Anyone having fun?

[Straticus]

While I appreciate all the great work that went into developing this fine product, my first impressions are mixed playing Rome. While I like the military management - very innovative - and 3M (Metal-Manpower-Money) management, I'm not caring for the management of decadence or of slaves or whatever counters the anti-aging aspect - beacuse ramping up culture does't seem to have the impact I imagined it would on that.

I don't care for a the ruling party changing every 10 years and having such miseable selection (or abense of any) military leaders when you finally get to the stage where you ahve to field 10 armies and the enemy seems to have no problem scounging up 2-star leaders to squash them.

Given many layers here and many layers of management - some as time consuming to manipulate and tweak as the parts I enjoy playing. I don't trust the automated management feature - seems ineffiecent when I broke in to manually check in on things.

So if there was an option to reduce these effects to drop them all together from the settings panel that would make it more fun from my point of view?

[devoncop]

It seems we look for different things in a game. In my view this is the best and most immersive game I have played in a decade and when diplomacy is expanded and nations are even more fleshed out (along with a couple of bugs and oddities like unit placement in battles are fixed) then it will be even moreso.

The design as a whole is superb.

[MoLAoS]

While I appreciate all the great work that went into developing this fine product, my first impressions are mixed playing Rome. While I like the military management - very innovative - and 3M (Metal-Manpower-Money) management, I'm not caring for the management of decadence or of slaves or whatever counters the anti-aging aspect - beacuse ramping up culture does't seem to have the impact I imagined it would on that.

I don't care for a the ruling party changing every 10 years and having such miseable selection (or abense of any) military leaders when you finally get to the stage where you ahve to field 10 armies and the enemy seems to have no problem scounging up 2-star leaders to squash them.

Given many layers here and many layers of management - some as time consuming to manipulate and tweak as the parts I enjoy playing. I don't trust the automated management feature - seems ineffiecent when I broke in to manually check in on things.

So if there was an option to reduce these effects to drop them all together from the settings panel that would make it more fun from my point of view?

What difficulty? Also the party shouldn't change every 10 turns unless you are screwing up a lot. I typically keep the same party all the way into empire. I agree that Rome, who has a big set of leader based buffs, nevertheless seems to always be short on attack two leaders. Huge problem in nearly every game.

Slave management mostly involves selling the 10 slaves for 1000 gold every time and stacking the first 20 slaves at a minimum into Rome. Maybe more.

Decadence isn't too hard to manage imo. At least until you've been stuck at Empire a while, depending on difficulty.

[LDiCesare]

Diplomacy is lacking and managing a large empire is tedious due to the lack of a single "go to next idle region" button.
Apart from that, the game is great.
Bad leaders are a pain because you never manage to suicide the ones you want, but I think it makes finding a 2-1 or better general even better.
Culture requires some time to pay off but it definitely does. If you're in for immediate rewards as when you conquer something with your army, that may be frustrating, but I think it's brilliant and forces to pace down your conquests.

[Pocus]

Diplomacy is lacking and managing a large empire is tedious due to the lack of a single "go to next idle region" button.
Apart from that, the game is great.
Bad leaders are a pain because you never manage to suicide the ones you want, but I think it makes finding a 2-1 or better general even better.
Culture requires some time to pay off but it definitely does. If you're in for immediate rewards as when you conquer something with your army, that may be frustrating, but I think it's brilliant and forces to pace down your conquests.

Diplomacy will get improved over time, we ask for some patience here though.

Go to next idle region would not be of much use actually, as soon as you have grouped your regions in a province, even if you manage your regions manually as many do, then it would be suboptimal to order one building in each region of the province, as that would delay and spread infrastructures build-up over all buildings. It is much better to click on a province, identify 1-2 regions where a building will do the most good, and concentrate all infras into these 1-2 regions so they are created asap.

[Batman6794]

While I appreciate all the great work that went into developing this fine product, my first impressions are mixed playing Rome. While I like the military management - very innovative - and 3M (Metal-Manpower-Money) management, I'm not caring for the management of decadence or of slaves or whatever counters the anti-aging aspect - beacuse ramping up culture does't seem to have the impact I imagined it would on that.

I don't care for a the ruling party changing every 10 years and having such miseable selection (or abense of any) military leaders when you finally get to the stage where you ahve to field 10 armies and the enemy seems to have no problem scounging up 2-star leaders to squash them.

Given many layers here and many layers of management - some as time consuming to manipulate and tweak as the parts I enjoy playing. I don't trust the automated management feature - seems ineffiecent when I broke in to manually check in on things.

So if there was an option to reduce these effects to drop them all together from the settings panel that would make it more fun from my point of view?

What difficulty? Also the party shouldn't change every 10 turns unless you are screwing up a lot. I typically keep the same party all the way into empire. I agree that Rome, who has a big set of leader based buffs, nevertheless seems to always be short on attack two leaders. Huge problem in nearly every game.
Q
Slave management mostly involves selling the 10 slaves for 1000 gold every time and stacking the first 20 slaves at a minimum into Rome. Maybe more.

Decadence isn't too hard to manage imo. At least until you've been stuck at Empire a while, depending on difficulty.

I agree on that being the way to handle slaves, but to me that’s a bad sign. The slaves decision should involve an actual decision on your part, but because slaves contribute so much to revolt risk, and so little to culture, you tend to get rid of them every chance you get, which suggests something is out of balance.

Any decision in which you make the same choice in every context is not a very interesting decision, and I doubt thats what the devopers intended it to be.

[Ezekiel]

I am having a great time, but I haven't played as Rome yet. I watched a couple videos where players were Rome, and it looked stressful, which I decided was not where I wanted to start. I have played as the Pictes and Caledonians and as Carthage. Both have more modest military objectives and loyalty / civil war issues.

And I think it is great that this game is different from other games and the usual strategies don't work. I hope and expect to lose the first time I play a new game. And I enjoy micromanaging, so deciding on buildings is a lot of fun for me. But, it gives the Player an advantage over the computer, so if you want to give control of that to the computer, you can always just set the game to Easy and call it even.

[LDiCesare]

Go to next idle region would not be of much use actually, as soon as you have grouped your regions in a province, even if you manage your regions manually as many do, then it would be suboptimal to order one building in each region of the province, as that would delay and spread infrastructures build-up over all buildings. It is much better to click on a province, identify 1-2 regions where a building will do the most good, and concentrate all infras into these 1-2 regions so they are created asap.

I never use the province interface, so maybe it's the problem. I want to go to every region and decide what they build. You say it's better to have all regions but 1 remain idle and use all the infrastructure pool to flash-build a building and then move to the next one. That means you'd want to see next idle province. Except sometimes you have regions not in provinces, and they'll still be a pain to find.
This looks like the optimal way of building is even more micro intensive than what I did.

EDIT:
Ok, so now I see how it works and I still would like a next idle region button. If a pop grows or anything, I will want an overview of everything and check each and every region. The province interface is just wasted on me. I don't like it at all. It doesn't display current loyalty which I think is the most important stat of all regions, so when a new building is available, I want to check right now if there's a +loyalty available. And if not, I want to shuffle now, so I can shuffle again later if needed.

[guanotwozero]

I never use the province interface, so maybe it's the problem. I want to go to every region and decide what they build. You say it's better to have all regions but 1 remain idle and use all the infrastructure pool to flash-build a building and then move to the next one. That means you'd want to see next idle province. Except sometimes you have regions not in provinces, and they'll still be a pain to find.
This looks like the optimal way of building is even more micro intensive than what I did.

I'm with you there. Although I see the benefit of province-based management, my inner bean-counter likes to tailor each region to take advantage of bonuses, which means I need to check the neighbours beyond the province. I earlier suggested map-based display of a Ledger dataset search - it would be useful to search for a dataset of idle regions and a way of iterating that on the region interface. At present I repeatedly click the "next" button on the interface until I find an idle one.

Oh, and I'm definitely having fun! I find the production & trade system innovative and compelling, the FoG2 battle export a master stroke, and I'm patiently looking forward to more diplomacy.

[Batman6794]

I never use the province interface, so maybe it's the problem. I want to go to every region and decide what they build. You say it's better to have all regions but 1 remain idle and use all the infrastructure pool to flash-build a building and then move to the next one. That means you'd want to see next idle province. Except sometimes you have regions not in provinces, and they'll still be a pain to find.
This looks like the optimal way of building is even more micro intensive than what I did.

I'm with you there. Although I see the benefit of province-based management, my inner bean-counter likes to tailor each region to take advantage of bonuses, which means I need to check the neighbours beyond the province. I earlier suggested map-based display of a Ledger dataset search - it would be useful to search for a dataset of idle regions and a way of iterating that on the region interface. At present I repeatedly click the "next" button on the interface until I find an idle one.

Oh, and I'm definitely having fun! I find the production & trade system innovative and compelling, the FoG2 battle export a master stroke, and I'm patiently looking forward to more diplomacy.

Maybe it would be useful to have a building ledger that lists what is being built in each region, with regions grouped by province and provinces color coded or separated in some obvious way, so you can see at a glance what is being built, and verify that you’re build something in every province.

[LDiCesare]

Maybe it would be useful to have a building ledger that lists what is being built in each region, with regions grouped by province and provinces color coded or separated in some obvious way, so you can see at a glance what is being built, and verify that you’re build something in every province.

You mean the one, when you sorted according to construction (every time you open it because it loses your filter every time), shows some of the shuffling and open slots buildings at the top (but not all, some shuffling buildings will end up in the middle for some reason), and then everytime you click one region and change your production, it's automatically centered in the ledger so you have to scroll up to the top again. And of course, you must remember, after that loss of context, that the bottom region is besieged (icon on the left when you just hasd to put your eyes to the right on the scrollbar) so you have to work on the previous one.
You'll then jump to the bottom, then back up again, and have carpal canal syndrome as a result.
Try it when your empire spans from Iberia and Africa to Macedon and the British isles, you'll understand that the ledger, as it is, is extremely bad, as you routinely end up a turn with more idle provinces than what fit the ledger screen.

And I just don't care that my province is building something. I want to manage my regions.
I disagree with Pocus's saying that it's suboptimal. Sure, I may build one building faster. But if I want to build something precise in one region, I have to shuffle until it becomes available, thus I have to review every province anyway. It's not possible to mark the building I'm interested in for building as soon as something else has finished in the province, so either I keep looking for every region every turn and remember, oh, I'm waiting for someone else to finish this here, so I don't need to shuffle again. Which means going through the whole ledger every turn without even benefitting from any filter!

[guanotwozero]

Maybe it would be useful to have a building ledger that lists what is being built in each region, with regions grouped by province and provinces color coded or separated in some obvious way, so you can see at a glance what is being built, and verify that you’re build something in every province.

The ledger includes a region database search with limited conditions, e.g. a dataset of all friendly regions that contain Iron. It would be useful to display this dataset on the map, using some appropriate graphics/highlighting in a custom overlay.

I reckon it would also be useful to include other conditions like buildings and present/missing goods, e.g. all friendly regions that contain a Bloomery, or all friendly regions that have missing Iron bonus (i.e. a building in those regions would like Iron as a bonus).

Even more useful would be to combine conditions e.g. all friendly regions that contain a Bloomery AND miss an Iron bonus.

All this would help in planning provincial centres of production, optimising building placement to get bonuses, and plan profitable trade routes. At present I find myself endlessly checking regions to remind myself what's in there.

[vakarr]

Maybe it would be useful to have a building ledger that lists what is being built in each region, with regions grouped by province and provinces color coded or separated in some obvious way, so you can see at a glance what is being built, and verify that you’re build something in every province.

That's already in the ledger, although I guess it's not a filter. Still select the "population" option from the ledger, and it lists all your regions and what is being built there, plus, and most importantly, any regions with a free slot available

To find your most rebellious regions, you can sort your regions by their loyalty level or their revolt risk on the ledger. You can see which regions are the best or worst by selecting the loyalty map filter (worst show up as purple regions) - it is an upheld hand in the bottom right corner of the screen.

[Batman6794]

Maybe it would be useful to have a building ledger that lists what is being built in each region, with regions grouped by province and provinces color coded or separated in some obvious way, so you can see at a glance what is being built, and verify that you’re build something in every province.

That's already in the ledger, although I guess it's not a filter. Still select the "population" option from the ledger, and it lists all your regions and what is being built there, plus, and most importantly, any regions with a free slot available

To find your most rebellious regions, you can sort your regions by their loyalty level or their revolt risk on the ledger. You can see which regions are the best or worst by selecting the loyalty map filter (worst show up as purple regions) - it is an upheld hand in the bottom right corner of the screen.

I’ll admit I don’t ise the ledger much, but does what you’re desribing group them clearly bu province?

What I’m imagining is a list that has a province title, with four our five regions and what they’re building listed in each region. That way if you want to be building one building in each province, you can see the whole provinve at once and see where/what you’re building.

[LDiCesare]

What I’m imagining is a list that has a province title, with four our five regions and what they’re building listed in each region. That way if you want to be building one building in each province, you can see the whole provinve at once and see where/what you’re building.

You described the ledger and now you are describing the province interface.

[vakarr]

You described the ledger and now you are describing the province interface.

+1 What he said

[Pocus]

The 'iterate through idle regions with extra slots' has been noted

[LDiCesare]

The 'iterate through idle regions with extra slots' has been noted

Thanks.