technically, it had municipium status, but it retained near same rights as the sociaani, with its own senate and manned garrison. All of which enabled it to defect to Hannibal during 2nd Punic War.

So, depicting as a direct part of Rome is weird to me.

So, there is a stark contrast between a settlement and a city; they use different buildings and serve very different purposes. However, the next tier up is a metropolis, and it is just an extension of a city; it grants some bonuses (mostly to pop cap), and that's all.

Does anyone else find this a weird design decision?

You'd think metropolises would serve a different purpose from cities, like administrative centers, and at the very least have new buildings like arenas or something. Furthermore, high-civilization cities are already de facto metropolises because civilization represents high infrastructure.

The story makes Reinhard's victory brilliant. But at the same time, was it really that impressive? Reinhard seemingly had the same number of ships, so he didn't beat a larger fleet.

He didn't even really use the defeat in detail; he just sent his admiral fight 1 v 1 battles against the FPA fleets, instead of concentrating force.

So, my point is that even if the FPA task force had not split up, would Reinhard not have been able to win a pitched battle against them?

The only person who seems to be concerned about the invasion is the commissioner in Fezzan, who says something like: "I didn't even know they had that many ships." But literally nobody else seems concerned; even Reinhard doesn't seem even slightly fearful.

It's pretty different from other Paradox games, but it is really cool that you can worship someone's else god and destroy holy sites for relics.

My only issue is that I don't think AI ever rebuilds any holy sites.

I also feel like the treatment of religions is kinda limited; it would have been cool if the treatment of religions worked similarly to cultures, where you can decide which religion gets persecuted, which gets state approval, etc.

In antiquity, discipline was the name of the game. It was their proponent in allowing Greco-Roman dominance against overwhelming numbers.

However, in the post-Roman developed to be less disciplined; this is why the Norsemen enjoyed success during the early medieval period, as tactics like shieldwall required immense discipline.

However, the First Military Revolution marked the transition between early and high medieval, that being shock cavalry. Cavalry in continental Europe had always been important, second only to discipline. However, by 1066 the armor of horsemen was heavy enough to allow them to behave as tanks and allow them break any infantry formation.

So, during the 12th and 13th centuries, heavy cavalry dominated the battlefield; if you didn't have it, you didn't really have an army.

Cavalry was so overpowered that in 1176, Barbarossa was confident his 3K knights could defeat 12K infantry in Legnano, but he didn't. And Legnano became a precursor to the Second Military Revolution, in which infantry developed anti-cavalry tactics that allowed them to defeat shock cavalry. Over the next few incidents, infantry bestriding cavalry became more common, notably in battle Loudoun, in which 500 Scottish pikemen defeated 2,000 English knights. During HYW, these became commonplace.

The Third military revolution was the introduction of gunpowder, which was most prominent during the Hussite War, where the use of gunpowder weapons allowed the Hussites to defeat larger armies.

So, Julian kinda succeeds in preserving democracy by granting autonomy to Heinessen. Meanwhile, Hilda and Mittermeyer try turning FPA into a constitutional monarchy.

I think history shows that neither of those can actually work out.

Why Heinessen can't remain autonomous

Heinessen situation is pretty similar to Poland after the Napoleonic Wars. Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth had been a democratic great power. It was dissolved in 1795 by Russia, Prussia, and Austria. Only 12 years later, Napoleon resurrected it as the Duchy of Warsaw by liberating the Austro-Prussian share of Poland. Napoleon promised Poles complete restoration of Poland, which was a contributing factor in Napoleon's invasion of Russia.

However, because Napoleon lost, Russia took all of Poland. And in the Congress of Vienna, as a compromise to the destruction of the Duchy of Warsaw, Congress Poland received a constitution and autonomy. Nobody was happy with the compromise; Poland had been promised full restoration, and Russia begrudgingly tolerated autonomy. Hence, only 15 years after forming it, Poland revolted unsuccessfully, resulting in the revocation of autonomy.

I feel this autonomy is going to be exactly like in Heinessen. The autonomous region will become a honeypot for dissidents who either hate Goldenlöwe or want to restore FPA. Until their sentiment becomes the majority and they decide to revolt.

Why constitution won't hold

Meanwhile, constitutionalization of the Reich seems kinda similar to Sweden. During Great Northern War, the King of Sweden, got their entire army killed resulting his successor conceding power to the parliament, ending absolutele monarch and beginning "Age of Liberty" which barely lasted 50 years when next king rebuild his army and deprived parliament of their power.

Russia is another case example of something that keeps rejecting democracy because it hasn't been accustomed to it. Only two years after the fall of the USSR, Boris Yeltsin orchestrated a coup against the parliament, literally firing on the parliament building with tanks, while people of Russia cheered as he transformed Russia into an illiberal democracy.

The point is that Reich has no culture of democracy to sustain it. The construction of two Iserlohn-like fortresses next to Fezzan means the constitutional will always live on the mercy of the Kaiser. And eventually one of Reinhard's descendants will decide to end it with ease.

So, certain countries have a flag: gender_equality = yes. Which allows for female generals and governors.

In vanilla, that flag is on for Britons, Gaels, and Iberians.

That itself is very strange, because them being patriarchal societies is fairly well documented. I presume their logic was just "Boudica exists, so...". Disregarding that Boudica was the exception, outside of the time period, and could have been handled with events. If a single woman is enough to make the entire Celtic sphere gender equal, why not just make Anatolian countries equal as well, after all Artemisia existed?

But bigger wtf is that Scythians and Sarmatians have gender_equality = false. Those are probably the closest thing to gender equality, and that's well documented and prominent in pop culture (Amazonians are literally based on an exaggerated version of Scythians).

It's so weird.

Yang keeps predicting everything that will happen and just chooses to abide by it. But does he actually make a mistake (not a choice)?