Imperiums: Greek Wars News

Hello everyone.

We hope that your summer vacation plans worked out well and that you had a great time. We have just finished a new update 1.1.7. with a code name "Trading posts".



In one of the previous faction highlights we informed you about a delay in the release of the Age of Alexander DLC because of some unforeseen issues and the fact that we really want to deliver a bug-free and well-balanced game. As a compensation for this delay, we decided to add in one additional new feature - the Trading posts.

Originally, we planned to release it with the DLC, but it also works in the vanilla game. Now the feature is finished and as a thank you for your patience and understanding we have decided to give it to you in this release, version 1.1.7. which also brings more interesting new stuff, adjustments and improvements.

Let's start with "Trading posts". Like other game mechanics, this is also inspired by historical reality. Cities along trade routes benefit greatly from this traffic. They get more wealthy as both travelers and traders stop there and they also become natural centers of "immigration" as they offer plenty of new opportunities. How has this been incorporated into the Imperiums core? Well, exactly like this.

Trade routes in Imperiums already calculate so called "losses". These are basically the fees paid to traders to transfer your goods. Losses are calculated, based on the length of the trade route, the terrain crossed, accessibility and dangers along the route. Originally, they were subtracted from the traded goods. With Trading posts these fees won't be "lost" but will be distributed among any friendly cities along the trade route. Note that traders do not stop in enemy cities, even if the route passes close by, hence these cities are not considered trading posts on the route.

All the cities which serve as trading posts also get a special migration bonus resulting in faster growth based on their birth rate support level. Their growth will be quicker than other similar towns (with the same birth rate) that are not trading posts.

This has some interesting consequences:

• It may be more worth your while to maintain peace with other factions, as any of your towns that are trading posts on trade routes of other factions passing through your lands will also make a profit.
  
• Cities without any significant resources around, but with a good trade route location can generate additional income and grow faster.
  
• Fewer trading posts along a trade route means a higher income for each of them. For example, a very long trade route across the sea, with perhaps a single en-route trading post on an island, would end up pocketing all of the fees paid on the trade route.

Information about the trading posts has been added to the Resource usage window, tooltips, as well as a special map highlight (the "Show all active trade routes" setting in the map menu must be ON).

We hope you enjoy this new feature and accept this as an apology for delaying the DLC. We are really doing the best we can.

But back to the new update. What else has been included in the new version apart from the Trading posts feature?

Here is the changelog:

• Diplomacy improvements - rejections should be explained more clearly.
  
• AI improvements in diplomacy (cancelling treaties, declaring war, offering federations and confederations, etc).
  
• AI improvements on the tactical level (when AI unit is trapped without supplies).
  
• AI improvements of trading offers.
  
• The map generator was improved - a new setting defining the minimum distance of cities from the map edges was added.
  
• Game balancing - food consumption was increased for bigger cities.
  
• Small changes in the Diplomacy window related to trade routes.
  
• The Graphic Card currently in use is displayed in the graphics tab in game settings (it was added as a "check" to ensure that the correct GPU was set up for the game).
  
• Autosave file names have been shortened.
  
• Some Proton improvements.
  
• Temp folder is now in subfolder of the game root (preventing some issues with Windows permissions).
  
• Issue with missing battle result window and report in special circumstances was fixed.
  
• Couple of very rare CTDs fixed.
  
• Translations added for German, French, Spanish, Czech, Russian and Japanese.

Enjoy the rest of the summer, we hope to get back to you soon;)

Yours,
Kube Games team.

Expansion is not only about extending your borders and ensuring a sufficient military presence in newly conquered regions. Incorporating any new territories into an existing administrative structure is a vital step to help bring potentially rebellious or hostile communities into your empire’s fold.




Small states can rule the whole country from the capital because all of the power is concentrated in the hands of the ruling class residing there. The management of a larger empire however, requires a different administrative organization.

Remote areas are prone to corruption by the local elite, who manage their affairs using the motto ‘what the eye doesn’t see, the heart doesn’t grieve about’. Such behavior not only hurts the state economy but it also feeds rebellious moods and unhappiness, unchecked, these could easily escalate into nationwide revolts.

The only way to ensure that your will is followed and that all orders are carried out properly, is to build regional capitals. Here, appointed governors and civil servants will enforce your imperial orders to the letter and demand obedience. They will greatly reduce corruption as well as increasing resource production.

However, power itself corrupts. The growing significance of regional capital(s) might feed the personal ambitions of the local ruler and his loyalty to your throne may become questionable. Always keep a close eye on your appointed governors, don’t allow minor opponents to grow too strong in your shadow.

As always, let’s have Pavel explain this new feature in depth.

Originally posted by Pavel

The snowball effect has always been a problem in 4X games and in general with all strategy games. This is where one player becomes too powerful to be threatened. It basically removes any challenge from the game as it enters its final phase, whereby it is just "a matter of time" before this player wins. There is no way to solve this entirely, because the whole point of the game is that the stronger player wins. The question is though, can we mitigate this problem for as long as possible, to extend the enjoyable playing time?

Different approaches have been implemented in other strategy games, such as hardcoded resource limits or artificial resources causing decay. Let's look at history to see what were the most common causes of failure of large empires (i.e. no viable competitors remaining):

• Civil wars or other kinds of internal collapse.
  
• Natural disasters (causing changes in societies).
  
• Surprise defeat in war (e.g. David and Goliath or Alexander‘s conquest of the Achaemenid Empire).
  
• Economic collapse.

Civil wars and revolts are already included in Imperiums, but from a player’s point of view they are not the right tool to effectively slow down the snowball effect. Revolts and revolutions are used in Imperiums to create local problems that make the game more interesting. However no player likes to have his empire collapse and see all of his hard work undone in a couple of turns, with no tools to be able to stop it (no matter how we might justify it). It would probably be the most realistic way to let empires fall, but the game should be fun and satisfying for the player, it should not induce fits of rage :)

Natural disasters as implemented in the game follow the same principles. They are included to make the game more interesting, but they are not deal breakers, they are balanced and the power balance within the game will remain largely unchanged.

Similarly a surprise defeat in war to a small nation, albeit to a brilliant general with a super powerful army, would not be accepted by players at all. We can already hear the feedback, it would be `ahistorical`, irrational and rejected completely, and would likely induce more negative reviews than we would like. Events like this are rare, to make them the main reason for the fall of empires in the game would be a little illogical.

So, having eliminated these options, we are left with economic collapse as the only remaining candidate we can use to deal with the snowball effect in the later stage of the game. Causes of economic collapse could be corruption, an insufficient workforce or maybe some other reason. In Imperiums we have decided that corruption is best suited to act as a control on the snowball effect, it is predictable, logical and can be well represented to the player.

You probably already know that we have implemented corruption in the vanilla release. So how will things differ in the Age of Alexander DLC?

• Corruption starts getting more important as the power and size of an empire grows. The bigger the relative power or size of the empire (compared with other players), the greater the corruption.
  
  
• Corruption in a city is a location specific variable. It is based on the distance from the capital and the distances from the nearest regional capitals, the further away they are the greater the corruption.
  
  
• The intensity of local corruption is represented by the amount of harvested or mined resources that are `lost`. In the real world this would be resources that are stolen or misplaced en-route due to bureaucratic inefficiencies, lack of control or bribes.
  
  
• In the game the best way to fight corruption is to build regional capitals.
  
  
• Your capital and regional capitals work in the same way, in that they prevent corruption in their proximity. However regional capitals, favored by the nation can cause local jealousies with other nearby cities, the loyalty of which may decrease. This may lead to lower unit effectiveness and higher odds for revolt, etc.
  
  
• Regional capitals cannot be created close to one another, they have to be a certain distance apart. Costs depend on the history of the city, if a city used to be an enemy‘s capital, the costs are naturally lower. It should be noted that conversion costs increase over time, the longer a city is `just` a regular town, the higher the cost to convert it to a regional capital. The reasoning behind this is to encourage players to create regional capitals in any recently conquered capitals they have taken from their enemies, sooner rather than later.
  
  
• The removal of a regional capital will cause a temporary morale decrease and will lead to higher risk of revolts in such city.
  
  
• The selected government is important. The maximum impact of corruption, the time it takes to reach maximum impact (based on power), the minimum distance required between regional capitals, the severity of the loyalty decrease in cities around regional cities, all of these vary according to the selected government. Smaller countries will be able to operate effectively with more types of selected governments than larger countries or empires.
  
  
• Corruption is implemented logarithmically, meaning that it slowly increases until it reaches its limit (the maximum corruption impact) from which it will not increase further.

There are few changes related to this new feature that you will notice:

1. Changing capital and regional capitals will be possible in a new window. Detailed information about changes and costs is provided to the player.
   
2. Corruption is handled in the game as a regular resource with its own Resource usage map.
   
3. Regional capitals are represented on the map by a "capital" banner but with a smaller flag and shield.
   
4. A new property of map items (in this case cities) called "default loyalty" has been added to the Map item detail window and to the Unit menu. This represents the value which loyalty converges to its maximum over time. Until now this value has always been 100% (aka loyalty was slowly increasing until it reached 100%). With this new feature, this value changes according to the distance to the closest (regional) capital.

With all of these changes the game brings more attention to the state organization. No empire can survive without strong economic and political ties to the centre. Give the provinces too much autonomy and they will soon be demanding full independence. Keeping the balance is the key here.

Hello everyone.

First of all, let us wish you a nice summer, we hope that you enjoy your vacations and holidays wherever you plan to go.

It has just been two weeks since the last update and although we want to maintain the current schedule to one significant update every month or two, we didn't want to delay this update. Since the release of "Transparent diplomacy" update (version 1.1.5.) we have focused our work entirely on diplomacy balancing and tweaking.

We developed some new tools for evaluating the AI changes in diplomacy and identified several places where the calculation could be improved. It was mostly a matter of one factor (considered in the calculations) having too big an impact on the overall result (or vice versa). We also implemented several new parameters that impact the relationship now. Especially confederations, federations and absorptions should now be way more interesting and predictable.



Apart from that, there have been some minor changes:

• Viewing political map of another player is now more informative. It contains tooltips showing the attitude between factions and their treaties.
  
• Confederation members are now fully informed about political changes made by their masters (for example, when you choose to play as a satrapy of Achaemenid Empire).
  
• Impact of influence action performed by a confederation member was improved. It deteriorates the relationship between those factions (and with the master of the state union, too).
  
• Issue in graphs was fixed (some factions were not displayed in the graphs).
  
• Couple of issues with the new transparent diplomacy mechanic were fixed.
  
• Couple of very rare CTDs fixed.

We hesitated to make this a regular update because the list of changes is quite short, nevertheless, we consider this to be quite a significant change in the gameplay (no matter that the change is "invisible" to the player) and thus deserves a proper article :)

We are going to focus mostly on finishing the Age of Alexander DLC in the coming weeks. Most of the new stuff is already implemented and works well, some mechanics are still to be tweaked yet and the overall balancing is still ahead of us.

Enjoy the summer. Ideally before Alexander DLC is out:)

Yours,
Kube Games team.

Hello everyone.

I hope that you are all enjoying Spring and are looking forward to Summer. We finally finished the next major update - version 1.1.5. - titled "Transparent diplomacy".
The code name is based on the new feature which you voted for in the last poll. Many of you have been asking for the changes in diplomacy for quite some time and we agree that there is room for improvements.

Apart from this new main feature, a few other significant changes are also being introduced.
Firstly, the possibility to tag particular events so that you can revisit them later. This should make navigation through the new turn events easier.
Secondly, a new game option called "Relationships randomization" has been implemented. This option should considerably increase the replayability of the campaign map as well as other scenarios. The randomization is disabled by default, if you decide to try it you will start the same map, but with different initial relations between factions. This will present new challenges and will make the scenario ahistorical by definition. In addition some of the other features, such as Objectives, are automatically disabled as they are defined by the original setup of the game. Nevertheless, it should be quite refreshing to try a new unknown setup for each game.
Picking out a couple of the other changes, there are some improvements in the terrain appearance and the look of the graphs.



Please read the full changelog for more information. We also tried to make some screenshots related to particular features:

New features and improvements added:

• Transparent diplomacy gives you more information about potential diplomacy offers in an easily accessible way. This includes information about the most probable reason why an opponent might reject a particular offer, the likelihood of acceptance of such an offer and/or when would the opponent be more open to discuss new offers. The list of currently available offers is displayed in the Political map window for easier navigation.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2507278918

• "Mark for later" checkbox was added to all event windows. It allows you to mark particular events which you want to come back to later in your turn, to investigate and address. Such events are moved to the top of the Report panel and the player can unmark them by unclicking the checkbox.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2507278887

• Game option "Relationships randomization" allows you to mix the initial state of relations between factions and so offers a new experience even when you play the same faction again. You might end up playing Macedon as a subject to a big Athenian confederation or vice versa. It is worthwhile to check this out yourself.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2507278852

• The information in graphs is no longer displayed based only on the availability of particular data. For example, in the Power graph in previous versions you could only see those factions with whom you had a full overview. Despite the fact that it was implemented this way on purpose (and was more realistic), the truth is, due to the lack of available information, players were barely using them. This has been changed and now you can see the data of all of the factions in the graphs (that you are in contact with)..

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2507278744

• The banner for each unit is now displayed in the unit selector, indicating its owner, this is to make it clearer which unit is yours (until now, the only distinction made was the color of the unit).

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2507278808

• List of active game options for current game was added to the tooltip of the year/turn panel.
  

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2507308422

• A small terrain appearance iteration was performed. Some terrain noise was removed, wooded areas are now more distinct in comparison to non-wooded regions and clouds were tweaked so that they do not block the player's view.
  
  
• Graphs were made wider and event labels smaller. This should improve their readability.
  
  
• The movement and behaviour of Generals and Settlers controlled by AI were improved.
  
  
• List of resources (so called "consumption") was added to the tooltip when you are about to build a building (like a shipyard).
  
  
• Information about the number of Citizens was added to the Map item detail window.
  
  
• For asynchronous multiplayer games (PBEM), a "leave game" button was added to the lobby. This allows you to leave the game, replacing you with an AI player so that all of the remaining players can continue playing.
  
  
• The algorithm calculating when a federation is beneficial for a player and when to revoke it, was improved.
  
  
• Texts of events related to desertion were improved to include information about their former owner.
  
  
• Some issues in Steam achievements were fixed.
  
  
• Changes in all localizations were made.
  
  
• Some issues in the newly introduced Polish language were fixed.
  
  
• Italian localization progressed further and we are getting closer to playtesting.
  
  
• Messed up "Athens conquered" dialog window was fixed.
  
  
• Issue causing crashes in Proton fixed.
  
  
• Rare CTD causing crash by pressing TAB was fixed.
  
  
• Rare CTD happening when Trojan horse (in Troy mod) was selected, was fixed.
  
  
• Very rare CTD causing crash when playing intro video was fixed.
  
  
• Issue in Hotseat causing anomalies on terrain was fixed.
  
  
• Issue with hanging Gordion knot objective was fixed.

That's all for today! Apart from the regular updates, we are working hard on the upcoming Age of Alexander DLC. If you haven't done so yet, consider wishlisting it so you won't miss the launch discount. We really think that the DLC will be great.

We hope you enjoy these changes and we’ll speak to you soon!

Yours,
Kube Games team.

Today we go back to the cradle of civilization, the place where the story of Philip II of Macedon and his son Alexander starts, the birthplace of Greco-Roman world – Hellas.

In Imperiums: Greek Wars you had the opportunity to put on the shoes of Philip II to try to relive his legacy in your own way. As Philip often struggled so did many of you, realizing that to survive in the world of warmongering rivaling city-states, you needed both military foresight and skills alongside the unscrupulous use of your political might.

Now, over 30 years later we are again at historical crossroads. Alexander has taken the throne after the murder of his father, with it comes the responsibility for the pan-Hellenic league of states. These subjugated city-states are not ready to stand peacefully aside, this might be their last chance to regain independence and perhaps even take back territories that they lost to Philip.

So let’s take a walk through Hellas in Imperiums: Age of Alexander and if you haven't done so yet, add the DLC to your wishlist.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

So, what do you think, is the path Alexander took an easier one than his father’s? When you start the DLC for the first time are you going to try your luck on the throne of Macedon, or will you prefer to try and regain independence for the Hellenic city-states? Alternatively, if you like an extreme challenge, you could try and lead the Illyrian tribes and teach a lesson in military and political guile to the young Alexander. The choice is yours :)

Yours,
Kube Games team.