izigame.me

This game still blows. There's some glimmer of a decent GSG buried beneath piles of repetitive events, hideous menus, and endless identical NPCs, but it's down so low that you're going to need James Cameron and Jules Verne on a join strike force to get to it.
IA is a mixture of EU4 and CK3, where the country runs off of characters, but you play as a nation. The designers, for some reason, seem to think that you give a fuck about each character's popularity, or personal wealth, or skills, or abilities, or hopes and dreams; they will constantly--CONSTANTLY--throw events at you to make decisions influencing them. Of course you don't care, because the clock ticks fast and it doesn't matter who the consul is--he only sticks around for a few years at a time. The fact of the matter is that the characters, at least when playing as a republic, are completely indistinguishable from each other. They're all the same. The only stat that matters is loyalty, because the only thing that matters is this game is civil wars.
Nothing. Else. Everything else about the characters could be completely automated and nothing would change. This isn't CK3. They don't matter at all. They aren't interesting. They're a total distraction. For example, you can "Befriend" a character with your sitting consul. Doing so requires you spend personal influence and personal funds from your personal treasury. This has no effect whatsoever on Rome's finances.
...so why wouldn't you do it?
I don't know. I haven't found a reason yet. I don't think there is one.
You have to endlessly balance approval between one random dude and another through constant random events, all of which you'll have seen after five hours, walking a tightrope that you couldn't care less about. And by the way, you have to constantly make sure each "great family" has the correct number of offices, or else they'll be SCORNED, and lose loyalty--the only stat that matters. You will thus spend half of any campaign slogging through shitty menus, reassigning positions of office, just to make sure families aren't scorned, but they will be anyway, because sometimes a family will be outraged it doesn't have enough offices EVEN WHEN THERE ARE NOT ENOUGH QUALIFIED MEMBERS OF THE FAMILY TO HOLD A SUFFICIENT NUMBER OF OFFICES.
Babysitting scorned families is the opposite of fun. It's miserable. It's the worst mechanic ever devised by any human in history and I do not know what Paradox was thinking.
Then when civil war breaks out, it'll be for no particular reason, with no purpose, ultimately easy to defeat, after a huge slog. In CK, when there's a civil war, it's because of some obvious cause--you understand why. Here--it's because some dude is disloyal? But what does he want? And WHO is he? I DON'T EVER KNOW! It doesn't even connect, usually, to Optimates vs. Populares conflict in the Senate; it's just because some guy is disloyal, so a bunch of provinces defect. And oh, by the way, if you ever click the wrong thing in an event (because you didn't realize the guy you chose a -loyalty tick for was the dude in charge of your legion doomstack) and lose loyalty on a general, he'll just go and chill in a corner, doing nothing. Because that's what Caesar did in Gaul. Nothing. He just did nothing. Yup.
I could put up with some amount of bad design--CK is full of it, after all--if the underlying game was good, but the focus on random events more broadly is what kills Imperator. Random events suck. They aren't good. I'm playing a GSG, not a choose-your-own-adventure written by a bunch of Swedes who barely speak English. I want to do strategy, not click between repetitive RPG options that I don't give a fuck about. When the strategy game is at the forefront, sure, IA isn't bad, but that's so, so rarely. Much more often it's trying and failing to be EUKings 3, and it's terrible at that. It combines all of the worst parts of EU4 and CK2/3 and distills them into one terrible Europa Universalis Rome-clone.
And there's so much more, like micromanaging trade. Who thought micromanaging trade was a good idea? I don't give a fuck if Rome imports grapes or marble; it really, really, really doesn't matter to me, just like it doesn't matter to me in EU4. Trade does not need to be centrally planned. That is neither realistic, historical, nor engaging. It's just tedious. Or how about legion traditions? I thought those were pretty cool, until my Legio I Italia lost a single battle (outnumbered 10-1, and even then it was closed) and was slapped with a permanent -15% morale penalty. Literally forever. For losing one battle. Once. Great! Good design!
So unless you think choosing between +10 loyalty for the Fabii but -10 loyalty for the Claudii every fifteen seconds is engaging gameplay (it isn't), stay away from this game. It's still a massive disappointment.