Ready to try Imperator: Rome again? Paradox have been busy overhauling quite a lot of it, with it still being one of the worst rated Paradox titles by users overall.
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Imperator: Rome - Paradox Interactive's recent attempt to bring its particular brand of map-painting grand strategy to the ancient world - has always been something of a chimera. Cobbled together with ideas and mechanics from the studio's past titles, it was criticised at launch for failing to bring those separate parts together into a coherent whole.
The past year of patches and updates, however, has seen the historical strategy game pull itself together. Now, it's biggest overhaul to date is poised to offer Imperator a fresh lease of life. Decisively moving away from many of the elements that made it feel like a toga-clad clone of EUIV, Imperator has instead embraced a more subtle approach towards managing your empire's population.
The 2.0 'Marius' patch continues this trend, and, in doing so, brings the game closer than ever to its goal of becoming a truly excellent ancients-themed grand strategy game. The update introduces a slew of big changes, the most obvious and immediate of which is the gorgeous new UI rework. New portrait backgrounds, tooltip changes, and a more stylised interface: it's all very sleek.
RELATED LINKS:
Imperator: Rome 2.0 'Marius' patch notes are here
Imperator: Rome's Heirs of Alexander DLC lets you build customised great wonders
You can watch half an hour of Imperator: Rome 2.0 in action (sort of)
Imperator: Rome's 2.0 'Marius' update is due to drop tomorrow, but you can peruse the official patch notes right now, thanks to the magic of dev diaries. As is tradition, the formal change log for a major title update gets released in the developer update just before the event, and the historical grand strategy game's diary slot has been Monday for a while now.
The upcoming changes touch a lot of areas, judging by the number of free features being included in the notes. The overhauled UI alone will make the game look completely different than before, but there's also been a bunch of changes to military forces and warfare, buildings (including ports), and the way technology and innovations work has also been changed. And that's not even tackling the bug fixes and tweaks to existing content. Pasted into a Word document, the notes run to some nine or ten pages.
It's the military revisions that I'm most excited about, but then I'm a massive nerd. Some people enjoy music, or good art design... but me? I enjoy an authentic abstraction of the Roman Republic's transition from a levy-based military to a state-funded professional army.
RELATED LINKS:
Imperator: Rome's 2.0 update is the closest we've come to Victoria 3
Imperator: Rome's Heirs of Alexander DLC lets you build customised great wonders
You can watch half an hour of Imperator: Rome 2.0 in action (sort of)