Recent reviews by Gtact420

Short Version

The game was promoted as a blend of features from other Paradox Games, but only end up with was weird mash of ingredients that don't go with each other. For eg: You characters with traits like CK2, but with very interactions available. In some government forms, you can even arrange marriage for all of your family, let alone the rest of nation. Weird especially since you might be in control of some other family upon death. From EU4, they brought the Mana System. However they made it worse by having everything work instantly. The pop system is a mess, and comparing it to Victoria 2 is an insult to Victoria 2.


Long Version

The creators are too obsessed with the new mana system. Almost every action takes mana. Change a government policy? Use scroll mana. Change a group of people's religion? Use sun mana. Move people around? Use weed mana. Developing your civilisation is more about waiting for a certain mana to store up and then click a button. It's all about wait for mana regen and click a button. BOOM its magically done. Plus the mana system is quite arbitrary. The scroll mana is supposed to be for diplomatic actions, but you need it for promoting your pops as well. But for telling them to move about, you need the weed mana. But wait, if you want them to migrate all the pops together then you need the scroll mana again. The worst thing is that the AI is not able to use these extra resources effectively and since everything is now active clicking, the AI stands no chance without cheating. There is no passive actions happening (Migration to better cities/countries, pop class promotion/demotion etc) It is effectively a dead world compared to some other games. And the thing that pisses me off more is that Paradox has done better implementation in previous games.
Take Vicky 2 for example, your ability to colonise was based upon the ports you have built. And once your colonies are built, some of your ports are freed up again. Makes sense. You also had to compete with other power for colonisation. But here, its a simple matter of saving up weed/scroll mana and clicking the button.
In Vicky 2 every artisan, farmer or worker produced a certain amount of good. But not in Imperator. 1 slave produces just as much resource as 14, but once they hit 15 voila suddenly the last man is able to produce just as much as the other 14 combined. So you will move around the slaves to have 15 in one city and 0 in others, screw realism.
The trade bonuses are quite nice. However they need weed mana, so outside of your capital its kinda a waste of mana and if isn't you are already too powerful. (again isn't trade a diplomatic thing. Why use civic power instead of diplomatic?) I would have preferred to have the ability to build more buildings that use up goods instead of the trade bonuses.
There are only 4 buildings; market, forts, barracks and granary. The first 2 are the only ones worth building.