Disappeared into the gacha game rabbit hole over the past few months and one of my first efforts to come back and play a "real game" led me, of it often does, to a city builder... which is also a Survivors clone, which is also a roguelike auto-battler dungeon crawler, which also has elements of plenty of other games glued to it in ways that are very rarely complementary.

It's extremely bizarre to me that it exists in this state as of its 1.0 release, because it's hard to shake the feeling that this game is horribly unfinished no matter how you choose to engage with it. The genres this game tries to pull from are very much dependent on robust systems or large pools of items/effects/abilities that would cost a tremendous amount of development time on their own, but because the developers have stapled three or four of these together it's pretty obvious that they didn't have the time to spend on making sure each of them was individually compelling.

The core of the game is the city-builder, which is actually more of a colony sim thanks to the fact that this is a cultivation game - you won't be placing that many buildings because your workforce is going to be pretty small, requiring a constant stream of resources to achieve these spiritual breakthroughs - allowing them to commute to their shift at the spirit stone mines by flying on their swords. Facilitating this requires a lot of work, most of which is micromanagement: you send people out into the world to scout out possible missions, then you do a mission (more on these in a bit), then you get a mobile game-ass loot chest that you have to manually open, then you can individually equip items or forcefeed elixirs to your various disciples using the "gift" system. It's... not great. The result of all of these games being attached to each other is a page for each disciple that is a huge mess of stats - most of which are irrelevant at any given time - being thrown into your face any time you need to interact with them.

Mostly, you'll need to interact with them for spiritual breakthroughs (which are just feeding them the necessary items and sending them to the Level Up Workbench) or for missions, which are locations that appear and disappear on the world map that allow you to dispatch disciples for a short bullet heaven or autobattler session. Neither of these have the variety of effects or loot to make them interesting beyond two runs, and if there's any meaningful metaprogression tied to the game's other modes then it's so drawn out that you could rightfully call it sadistic. I am not the foremost bullet heaven hater on this site - I've played my fair share of them and even think a few are quite good - but this game falls into the same traps that so many of these games do: it's often hard to tell when an enemy is doing an attack, your own attacks can be so visually busy that you walk into enemies, the upgrades you get aren't very interesting... All of the game modes present here indicate an understanding of the core elements of each genre but a lack of passion, funding, time, or analysis that would allow them to really shine. Does the autobattler really need so many pieces of gear that never meaningfully change the gameplay? Do either of these game modes justify each colonist displaying 13+ combat stats on their profile at all times? When you were testing this, was anyone excited to get a piece of gear with an 8% bonus to "critical resistance rate"?

The whole experience is disappointing because it's pretty easy to see what they were going for, but they really needed a project director who was willing to tell them "no" more often, or at least to help guide their efforts. I genuinely think cutting the bullet heaven components of this game and replacing them with the other combat minigames would've given them a substantial amount of time and effort back that they could've used on punching up the gameplay of the other game modes, of refining the menus for the rest of the game, of making sure the translations correctly explain the interactions between systems. Making these fixes now is a losing proposition - people will freak out if you try to do something like remove a game mode, but future projects from this team would benefit greatly from taking some time to really examine what you're putting into the game and asking how the player benefits from tying research progress to real-life timers.

Paradox is especially interesting as a developer because they essentially make the same game over and over, adjusting mechanics to suit the setting, and it means that playing these games in release order you'll see more and more cross-pollination as systems and mechanics that work well in one series are placed into a new game from a sister series. Probably the best example of this is the "pops" system that is best known as being part of the Victoria series, initially designed to help simulate both economic and cultural changes that occurred during the Second Industrial Revolution by bundling people with the same culture, religion, and job into a single demographic block. Paradox seems to think this was a hit, because they're putting it in everything now - they kept it for the release of Victoria 3 in 2022, they're putting them into their currently under-development "Definitely Not Europa Universalis 5", and they exist here in Imperator as well.

Imperator is most fascinating as a mishmash of interesting systems from Paradox's other series - after 2 years of tweaks turning this into a completely different game, it's fascinating to look at the final product and see what systems remained part of the developers' core vision for this game. It uses Victoria's pop system to represent the tendencies of the masses, it uses a stripped-back form of Crusader Kings' characters to represent the most influential nobles, its statecraft and military options are a mixture of so many other Paradox games that it'd be painful for both of us if I spelled it out. The result is a game that - for returning players - has a ton of familiar, (individually) easy-to-grasp elements that affect a truly absurd number of statistics and variables for states, provinces, and individual actors, some of which are more opaque than others.

It's not helped by Imperator's map, which is more granular than ever. Victoria 3's map divides territory into "states" and that's effectively all you have to worry about unless a state is split between two or more countries - even then, most modifers will only apply to the portion of the state that's under your control. States are large, they are chunky, and while the populations in them might be diverse, you almost never have to worry about fractions of a state. Imperator's map is broken into Territories (individual settlements), Provinces/Areas (collections of 10-15 territories), and Regions (groups of provinces that are generally of a similar cultural background). Buildings are built in a territory, provinces have loyalty separate from that of the person governing them, and when you unlock the ability to maintain a standing army then you typically are limited to one per region - so claiming a single village from a new region will be far less useful than consolidating your power within an area.

Provinces have local trade, loyalty, unrest, food, "civilization", infrastructure, taxes, and separate happiness values per population. Influential characters belong to families (with relationships and family trees) and have character traits, jobs, dynamic party affiliations, statesmanship, loyalty, popularity, prominence, corruption, personal income, and a powerbase that includes soldiers that may have loyalty to them over the state. The state has at least 9 core stats that can change or disappear entirely based on your forms of government. There's more I could mention, but I think I've driven the point home.

The point is that there's a LOT of moving parts and it can be tough to grasp even for longtime Paradox players. If you make someone play this as their first grand strategy game they will likely swear off the genre entirely. The reward for learning it, though, is a simulation that really nails the experience of holding together a vast, ancient empire with hope and duct tape, forced to use the stability of the entire country as a resource to keep the richest man in the empire from getting too ambitious. All of these mechanics let you roleplay through a vast variety of actions that few games would support: you can view the accomplishments of individual legions in a historical log, you can build up a tiny border town into a metropolis, you can award different cultural groups with increased status or expanded rights, you can play favorites among the influential families and use your leader's status to accrue as much personal wealth as possible. This game only received 2 years of post-launch support but it has depth comparable to Paradox's other games that have been in development for over a decade. The systems take time to learn but they weave together naturally, where the decision to remove a provincial governor involves smaller decisions on the relative value of his talents vs. his corruption and provincial loyalty, the happiness of his family vs. the happiness of the people in the province, and the relative costs of each approach you could use to solve the problem.

There are some valid criticisms, though, going beyond just the complexity. First is that the game's quite easy once you wrap your head around the systems - there are a lot of ways for factions of moderate starting power to get ahead and the game heavily rewards you for keeping your foot on the gas, so it's entirely possible (especially if you're playing Rome) that you crush a couple early factions and never look back. The game also has some obvious seams as a result of its reinvention over 2 years: it does a decent job of explaining most of its mechanics, but there will be a handful of times where you have to resort to googling something that doesn't have a tooltip, because the game has a lot of icons and not all of them are explained well. What are the effects of "prominence"? Where is this "divine sacrifice" button that I keep getting modifiers for? The law system also feels abnormally weak when compared to all the other systems, since changing a law typically means swapping one minor buff for another in a game where you're constantly racking up stat increases via research (Rome's military tech tree alone has 84 techs that all provide meaningful buffs).

All that being said, I'm pleasantly surprised with how much I like this game - I picked it up on release and played 15 hours or so before dropping it like a hot brick and refusing to touch it until this year. Even ignoring the complaints above it's hard to recommend, because I think it's a lot easier for players to hop into a game as "France" and pass "Agrarianism" than it is to play as Scordiscia and learn what it means to click "lex Caecilia de vectigalibus" but I think those who are passionate about the era or the genre could find this really rewarding. There's a surprising amount of room to "play tall" despite naming this game after a famously expansionist empire and it does a good job of making you think about the people and places you conquer, even after the deed is done. Far from perfect, but it's deeply interesting and I'm super interested to see what mechanics and systems they're going to use in their future games - they're already using a similarly granular map in EU5, and I think a lot of what's present here could be polished to a mirror shine in future games.

The joy of hectic co-op missions - where you're just as likely to die to a friendly mortar as an enemy rocket - is only stifled by a progression model that becomes punitive in the late game and the ludicrous frequency of glitches, the latter of which is mostly confined to the downtime between games. You are just as likely to run into an enormous bug in the missions as you are in the menus. With no glitches, though, it's a great game. The developers deserve a ton of praise for nailing the actual experience of playing at any given moment. Guns and explosions sound great, and all the things that could be a real nuisance in a game like this are balanced so well that they're never a concern - guns have just enough recoil to make it worth some attention, ammo and stamina feel plentiful as long as you're being somewhat mindful, you get the idea. When combined with the number of stratagems (providing airstrikes, additional equipment, and turrets from the sky) and equipment options, you can easily drop into a mission with a loadout that ensures you will never ever have to think about ammo, or about watching your back, or about dealing with heavily-armored enemies.

The difficulty, though, ramps up pretty steadily until you're constantly bottoming out on your "plentiful" ammo and stamina, with the cooldowns on those airstrikes becoming excruciatingly long despite the fact that they never actually changed. In terms of the actual effect this has on team strategy and camaraderie, it's up there with the best - it's hard to mind that your pal's airstrike nearly killed you when it saved you from five other things competing for the honor. A teammate finding the time to call in a much-needed resupply as everything is going to shit will make them your real-life hero.

Comparing this to similar shooters will undoubtedly let some folks down as the smaller (but still important) differences in strategic flavor between games can be a turn-off. For one thing, the game is very quick to throw out the periodic lulls in the action that are common in games like L4D, PD2, and DRG - unlock the first of 6 new difficulty levels and you'll find that lingering slightly too long in a level can put you in a situation where enemies are permanently spawning faster than you can kill them as your team starts hemorrhaging their limited revives. Helldivers is also rather generous in that all of your stratagems are very good as long as you actually tailor them to the situation, but part of the cost is that you have to immobilize yourself and enter between 3 and 9 directional inputs without making a mistake, and then throw a beacon that actually places the thing. This is how you call in the extraction shuttle, this is how you summon more ammo, this is how your friends are telling you to revive them as you dive into a crater with rockets flying past your head. Some people are going to hate this more than their actual job, I think it's fantastic. Part of the fantasy is becoming so good at entering these codes that you barely have to stop moving at all to get the entire team back in action, and finding these small windows to call in support contributes strongly to the impression of constant enemy pressure, but also to the satisfaction of actually pulling it off once the mission's over.

With a full squad, there are 4 different perspectives on a mission that all share the broad strokes but each of which has different details. A teammate's attempt to save one of your comrades from being maimed by a building-sized bug may not notice that they just gave you a haircut with a ricocheted autocannon projectile. A dead teammate who checks their phone for texts likely didn't see that the effort to bring them back involved a creatively used stim, a head-first dive off a cliff, and a respawn beacon tossed over a crowd of enemies as you draw the horde away from them. The team chuckles at the idea of throwing down a minefield behind you to cover your tracks, but only the player who deploys it will notice that they've killed an entire enemy dropship without firing a shot. A teammate operating the terminal at one of the objectives can't tell that your efforts to cover them involve frantically switching guns as you mag-dump at a horde of silhouettes through thick, black smoke. Everyone completed the same mission, but there's still plenty of clever and hilarious details to discuss once you arrive back at the destroyer. Including the other consequences of that minefield.