Recent reviews by Butt

I like this expansion. The free update fixes a LOT of QoL issues, and the power blocs are really fun. The foreign investment stuff is REALLY good, it's about time. I can actually make other countries produce enough goods for me to trade with!

Also, the great game is genuinely very fun.

made the game 1000x better and i already liked the game a lot so :+1:

Line go up = good, line go down = bad. Game is fun. Must make line go up.

this game makes you a horrible horrible person who commits war crimes

don't forget to install the slavery mod

10/10

this game lets you do some weird and fun ♥♥♥♥

This is a good fighting game. It's a lot of fun. You get to fight as DBZ characters AND the mechanics are good. What more do you need?

this game is really fun but also can suck your soul away be careful

play with mods

I enjoy this game a lot. I love these 4x games that paradox does, and I don't understand where all the hate for this is coming from. This is probably one of the most well executed initial releases in terms of features that paradox has ever done.

First, the flaws:

There are some glaring faults regarding quality of life and the way information is surfaced to the player. Some examples:
- Information regarding the culture of your pops is cumbersome to get to, when it's literally one of the most important metrics in the game.
- There is missing flavour like trade routes spawning units or even being painted on the map.
- The fact you have to build roads one tile at a time seems like a huge oversight to me.

There is again a huge reliance on mana, which doesn't bother me that much but i wish it felt more controlled. Being able to 'buy' mana makes it better, but also feels really weird.

There is very little interesting stuff to do in peacetime.

The Good:

The map is beautiful. I don't need to keep it on political all the time now.

They're also releasing a lot of fixes to the complaints i made in the first patch. Patching is paradox's way, and it's how we ended up with these amazing games in the first place.

Fighting feels really fun. Trade is really fun. The way conquest and civil wars work is really fun. This game is really fun. You get to pretend to be Rome! Or Carthage! Or some random tribe! It's amazing!

The character system has a lot of potential. In fact, the whole game has a lot of potential. It feels like it's lacking things because it is, but unlike what the community would have you believe, this is not just so they can sell it piecewise. Building this stuff takes time, and money. Yes, Paradox has a really odd DLC model in my opinion. I prefer the Ck2 model over the EU4 one, that's for sure. But we've seen games like EU4 and Stellaris change entirely over the course of their run, become better and more fun.

Expecting Imperator to be as polished on release as EU4 is now after years of active development is a very weird stance to take. Give it some time, don't buy it until it's patched to fix your problems if you're worried - but keep checking back to see if it's in a usable state.

And here's a solution to preordering problems: do not preorder your games.

There is a lot of complaining around the 2.0 update. It's all pretty dumb complaints, when you boil them down tbh.

TLDR: This game has an amazing concept, an amazing dev team, and an amazing foundation. It is not polished. It has pacing issues. It has scale issues. I love it. It will only get better.

10/10 for concept
7/10 for execution
9/10 for 2.0 updates
10/10 for improvement consistency

Full review:

I picked up the base game on sale around 1.8. I'd just spent a bunch of money and time getting into EU4, and honestly i was a bit disappointed. Stellaris was shallow compared to EU4, both in content and mechanics. The content side I was fine with, since to start, the developers don't have hundreds of years of history to turn into world building. The mechanics being so clunky threw me for a loop, but I remembered how mechanically terrible EU4 felt for its launch version, so I just dealt with it. 4X UIs like this take time to get right.

The game was incredibly bland. It was made fun by being able to RP, and I honestly love creating the most ridiculous empire combos and playing with a set ideology instead of trying to 'win' the game. Despite this, the weird tech tree, FTL systems, and doom stacking made the game feel so much less than it should be.

Then 2.0 came out. It breathed new life into the game, and made it much more compelling. There are still issues, obviously, but the direction it's going is amazing, and I look forward to it overall.

The biggest complaints are around how long it takes to traverse your empire. I think these complaints are pointing out a problem with the original, and the playstyle we as a community developed to play the game. You can't have a single science ship anymore. You can't have a single construction ship. Doom stacks do not work. The game is more about strategically placing your fleets, because unless you have a gateway or wormhole, you are out of help's reach otherwise.

The game has slowed down significantly in a lot of ways. This is a true issue, the pacing still feels off. I think we need a way to claim more than a single system at a time, or a way to go to hyperspeed without crossing systems in sub-light. The tech tree needs to be reworked to not be so random, and I think science ships need to start with auto explore. That would fix some of the glaring issues.

Overall, paradox has shown they really do care about the game and its future. They've shown this with all their huge games, and I'm excited to see Stellaris start to get the eu4 treatment.

This is quite the expansion for EU4, and in my opinion it's more than worth the $21.99 CAD price if you ever like playing or colonizing the near east.

Adds a TON of new mechanics, fixes some old ones. The new trade goods make the map a lot more interesting. The gems event alone can change the course of your game completely - I blobbed as aragon by getting Barcelona changed to gems early game and reaping all the benefits of that. It was really interesting.

Also makes the mechanics of religion more.... bearable. The religious aspects of this game are probably the least overall polished, and it's nice to see them taking a stab at fixing the most egreigious offender - the Islam mechanics.

Also interesting is the new trade mechanics - you can get diplo or covert boosts. I like.

Conform to template should NOT be a paid feature. That's my big gripe. That sort of ♥♥♥♥ should have been an update to fix the awful army UX in this game. Stop charging for quality of life improvements, and I think the entire community would calm the hell down too.

Overall, I think this one of the 'the game isn't nearly as good without it' DLC tiers.