This is the second half of the third and final part of our three-part (I, IIa, IIb, IIIa, IIIb) look at Paradox Interactives ancient grand strategy game, Imperator: Rome, which covers (inter alia) the period of the collapse of the Roman Republic, which we generally call the Late Republic (c. 133-31 BC). Last time, we examined how Imperator models the internal politics of ancient polities, in particular how it handles republics, and noted that the vision it presents is very centered on elites, to the point of erasing the role of the common citizenry in the conduct of the Roman (and Carthaginian) Republics.
That foundation work is going to matter for this week as we turn to look how Imperator aims to answer one of the biggest and most consequential questions of this period: why did the Roman Republic collapse?
Now, before we get into Imperator‘s approach, we ought to clarify some terminology and chronology. The Roman Republic was founded in 509 BC (following a period where Rome was ruled by kings) and lasted, I’d argue, until 49 BC. We can divide up that period even further: the standard division is into the Early (509-288), Middle (287-133) and Late Republic (133-31); these are usually understood primarily as chronological distinctions: one republic with several periods. The dates here are more or less flexible.1 The first century BC brings too very important chronological breaks: the dictatorship of Sulla (82-80), which I would argue shattered the old republic and tried to invent a new form (which ended up being much worse and less stable) and then a period without regular ‘constitutional’ rule from 49 to 31 covering the final spasm of violence in Rome’s civil wars.
Out of that anarchy emerges the Roman Empire (31 BC to 476 AD (West) to 1453 AD (East) to present (our hearts)).2 So to be clear, when we discuss the fall of the Roman Republic, we’re talking about the failure of the governing system of the Middle Republic, which slowly rattles apart from 133 to 82 and then also the much more rapid failure of what we might call the ‘Sullan Republic’ from 80 to 49.
The narrative of the collapse of the Republic is, for much of the public’s understanding of Rome, the one they know (even if there is a tendency to conflate it with the fall of the empire in the West). The period of the Late Republic is the period of Tiberius Gracchus, Gaius Marius, Sulla, Cicero, Pompey, Crassus, Caesar, Marcus Antonius and, of course, Octavian who would be Augustus. This is the period that gets HBO miniseries made about it. And so naturally Imperator is interested in the question of why the Roman Republic collapsed in this period. Unfortunately, as we’ll see, the limits of Imperator‘s politics simulation, which we discussed last week, somewhat hamstring Imperator‘s effort to simulate (rather than merely narrate) this collapse.
But first, this is the period of Roman history where the Roman elite became so fantastically wealthy as a result of Roman conquests that the old structures of the republic struggled to contain their ambitions, so wealthy that Marcus Licinius Crassus could famously remark, “no one was rich who could not support an army out of his substance” (Plut. Cras. 2.7). And if you want me to be rich enough to support an army out of my substance, you can support this projecton Patreon!3 I promise to reward all patrons with land, if by ‘reward with land’ one means ‘give monthly updates on my research.’ If you want updates whenever a new post appears, you can click below for email updates or follow me on twitter (@BretDevereaux) for updates as to new posts as well as my occasional ancient history, foreign policy or military history musings, assuming there is still a Twitter by the time this post goes live. I am also on Bluesky (@bretdevereaux.bsky.social) and (less frequently) Mastodon (@bretdevereaux@historians.social).
Bellum Civile
Because Imperator is structured as a simulation in which every polity is fully simulated, it cannot simply have a narrative story or a set of bespoke events to make the collapse of the Roman Republic happen on cue. Instead, it has to embed its historical assumptions about state stability and collapse into its mechanics, most of which are applied to all states, not merely republics (much less just the Roman Republic). While the game does feature some events designed to push in direction of historical Roman conflicts (most notably with an event chain for large imperial republics modeled off of the Social War in which the player is forced to risk either an internal oligarchic revolt (for expanding citizenship) or a large-scale provincial revolt (for not doing so)), for the most part Imperator attempts to systematize state stability across all polities.
The key mechanics for state collapse are, in turn character loyalty and civil wars.
Now Imperator does have two kinds of state collapse, provincial revolts and civil wars (these were merged in early versions of the game, but are now split). However, provincial revolts are by far the less dangerous and simpler, so we may treat them first. Every province4 has a loyalty value, from 0 to 100, which moves by a fraction of a point each month, based on the skill of the governor and the happiness of the province’s pops (through an intermediate value, ‘unrest’). If that loyalty value falls beneath 33, most interactions with the province (raising levies, building buildings, moving pops) are disabled. If it falls to zero, the province revolts, starting an independence war with the controlling polity and often bringing any other disloyal (sub-33 loyalty) provinces with them.
Provincial revolts tend to be fairly easy to deal with unless a state is under very heavy pressure. Because of the incentives we’ve already discussed, a disproportionate amount of any large state’s manpower and military capacity is likely to be concentrated in the capital region, which cannot join a provincial revolt, meaning that most provincial revolts are fairly easy to defeat. This is especially true for states operating standing armies (‘legions’) because the initial technology for this attaches those very powerful standing armies to the home region only.5 The only real exception is a situation in which a state is running at very low stability for very long periods, as stability below 50 leads to a global negative happiness modifier. However, since stability naturally ‘decays’ towards 50 (rather than 0), the only way to get into this trap, generally, is to have some long-term downward pressure on stability, which is almost always excessive Aggressive Expansion. Since provincial revolts tend to be weak, these mechanics are mostly just a ‘brake’ on expansion, forcing a player to stop waging aggressive wars for a few decades while the aggressive expansion decays and thus stability recovers. I’m sure a player could lock themselves into an unavoidable explosion they couldn’t control this way, but the threshold is very high – I’ve run aggressive expansion substantially above 60 and while I had to stop expanding for a while, I recovered just fine.
Instead, the main risk to state stability is character loyalty which can spark civil wars (as distinct from provincial revolts), as Imperator understands civil wars as essentially revolts among the elite and thus that is how they are simulated.
As already discussed, characters in a state each have a character loyalty statistic from 0 to 100, but whereas province loyalty moves very slowly and predictably, character loyalty can shift dramatically and relatively rapidly, making it much less predictable. If a character’s loyalty is below 33, they are considered disloyal and will refuse to follower the player’s orders, refuse to be removed from their post and will join any civil war once it starts.
The second key statistic characters base is power base, which reflects their total political power. A lot of things contribute to power base, including a flat bonuses for any character holding an office, a percentage based bonus for the percentage of a country’s pops in a governor’s region or the percentage of a country’s troops under a commander’s command. Since governors command regional levies, this can make a governor with a raised levy quite powerful. Standing military forces (‘legions’ in the game’s parlance) can also become loyal to a commander, which gives them substantial power base even if they are removed from command. Family heads tend to have naturally high power base, because they get a substantial boost based on family prestige as well as a boost from ‘holdings’ (representing landed property), since nearly all holdings tend to accrue to family heads rather than their junior family members.
These two statistics, power base and loyalty then interact. First, each point of power base lowers loyalty directly by a significant amount for any character that is not the country ruler (who is always 100% loyal to themselves). Meanwhile, the civil war threshold is based not on the number of disloyal characters, but on the percentage of a country’s power base that is disloyal; when a character is disloyal, so is their power base. That civil war threshold varies (as we’ll see) but tends to be 25% or less, so it is entirely possible, especially in the late game to have individual characters (or small groups of them) whose power base is large enough to meet the civil war threshold on their own.
Once enough characters with large enough power base are disloyal enough to push over the civil war threshold, the game starts a 40 month timer, giving the player time to shore up the loyalty of key figures. If the timer expires, a civil war begins: a new country tag is created and all disloyal characters and their friends and immediate family join it. They bring with them any regions they govern (regardless of the province loyalty!) and any armies they command, as well as any loyal standing-army cohorts (or veterans from disbanded cohorts). The resulting war is total, with no chance to end it with a peace agreement – it continues until one side is extinguished completely. Because friends and immediate family are pulled into the revolting faction even if they themselves are loyal, civil war factions can end up being much larger than the player expects, making this one of the few ways a reasonably skilled player can find themselves in an unwinnable position.
That difficult in turn provides a strong incentive for players to try to avoid civil wars, which even if won can cripple even powerful polities.
The Bigger They Are…
While character loyalty and power base provide the foundational mechanics for how the game simulates state instability it is a few key mechanics layered on top of this that develop that foundation into a theory of history, an understanding of how the Roman Republic collapsed. In particular Imperator makes it progressively more difficult to avoid civil wars as empires grow in size, and presents the emergence of monarchy as the more or less inevitable end-point of such instability.
Let’s start with the ’causes’ part of that statement.
Imperator uses both one very obvious direct modifier and some less obvious but significant background interactions to make it progressively harder to avoid civil wars as a state grows in size. The direct and obvious modifier is the civil war threshold, which is the percentage of power base that needs to be disloyal to trigger a civil war. By default, this is 25%, but nearly all of the modifiers for that are negative. Each point of tyranny lowers it by 0.12% (so to a potential maximum of -12%, at an astounding 100 tyranny, which is the maximum value; in practice this impact will be much lower). Meanwhile, as a state grows in size, its civil war threshold also decreases: to a base of 22% for a regional power, 20% for a major power and just 17% for a great power. Put another way, the penalty for being a great power, in terms of civil war threshold, is equal (8%) to the penalty for having 67 points of tyranny (the equivalent of nine assassination plots, thirteen forced religious conversions, or 22 unjustified arrests – it is a lot of tyranny).
Of course as the civil war threshold gets lower, it becomes harder to avoid as it takes fewer powerful characters being disloyal to trigger it. One might assume this would also make civil wars less dangerous, but remember: disloyal characters pull family and friends into revolt when it happens, meaning that the lower threshold doesn’t necessary make the civil war less dangerous as non-disloyal characters can be pulled in. Consequently, large states are less stable simply because the game lowers the civil was threshold: larger states are more prone to civil wars inherently in Imperator.
But growing larger not only lowers the civil war threshold, it also makes it harder to maintain character loyalty, though some indirect interactions. The most direct are that growing in size increases the number of major families: small states have 3, middle powers 4 and great powers 5. More families means more characters to be disloyal, but it also makes balancing families and avoiding having ‘scorned’ families (with too few offices) harder as well. Each new major family also, of course, has a major family head who, as discussed above, is nearly certain to have dangerous amounts of power base. Compounding that, major and great powers get a flat loyalty penalty to generals, admirals and governors (-2.5 for major and -5 for great powers); this can as the game advances be mitigated by technologies that provide bonus loyalty, but it is still downward pressure on the loyalty of the figures most likely to cause problems in a civil war.
Meanwhile, as a country expands, the amount of power base not directly carried by the ruler is also expanding. The ruler (again, king, suffete, consul, whatever) always governs the capital region directly and is the commander of its levies which ‘locks down’ a portion of the country’s power base, as the ruler is always 100% loyal. But added foreign provinces provide power base for their governor, based on the percentage of the country’s pops they have; armies not from the capital region do the same for generals (and standing armies, ‘legions,’ do this for generals even if they are from the capital region). Likewise, major families are going to also be accumulating holdings, enhancing their power base at least initially.6 Of course a clever player, as noted before, will attempt to counteract this effect by concentrating development in the capital region (and excluding holdings from it!) to try to keep the ruler’s perfectly loyal share of the power base high. This is, as we will get to, much easier in monarchies in Imperator.
In short, Imperator argues imperial expansion and the large states they create themselves make stability harder. Note it is the fact of bigness, not the act of conquest, that is the problem: Imperator is asserting that large empires are less stable than smaller states.
As a theory of history, there’s not nothing to this, especially in the way that a country’s aristocracy (represented by the named characters) becomes progressively harder to control (more families, less loyalty) as the state gets larger. It is a commonplace to assert that one of the causes of the collapse of the Roman Republic was that Rome’s form of government was simply not suited to the scale of the territory that it came to control, though it is important to distinguish the mechanisms by which this problem asserted itself.
The closest to Imperator‘s vision is that the flood of wealth and power that Rome’s conquests produced elevated members of the Roman aristocracy to a degree of influence which the power-sharing structure of the republic was unable to constrain, creating the late Republican ‘dynasts’ like Marius, Sulla, Crassus, Pompey and Caesar who, in their struggles for power tore the republic apart. This narrative goes back at least as far as R. Syme’s The Roman Revolution (1939), but also appears reasonably frequently in other more recent treatments.7 However, as we’ll get to towards the end of this post, this argument, focused on the emergence of elite dynasts is generally paired with an equally important narrative whereby Roman expansion disrupts economic and social relations in the republic more broadly, destabilizng the social basis for the power-sharing arrangement that was the republic. Unfortunately, as we’ll see, Imperator doesn’t engage with those factors at all, because – as discussed last week – it views ancient politics as entirely matters between elites and so is largely unprepared to consider non-elite causes of social strife.
Teleology
But before we dive into what I think Imperator is missing about why the empires in general (and the Roman Republic in particular) collapse, there is a second, perhaps less intentional, element of Imperator‘s design which also expresses a theory of history, albeit one that sits rather less well.
Simply put, Imperator views monarchy as the natural, nearly inevitable outcome of ancient state development and expresses that view in a few different ways.
The bluntest way this idea gets expressed is in how Imperator handles government types. As we’ve noted, each country can be one of several government forms; these are sorted into three large categories: tribal (that is, non-state) governments, republics and monarchies. It is possible to transition between these forms when specific requirements are met via decisions. Each government type comes with a few built-in bonuses (along with its mechanics, already discussed) and a certain number of ‘idea slots’ which allow the player to select additional custom bonuses from a list of possible ideas. These idea slots are coded by type, so certain governments are pushed towards selecting more, say, military-themed bonuses, or governing themed bonuses and so on. So far, fairly reasonable.
Where things start to go a bit off the rails first is that these government changes have directionality. Each government type often has just a few options for the government types it can change into and importantly it is often not possible to change back to previous government types and the system also lacks ‘loops’ (ironic because such loops are how ancient writers like Polybius imagined government transitions to work) where a state could, say, progress through the types in a circle. As a result, governments in Imperator are organized as a progression in which only motion in one direction is possible. This is perhaps easier to visualize than explain, so I have mapped all of the allowed government transitions in the flow-chart below:
What you can see is that Imperator structures government types in a mono-directional progression where tribal governments become either republics or monarchies (and can then never transition back) and republics can become dictatorships (and can then never transition back) and then all of the monarchies (including dictatorships) can become empires or imperial cults (and then never transition back). There is a single direction that governments progress, never moving backwards, never moving in any other way, inexorably, inevitably developing forward.
This sort of historical reasoning, where by a certain set of social changes and progressions are viewed as inevitable products of the passage of time, happening perhaps slower or faster but always in the same direction, we call teleological, from the Greek word telos (τέλος), meaning ‘completion’ or ‘achievement’ but used in a philosophical sense to mean the intended purpose and end of something. In studying history, such teleological reasoning is a mistake. History does not move only in one direction, it does not even always move forward or backwards, but skips and whirls in unexpected directions.
And this is actually a great case study in the weaknesses of such teleological reasoning. What Imperator presents is a simplified model of how state societies might develop: first moving from non-state to state institutions, eventually culminating in imperial states with exalted rulers governing vast territories. And Imperator imagines this as a movement from worse to better forms of government. Remember when I said each government type gets a certain number of idea slots for extra bonuses as well as some built-in bonuses? Well they do not all get the same amount. Most tribal governments get 2 idea slots and 1 built-in government bonus (federated tribes get 3 idea slots and 2 bonuses), while most base monarchies and republics have three idea slots and two relatively strong built-in bonuses, except for the two initial types (autocratic monarchy and democratic republic) which get just one government bonus alongside their three ideas. The ‘dictatorship’ government gets four idea slots, but only two government bonuses, while the ‘final’ government types get four idea slots and three government bonuses.8
To put it more simply, if we add the two kinds of bonuses (fixed and ideas), we go from three (tribal governments) to four (federated tribes, initial monarchies and republics) to five (more ‘advanced’ monarchies and republics) to six (dictatorships), to seven (imperial cult, empire) as we advance from left to right in our ‘government development’ as it were.
To this I must add an observation that I don’t think was intended in the mechanics, but in my experience seems to be true, which is that monarchies are more stable than republics in Imperator. There are a few reasons for this. For one, it is easier to consolidate power base in the ruler when that figure doesn’t change every few years and doesn’t rotate between families. Because the ruler is always the head of his dynasty and that family also doesn’t usually change, it becomes fairly easy to concentrate family prestige in the ruling family (which boosts the head’s power base) and to accrue a lot of holdings (which does the same). By contrast, because republics rotate who is the ruler at any given time between individuals (and families) frequently, it is impossible to consolidate power base in the same way.
Meanwhile, legitimacy is an easier currency to manage than senate approval: it comes with fewer stacking costs if it ends up negative, but is also easy to keep high (it defaults to a base of 60 on succession on a -100 to +100 scale) as compared to managing the approval of three different senate factions which often want diametrically opposed things. To make it even easier there is both an office (‘court philosopher’) that provides a ticking bonus to legitimacy and the ‘strengthen legitimacy’ action which can be stacked and gives a substantial increase to legitimacy for a very small increase in tyranny and a political influence cost; republics simply lack similar tools to really manage senate approval (almost anything that boosts one faction’s approval damages the other two). Monarchies also, as noted last week, tend to accrue tyranny slower because they lack that senate approval mechanic.
Monarchies do suffer from their own kind of internal crisis, ‘succession crises,’ but I’ve found these relatively easy to manage: when a succession happens, the first person ‘in line’ gets the crown and the next three are ‘pretenders.’ If any of these pretenders is disloyal when that happens, they’ll start a crisis, trying to accumulate enough power base to trigger a civil wara. But generally speaking, it isn’t all that hard to keep these three guys either loyal or their power base so low that they can be easily countered when the succession crisis occurs. Compared to republics, dealing with a shifting roster of family heads, senate faction heads and such, I’ve always found this easier to manage.
Combined with the increase in government-based bonuses and idea slots as we saw above, I think most players will find it hard to resist the suggestion Imperator is offering: Imperator imagines this as a progression from worse forms to better ones, culminating in the best form: imperial rule. This is not, I think, what the developers necessarily intended, but it is the force of the mechanics. That in turn suggests a rather weak answer for ‘why did the Roman Republic collapse?’ which the game answers with, ‘because that was how it was going to ‘develop’ into a ‘better’ and ‘more advanced’ government form, like dictatorship or empire. This is, needless to say, not generally how we understand historical causation.
The first problem with this model, of course, is that polities regularly do move ‘backwards’ in this arrangement! Rome was a monarchy until 509, when the kings were overthrown and replaced by a republic; likewise it seems that nearly every polis government began with the limiting or abolition of the kingship and its replacement with what Imperator would understand as a republican form of government. So monarchies becoming republics was quite common! At the same time, states do sometimes deconsolidate into non-state polities – the most famous example of this, outside the period of the game but hardly irrelevant, is the collapse of the Roman Empire (in the West) itself, a case of a state all the way on the right side of the chart fragmenting down to being all the way on the left side of the chart just in time for us to play the resulting non-state polities in Crusader Kings III. Likewise, progression from a dictatorship back to a republic is clearly possible, because that’s precisely what happens when Sulla retires.
More broadly, it is not at all clear that monarchic or imperial governments did, in fact, have more state capacity than republics, that they were ‘better.’ As Michael Taylor has demonstrated in Soldiers and Silver (2020), it is the Roman and Carthaginian republics which were by far capable of the greatest mobilization of men and resources while the monarchies of the Hellenistic period appear positively feeble in comparison. Comparing the state capacity of the Roman Empire with that of the Roman Republic is more difficult: the Empire had a more developed bureaucracy (but that’s not always a good thing) and a larger standing army, but less ability to dig deep in the event of emergencies.
Beyond this it is certainly not clear that monarchies were more stable than republics in terms of avoiding frequent civil wars. The Roman Republic was established in 509 and avoids meaningful civil war until the Social War (91-87). Carthage’s history is harder to see, but it also seems to have mostly avoided civil wars (one could argue if the Mercenary War counts) and fell not from internal division but outside conquest. By contrast, both the Seleucid and Ptolemaic kingdoms regularly blew up into serious civil wars, which in both cases fatally weakened those kingdoms. Indeed, the Seleucid kingdom was nearly constantly in a state of some sort of civil war from 157 to its abolition in 63 BC, but that was hardly the first of it: Antiochus I Soter (r. 281-261) faced revolts in Syria. Seleucus II Callinicus (r. 246-225) faced a prolonged civil war with his half-brother Antiochus Hierax (r. 246-226); his heir, Seleucus III Soter (r. 225-223) was assassinated in just a few years, leaving Anatolia in a state of revolt, followed by Antiochus III (r. 223-187) who finds not a revolt in Anatolia (under Achaeus) but also one in the East (under Molon). The Ptolemaic dynasty is not much better – in both cases it would often be easier to list the successions and reigns that didn’t see significant civil war than the ones that did.
The Roman Empire is, as imperial monarchies of its scale go, relatively stable, which is to say that it only suffered what we might view as major civil wars in the first century (68-9) and the second (193-197) and the third (235-285) and the fourth (306-324, 350-353, 360-361) and ::simply gestures wildly at the entire fifth century in the West::9 And again, I must stress, the Roman Empire is generally considered decently stable as large empires go.10
In short, then, this teleological view that, in effect, all ancient polities evolve towards something that looks either like deified ruler cult (the ‘imperial cult’ government type) or at least imperial monarchy (the ’empire’ type) doesn’t stand up very well. Yes, that is the direction that the Roman polity ended up, through a variety of twists and turns, taking, but it was hardly predetermined or the only option.
What I have instead sometimes argued is that monarchy, usually hereditary monarchy, is the ‘base state’ of large-scale human political organization. It is the oldest form of state government and thus tends to be the form that other – often more capable and effective – systems decay down to if public trust and capacity wither (assuming the state doesn’t collapse entirely). But that doesn’t mean that republics are necessarily unstable. Indeed, if anything, they seem unusually stable. Merely that, as a product of entropy, republics decay into monarchies of various forms, whereas monarchies decay into…different monarchies. One can get back to a republic of some sort – we see this after Sulla in Rome and of course in the many Greek poleis that recovered their constitutions after periods of tyranny – but that is building up rather than decaying down, as it were. Please note how in this (admittedly simplistic) intellectual model, movement in all directions is possible, governed by human agency.
Missing Crises
So what Imperator offers is an argument in two parts: the first that the Roman Republic was itself incompatible with the larger scale of the Roman state which has some grounding in history, but feels quite incomplete, and the latter that a development into monarchy was the natural, unavoidable telos of ancient states, which does not feel so grounded.
What’s missing?
A full discussion on the causes of the fall of the Roman Republic is beyond the scope of this post (though it has been requested more than once, so perhaps it is something to revisit in more depth in the future). The scholarship on that question is also voluminous and I will hardly be exhaustive in discussing it here. But we can discuss what I think are the two main threads in how historians try to understand the complex sequence of events that collapse the Roman Republic from 133 to 31 BC.
The first thread is one that focuses primarily on people and choices. This is the older of the two – indeed, dating back all the way to Greek and Roman contemporaries of the events (men like Sallust) writing about it as it happened. Historians emphasizing this thread tend to focus on each crisis as it occurs, the key political actors – invariably elites – who made decisions in those crises and how those decisions set up future crises and failed to resolve key issues. Tracing that tends to mean very carefully trying to reconstruct Roman politics in the late Republic both in the sense of the rules of its function but also in the sense of ‘who did what, when and why.’ Naturally, this is the kind of approach that is going to dwell a lot on the character of key historical actors: why kind of person was Sulla or Caesar and why did that lead them to make the decisions they did. Layered on top of that is also, of course, an effort to think about the character of Roman society as a whole: what about Roman elite culture led to these particular catastrophic decisions (and then also shaped the eventual form of the new stable form of government, the principate under Augustus, an absolute monarchy that dared not speak its name).
Readers who know that I tend towards Annales-inflected ‘history from below’ readings may be surprised to hear me say there is a lot of merit to this approach, even though it can get a little ‘Great Man’-ish. I do not think the collapse of the Roman Republic was inevitable: it was the product of choices. This was hardly the first series of political crises that had shaken the republic; indeed, the narrative we have of the first two centuries of the republic is one of repeated, sometimes quite dire, political crises over the place of the plebeians in the state (the ‘Struggle of the Orders’).11 Instead, the history of the Late Republic often reads as a comedy of errors (a tragedy of errors?) where at seemingly every stage, the Roman aristocracy, which had been in previous generations able to make practical compromises to preserve the res publica fails to do so.
Some of those failed ‘decision points’ do show up in Imperator as events tied to the republican government form and Imperator‘s power base mechanics, especially combined with standing armies producing ‘loyal cohorts’ with potentially destabilizing political effects, do push some characters to act in those destructive ways. But more broadly this was always going to be a thread difficult to capture in a simulationist game like Imperator; it is something one might better be able to capture in a more narratively driven game.12 For readers looking to follow this thread themselves, naturally there are no end of such treatments, but for a well-regarded and reasonably modern one, H.H. Scullard, From the Gracchi to Nero: A history of Rome from 133 BC to AD 68 (5th ed., 1982) offers a thorough (if relatively dry) overview.
The alternative thread is the Annales-inflected one, which focuses instead on structures and how the expansion of the Roman Republic, combined with the structures of Roman society produced tensions and pressures that the Roman political system proved incapable of resolving. Whereas the personalistic, narrative thread tends to follow events using the literary sources, this thread – which also has some roots (though fewer) in the ancient sources themselves – tends to look to use approaches like demographic and economic modeling (buttressed by archaeology) to understand this period. Perhaps the most impactful approach of this sort is K. Hopkins, Conquerors and Slaves (1978), in which Hopkins laid out the argument that Roman expansion, by bringing both tremendous wealth and also large numbers of enslaved people to Roman Italy, fundamentally destabilized the economy and undermined the social compact that made Roman society work, producing the intense tensions that led not merely to the reform programs of the Gracchi (and the violence response to them from more conservative Roman aristocrats) but the tensions behind the Social War and the political instability of the 50s, eventually resolved by massive colonial settlement of Italians outside of Italy under Augustus.
This vision has become sufficiently pervasive that HBO’s Rome quite literally has a scene in which a young Octavian lays out several of its key points for the sake of the audience. I do feel I should note in this that not all of those structuralist arguments have gone unchallenged: recent demographic work has tended to question quite sharply Hopkins’ (and indeed, the Romans’) understanding of exactly what was happening in terms of their population in the late second century, for instance.13 Meanwhile, archaeological study has tended to push the dates on the proliferation of large-scale, presumably slave-run estates (latifundia) into the first century, too late to be the motivator of the Gracchan reforms more than thirty years prior.14
Likewise there is a thread of scholarship that sees the problem of the Late Republic as fundamentally a breakdown of the civil-military relationship, laid out most notably by E. Gabba, Republican Rome, the Army and the Allies (1976) and which shows up also in L. Keppie’s The Making of the Roman Army (1984). This argument runs that the weight of conscription, particularly for service in Spain, in the late second century became too burdensome, leading to the economic ruination (or mass draft-dodging) of Roman assidui, a problem in turn resolved by the shift to increasingly professional volunteer soldiers serving for pay in the first century. However, those ‘post-Marian’ (a term you know I dislike) legions were structurally loyal to their generals (upon whom their pay and post-campaign rewards depended) rather than the Republic itself, turning the armies into tools that Roman dynasts could turn against the state.
This is a vision which is also currently undergoing revision and I think would be fair to describe as ‘hot’ as a scholarly matter: a lot of the underlying assumptions here have been questioned, some pillars knocked down, but a new consensus – much less a single work laying it out clearly – hasn’t really emerged yet. While the Gabba/Hopkins position argues that Italian farmers were, in fact, being economically ruined during this period, Rosenstein, op. cit. argues that this misunderstands their position and the structure of Italian agriculture. Likewise, the traditional vision that something called the ‘Marian Reforms’ happened and destabilized the civil military relationship has been fairly extensively disputed, most notably by F. Cadiou in L’armée imaginaire: les soldats prolétaires dans les légions romaines au dernier siècle de la République (2018), who notes that the armies of the Late Republic continued to be, for the most part, traditionally recruited from the assidui and largely non-professional.15
Another strand in this structuralist thread is looking more closely at the political structures of the Roman Republic and how they permitted or indeed did not permit the necessary change. H.I. Flower, Roman Republics (2010) takes this approach in its treatment of the Late Republic, in particular in Flower’s analysis of Sulla’s ‘reformed’ constitution, which Flower regards – correctly, in my view – not as a restoration of an older form of republican government, but as an innovation and one which utterly failed to meet the needs of the political moment.
That said, while this structuralist thread is a ‘moving target’ in terms of the scholarship, it is something that Imperator, as a simulationist game, could attempt to simulate. And there are a few elements of it. In particular, the tendency of standing armies (‘legions’) to become loyal to their commanders, producing a dangerous amount of power base for these figures, is presumably meant to directly represent the civil-military side of the traditional view. Likewise, as noted above, the general notion that the Roman Republic, structurally was unprepared for the challenges of running a huge, Mediterranean-spanning empire are, to a degree, reflected in the increasing difficulty of maintaining stability as an empire grows.
Now I should note, I call these two threads ‘threads’ rather than ‘positions’ or ‘camps’ because they are not really separate: most scholars now weave them together, as it were. Almost any modern history – and indeed, basically all of the works I have cited here – do so, noting how the structural concerns of politics, economics and civil-military relations inform the decisions (and, importantly, mistakes) of key leaders while at the same time noting how those errors in turn create or shape the structural weaknesses slowly killing the republic. Both are at play; the question is merely emphasis.
But more fundamentally Imperator is unable to engage these historical ideas because it does not simulate popular politics. Regardless of if one adopts Hopkins’ or Rosenstein’s vision of the mechanics of economic change in the Roman countryside, the mechanism by which they expressed themselves politically in the Late Republic was through elections and voting on legislation (particularly in the concilium plebis), something Imperator does not simulate. What Sulla’s ‘reformed’ disaster of a constitution was trying to stifle was in part these non-elite avenues of political expression, which, one might argue, led to them reasserting themselves in the form of wildly popular, dangerously demagogic politicians like Pompey and Caesar and the collapsing political legitimacy (or auctoritas) of the Senate itself. Consequently, there is no mechanic for the discontent of citizen pops in the capital region to bubble up to press for political change or become destabilizing if that change does not occur, which in turn means there is no mechanism for these structural forces to become political forces in the game.
This is a large part of why I found myself concluding that Imperator‘s elite-centered vision of ancient politics is far more fitting for monarchies and tribal non-state polities than for the republics that are, ostensibly, the stars of the show. When monarchies fall in antiquity, it is generally from a conspiracy of political elites, well represented in Imperator. Aristocratic ‘big men’ likewise dominate the political narratives we see in non-state polities.
But the collapse of the Roman Republic using either thread comes inextricably linked with popular expression in politics and the failure of the elite to respond appropriately or constructively. The first outbreak of violence in Roman politics, the beginning of this downward slide, is the murder of a popular tribune – Tiberius Gracchus – who members of the senatorial elite feared would make himself king by winning elections because he was so popular. The crisis of the Social War was a product of the frustrated aspirations of the socii because Roman politics had become deadlocked on the issue of their citizenship, in part because a large part of the Roman voting body – that is, again, not the Senate but the popular assemblies – was really quite hard to convince that they needed to ‘water down’ their votes by adding new citizens. The First Triumvirate works, as a political alliance, because Crassus, Caesar and Pompey are so popular (and have so many veterans) that if they move together politically, they can win votes to push through laws and appointments, again in the popular assemblies (in part because the Sullan constitution has utterly failed to maintain the auctoritas of the Senate).16 And Imperator simply isn’t equipped with mechanics to engage any of that.
Imperator Interrupted
I think the challenge that Imperator faced, generally, was considerable: this is a difficult period to ‘gameify.’ Imperator‘s nearest ‘peer’ in terms of market saturation, Total War: Rome II is, if anything, even more of a mess in terms of the historical ideas it is trying to implement and most ancient city-builders do no better in representing ancient urbanism in either its causes or results. Unlike the European Middle Ages of the Early Modern Period, where the time and place allows the game to begin with a clear focus on one sort of polity and one set of historical narratives, the Hellenistic Mediterranean is unavoidably split between wildly different polities all of which are fairly central to the experience and core historical narratives.
And I’ll be honest, I don’t think Imperator quite fully succeeds at grappling with the history of this period, but I also don’t think it fully fails either. Imperator‘s simulation of interstate anarchy in the ancient Mediterranean, effectively an intensified, even more no-holds-barred version of Europa Universalis‘ interstate anarchy, is fairly on-point. And Imperator‘s pop system allows it to take a fairly complex approach to economic production, social stratification and urbanism that, while it doesn’t perfectly replicate the structures of ancient societies, does communicate some of the complexity and important a lot of the diversity of these polities. It is a game that makes a serious effort to tackle the question of ancient slavery rather than simply ignoring it or white-washing it. I haven’t dealt much here with the non-state gameplay, but the fact that Spain and Gaul are – and remain through the game (at least until someone conquers them) – represented by a patchwork of small non-state polities is wonderful.
And I must say, the end result is a fun game that now has a lot of depth. I think players who bounced off of Imperator at release are likely to be pleasantly surprised if they go back.
Of course discussing Imperator here is made more than a bit difficult because of its development history. I think its fairly clear that the Imperator we have is not what the developers might have originally wished for the ‘final’ version of the product. Most Paradox games now get many years of continued, post-launch development, which can add a lot of flavor and detail to the world, layering in new mechanics; Imperator received only four major pieces of post-launch content, only one of which, Heirs of Alexander was a substantial expansion.17 It is not hard, for instance, for me to see – in a different world, where Imperator performed better financially – a ‘republics’ DLC that resolves a lot of my complaints here about the lack of mechanics reflecting popular participation in politics.
What I find most promising is that it seems fairly clear that some of the lessons of Imperator are being incorporated into future Paradox games, most notably ‘Project Caesar’ which we kind of all know is going to be EUV.18 In particular, the fact that ‘Project Caesar’ is going to be simulating population using a pops system that seems like an expansion and development of Imperator‘s system (and a bit of Victoria II, which is interesting) and is working to model a variety of non-state polities and communities feel like happy legacies of Imperator‘s development.
That is particularly hopeful for me because I hope it means that Paradox may some day return to this period (or at least the ancient world more broadly) wish some fresh ideas having learned some of the lessons of Imperator. I think it is worth remembering, after all, that the current ‘successful’ Paradox games are all the products of designs that have been both refined over lots of DLC and expansions, but also over lots of complete versions. Hearts of Iron IV is a much more solidly designed product than Hearts of Iron II (I never played the first one) because of the iteration of moving from II to III to IV. The same is absolutely true for Victoria, Crusader Kings and Europa Universalis. I think the sales legacy of Imperator means that Imperator II as such is probably unlikely, but I hope that when Paradox again (hopefully!) turns their eyes to this period, what we get, even if it isn’t called Imperator II borrows some of the lessons and ideas of this first-ish19 effort.
Until then, I will continue my tireless effort to bully Paradox into greenlighting Imperator II. As Philip II is said to have quipped, “We do not run away, but only retreat that, like battering rams, we can move back to strike again harder” (Polyaenus, Strat. 2.38.2).
Imperator II when?
- For an even more granular look, see H.I. Flower, Roman Republics (2010), who posits that we might understand multiple republics, defined by somewhat differing function.
- I kid, of course. I prefer the Republic to the Empire.
- Yes that, was way too far to go for this joke.
- Except the capital province, which remains 100% loyal regardless.
- Which, of course, doesn’t help in a civil war, where if the legion’s general goes – or if the legion is loyal to someone else who does – they’ll shift sides on you.
- This one is a bit more complicated, as while power base for holdings is calculated as a percentage, the individual power base a holding can provide is capped, so each new holding in your country for the first few (five, I think) straight up adds more power base to the total pool. A similar calculation means that building your first navy adds power base to the pool which will never be controlled by the ruler.
- Though we should be careful to separate this structural view where power and wealth shakes the republic apart from the moralizing views presented by writers like Sallust, where the problem isn’t that the republic was unprepared to deal with powerful men, but rather that power and wealth corrupted the morals of the Romans, which led to collapse. These two narratives are often lazily conflated, but those are very different arguments, despite sharing the element of wealth and luxury as causes.
- Also Athens gets a bespoke republic government type that only Athens uses which other states cannot shift to, so far as I can tell, called ‘Athenian Republic’ that gets four idea slots and two government bonuses, like dictatorships.
- I am actually leaving out a bunch of smaller fourth century dust-ups between emperors and usurpers and I’ve also left out entirely local revolts that don’t involve a play for the purple.
- Though it should be noted that assassinations and usurpation are unusually common for the Romans, as a result of the fact that they never codify a clear law of succession. On the upside, that means Roman emperors tend to be unusually capable, because absent strong hereditary succession, incompetent emperors do not stay emperors (or alive) for long. The downside is a lot of instability at the top, but one of the virtues of the structure of Roman rule was that, until the third century, this instability rarely shattered outwards into the provinces in really destructive ways.
- Though these events are early enough that we can’t have full confidence in our sources for them. If you want to know more about the Struggle of the Orders and our sources for them, I cannot recommend The Partial Historians enough for their year-by-year analysis of the sources and events.
- Expeditions: Rome attempts this, but does not, in my view, wholly succeed.
- On this, see N. Rosenstein, Rome at War: Farms, Families and Death in the Middle Republic (2004) and De Ligt, Peasants, Citizens and Soldiers: Studies in the Demographic History of Roman Italy 225 BC-AD 100 (2012).
- On this, see De Ligt op. cit. 278-9. Note also the more nuanced approach to this question, N. Morley, Metropolis and Hinterland: The city of Rome and the Italian Economy 200 B.C. – A.D. 200 (1996), 108ff.
- David Rafferty’s review of Cadiou’s book does a good job in describing its arguments and also placing it in the context of older scholarship, for those who do not read French.
- If it sounds like I am very negative on Sulla’s ‘reforms,’ it is because I am. We may talk about them at some point, but in the meantime, I think Flower’s chapter on them in Roman Republics is very good.
- Though post-launch patches did a lot to retune the game’s mechanics; seriously, the current 2.0 version of the game is substantially stronger than the 1.0 version. Which should be no shock to anyone who has looked at, say, the 1.0 versions of CKII or EUIV or – goodness – HoI4.
- I don’t have any special visibility into that project, which frees me to speculate on it.
- Yes, Europa Universalis: Rome exists.
Do you mind me asking how common Republic really were at the time? from the sound of it only Rome and Carthage itself really qualify in those terms of sorts, just based off the Game vibes. I know “republics” of sorts become more popular Far, far, later but of the period of time “republic” seems to be the odd special duck out in the Mediterranean and other locals of the time.
You have a whole mess of smaller polis governments the game would understand as republics in Greece which are more-or-less independent for much of this period. Arguably some of the Iberian states are at least verging on being republics rather than tribal governments (Saguntum, in our sources).
Republic might well be a default condition, or at least a strong attractor, for a city-state, especially one that relies on heavy infantry for its military. I wouldn’t be surprised if a bunch of the Italian polities were more republican than not, though also wouldn’t be surprised if we don’t know.
Wiki says ‘It is believed that the Etruscan government style changed from total monarchy to oligarchic republic (as the Roman Republic) in the 6th century BC… Political unity in Etruscan society was the city-state, which was probably the referent of methlum, “district”. Etruscan texts name quite a number of magistrates, without much of a hint as to their function:’
“Republic might well be a default condition, or at least a strong attractor, for a city-state, especially one that relies on heavy infantry for its military.”
As I recall from War in Human Civilization, Azar Gat would agree. To the point of suggesting that the classic European territorial states can be regarded as, in their internal politics and relationships with each other, being *very* large city-states/ polises.
Certainly, they all evolved towards being de facto Republics.
Overall, humans seem to prefer democracy when problems are a thing to be solved and monarchy when problems are a thing to be avoided/ignored. When an urban area grows large and stable enough that it passively deters marauders but can’t ignore local social distress, it tends to adopt local democracy and tends to expand voting rights to the minimum where social problems will actually be addressed.
The total inability to switch between republic and monarchy and back is silly, but I find myself deeply skeptical that Rome could have survived as a republic for much longer than it did, conditional on it becoming as big as it did.
If you read about the debates that happened first inside the Philadelphia Convention itself, then whether to adopt the constitution the Philadelphia Convention had written, you get a sense that there was real uncertainty about whether a republic stretching from New England to Georgia could work, and basically nobody correctly predicted the “how” of it working. One argument for the Electoral College was that everyone would just vote for the guy from their home state and the candidate from Virginia would win every time with a weak plurality! The answer for how the system would *actually* work in practice turned out to be “political parties”, which initially relied on newspapers in order to be able to organize, something the Romans could not possibly have done because the Romans did not have the printing press.
This view has been reinforced for me by reading your descriptions of how both the Roman Republic and the polises of Greece fundamentally ran on in-person interaction. That doesn’t scale! And yes, for awhile Rome did have a geographically-constrained republic ruling over a much larger empire (I can’t think of a better term for the thing Rome was ruling by the time it had won the Third Punic War), but how does that situation last? How do you not have a breakdown of civilian-military relations in that situation, regardless of how soldiers are being recruited? How does no longer sharing a physical city full-time, but instead commanding different armies in different provinces, *not* make elites less likely to compromise with each other? I just don’t see it.
I was going to say this if nobody else did. The Roman republic spent its first few hundred years confined to Italy, doesn’t really do overseas expansion until the 2nd Punic War, and doesn’t start to get really far-flung until the Macedonian Wars–and it’s worth noting that the Republic starts destabilizing within a generation after the Romans move into Greece. Meanwhile, the Seleucids had a very far-flung empire from the get-go, and are unstable from the get-go.
The history honestly doesn’t disprove Imperator’s notion that republics are less stable than empires (or prove it), but it does, I think, prove that the game’s contention that big polities are less stable than small ones, at least in this period, is pretty accurate.
Old city states also had plenty of instability. It just doesnt make the history books as easily since its just a citystate among many. The fact the roman empire (both republic and empire) managed to survive many civil wars and reestablish itself is pretty impressive.
TBH, most civil wars are not neccessarily terminal for the polity in question: It’s entirely possible for an unstable state to last for quite a while. Lots of medieval kingdoms were in regular civil wars but weren’t actually at very many points threatened by actual destruction.
The less the government is expected to do in daily life, the more easily it can have a civil war and still survive.
I think the problem here is that the game doesn’t simulate how exactly the Roman Republic, and later the Empire, managed to gain its stability. Because yes, big polities tend to be unstable because the more provinces are ruled by a core, the more likely those provinces are going to look for an out if the core is weak.
Which is what the Romans avoided because, as the Mg. Devereaux explained in his “Who were the Romans” series, the Romans actually allowed participation with, and later entry to the core. The Republic does this at first with the socii system with the various communities in Italy before extending roman citizenship to them after the socii war (and incidentially creating an actual Italian identity) while the Empire ends up doing this to all of its people in the provinces bit by bit (most notoriously with the Auxilia) until the Constitutio Antoniniana simply extends citizenship to everyone in the Empire, effectively making all people part of the core.
And this is something that the Hellenistic states didn’t do, which contributed to their weakness when facing the Roman Republic. If anything, this is why the Macedonian kingdom was able to punch above its weight, it actually had a proportionally bigger core to tap into than the Seleucids or the Ptolomies.
Now, does this mean the Roman Republic could have survived its expansion? Maybe for a while longer if Sulla died before he did his reforms (they are in my opinion the point of no return for the Republic) but as topherbrennan said, there would have inevitable problems with scaling the Republic’s form of government, to say nothing of the intransigence of the Optimates, so I do expect that the Empire would have appeared down the line as a response to the Optimates’ grip of the state.
“This view has been reinforced for me by reading your descriptions of how both the Roman Republic and the polises of Greece fundamentally ran on in-person interaction. That doesn’t scale!”
Well it did scale up to the size of Italy through the mechanic of just decentralizing everything. Really it’s in the interest of any pre-industrial society to decentralize heavily, for the average peasant farmer a good society is just one where their community is pillaged or extorted. Rome could achieve that for a while by uniting all the communities it ruled in conquest. All the people who would be pillaging are pillaging outside communities and with all the spoils of war you dont need extortive taxes to pay for the army. But the system relies on growth and can’t last forever.
And even then it doesne’t scale forever: Having the Marsii follow you to Greece for plunder might work but it’s a lot more trouble moving them to Persia.
Mostly because of travel time and logistics, but there’s a reason preindustrial empires generally stop expanding over deserts or even steppes, or are unstable. Hell, even industrial empires find the terrain in Persia and central Asia to be a nightmare, it’s not a mistake that Iran and Afghanistan are independent and largely always have been (or in imperial flux).
Still, let’s provide some context; by 100-200 ad. Rome no longer needed to be a bellicose empire to be stable, it was too big and well positioned to ever invade. If it hadn’t torn itself apart with civil war then it would not have fallen militarily as an almost indisputable fact, and this suggests that a less efficient way of leveraging state power and violence may have actually made Rome safer, paradoxically. In other words, Later Rome just needed to convince people to stay mostly home, not go to war.
The US also scaled by having representative democracy, while Rome had a quasi-direct democratic city-state that acquired an empire, kind of if the US had been run by the Philadelphia city council. For Rome to scale _as a republic_, I think someone would have had to think of, and push through, something like the provinces sending tribunes to Rome to speak for their interests. Rule by a Tribunate. But how to mesh that with the Roman assemblies electing consuls? Or how to replace the Senate selecting pro-magistrates with provinces electing their own?
The problem is “can’t imagine a solution” but more “can’t imagine how you get _to_ a solution, giving the starting point.” Short of Sulla or Caesar using their dictatorial power very differently.
But The United States was never a homogenous country. Rome was, at the beginning. Then it became multicultural before it became mostly Greek.
This is not correct, as I wrote about here: https://acoup.blog/2021/06/11/collections-the-queens-latin-or-who-were-the-romans-part-i-beginnings-and-legends/
The Romans understood themselves – correctly, as the evidence indicates – as a fusion culture from the very beginning. ‘Roman’ was never an ethnic identity, but a legal one, defined by citizenship, which embraced multiple ethnic identities at all visible points of Roman history.
“not homogeneous” makes sense if regional differences are the measure of interest. Different city states have different geographies, economies to some extent, somewhat different traditions, etc.
Though what that has to do with expanding a Republic isn’t clear. Maybe implication is that the US had to build in ways of handling regional differences from the beginning, while Rome as a single city state did not.
Or might have been implying racial/cultural homogeneity and ended up on a kernel of an argument anyway.
Some vague imaginings of how this might work. (with caveats that as a random guy who did not live at the time, I am probably missing a ton of knowledge that would make this not happen, but it is fun to imagine)
-Italians start asking for citizenship, to share in benefits.
-While rich guys don’t care about participation of other Italians, people do notice issues with lots of people spread out over Italy interacting with a government in a single city.
-To work around possible issues, do this instead:
–Italians (including romans) are citizens of their own cities, participating in their own city governments. In addition, they have “Italian” citizenship which gives marriage rights, laws for doing business, etc. that are equivalent to what Roman citizenship was, and share in benefits from provincial taxes coming in.
–On decisions that effect all Italians (Anything with wars, possibly big building projects, etc.) ambassadors from other cities become an institutionalized position, and they get to vote on things.
–After some more wrangling, and some annoyance at how Romans still pick Consuls, provincial governors, and/or similar, the government splits city based officials (Tribunes, Aediles, various priests, praetors managing courts in the city, plus their equivalents in other Italian city states) and similar) from empire wide officials (provincial governors, consuls, praetors managing armies, etc.). This is obviously a major change, but I’m imagining this and want it to work out properly, so it does.
–Possibly, these “Ambassadors” pick the positions from amongst themselves, which gives a few citizens a chance to see in person who some major officials are as they did before. Plus it gives “ambassador –> Consul” as a natural path of career progression. Promising questor equivalents may be selected as well, to boost themselves in provinces before moving on to bigger things, in addition to those in the city, or equivalents if existing elsewhere in Italy.
–The senate has already incorporated members from outside Rome, so presumably does that a bit more.
-The ambassador’s council over time develops into a legislature, and the original city governments into something like modern city/state/provincial governments.
-As other provinces Romanize, they make demands, and may get incorporated into the system after some sort of political conflict (some incentive to keep provinces paying taxes and out of government, but if recruiting auxiliaries from other places, or general unhappiness leads to revolts, or a desire to reward service, incentives also exist to expand the system further.)
-System encounters some other issue, possibly, and goes to monarchy like just about every other large empire.
Alternatively some system where the provincials make local decisions but cooperate voluntarily with Rome and each other for defense and trade, which is a more reasonable evolution of the preexisting system, but one with less central authority and bigger cultural barriers; a hands off decentralized approach is completely incompatible with the political ambitions of the Roman elite, who needed military service and positions of authority to advance. And the existence of that elite is given impetus by economics and subsistence patterns, it’s not arbitrary and couldn’t be simply discarded by killing them all, or anything equally trite.
You’re oversimplifying how even early American politics worked, which is fine obviously, but to point out an even stronger supporting point…while political parties weren’t necessarily integral to the process, and, indeed, there are real examples of nonpartisan movements or political entities influencing early American history so it’s clearly not that simple, a literate population is. It’s fundamentally impossible to convey information fast, often, and coherently enough via word of mouth to operate a Continent sized democracy, and the least advanced solution to that is writing.
The real problem is the communication lag. You simply can’t have a participating public if information needs to move at horseback, accurately, for even weeks at a time. De facto the preindustrial solution was to have an urban core which was politically enfranchised, and a bunch of controlled territories-an Empire, as defined by many political scientists. The Romans managed a partial fix via ships and delegates, but that only works in the Mediterranean (maybe the great lakes of north America or Africa could work, to a lesser extent), so it fell apart once it took more than a week or two for word to travel.
Newspapers, and print media in general, help solve this tremendously by A. Reducing inaccuracies, B. Being portable, C. Being reproducible, and D. Being verifiable. It’s not just newspapers; the paper ballot is arguably just as important given how early democracy worked in America.
And as you say, newspapers required certain industrial processes that didn’t exist, and a literacy rate only possible because of the honestly deranged efforts of early enlightenment inspired religious and secular educators, whom valued education with a pathological fervor rivaling the Roman obsession with martial valor. You also arguably need ships or railway, but mass movement of letters, ballots, or newspapers is possible.
Of course America has all the above, and a few other tricks like telegraph, electricity, radio, and industrial agriculture. Point being, comparing Rome to America simply fails. It fails in ways that should make us incredibly grateful for public education, fertilizer, and industry, but to the point here it fails in ways that suggests Rome might’ve been doomed.
“You simply can’t have a participating public if information needs to move at horseback”
But the early US _was_ a large republic where information moved no faster than horseback or sailing ship, and we’re not talking courier relays or clipper ships, either. By around 1812, states stretched 1000 miles north-south and 800 miles Atlantic-inland, and both railroads and electric telegraphs were still decades away.
I would disagree with the teleology argument.
Out of the meaningful players beyond the city-state stage in the game’s timeframe there really isn’t an example of regression of monarchic power back to more republican ones, save perhaps for Silla who both came from a long republican tradition and definitely paid a lot of lip service to (or genuinely believed in) his role as an unconventional savior, part dictator, part reformer, fully agent of exception.
I don’t think it’s teleology, but rather, game development constraints. The game had to be shipped and there likely was no time to create an engaging, complex, and balanced system where going the opposite way was an option; and player expectations are that later items in a progression be superior or at least comparable to the old ones. So the game tries to model what was more or less an historical trend, but the necessities of gameplay add a superficially teleological aspect on to it, one that I doubt the very knowledgeable folks at Paradox intended to incorporate.
Why wouldn’t Carthage’s transition from the Magonid-dominated monarchy to a republic in the mid 300s BC also count as an example? I assume “meaningful” means a combination of big and famous, and Carthage transitioned into a republican government when it was already powerful and had an empire well beyond the city itself.
That would suggest that more “meaningful,” i.e., big and famous, states transitioned from monarchy to republic (both Carthage after the Magonids and Rome after Sulla) than transitioned from republic to monarchy (with Rome being the -only- such state to ever do so within the game’s period).
But also, describing the whole process as “regression” of monarchic power to republican power does more to assume the conclusion than to prove it, right? It’s only a “regression” if the direction from republicanism to monarchy is indeed the only teleologically “forward” direction, and if you frame the question so as to prejudge the answer, then of course you will make it appear to yourself that the prejudged answer is right.
Except in the sense of “regression to mean.” But since we’re not statisticians wearing our statistician hats. . . .
One could also call it a restoration, in many cases.
Roman history is hugely popular with grand strategy players. The fact that paradox messed it up as bad as they did is honestly surprising. I have two theories why it could have gone wrong.
1) the project was taking longer than expected and still was not anywhere near what they wanted. When they had the choice of throwing good money after bad, or just releasing what they had, they decided to go for the latter option. They released it just before a business quarter. If this is the case it is surprising they still put so much time into the game with free patches.
2) they honestly thought people were willing to accept a half-finished game and would just buy it+DLC, no questions asked. When the game bombed and people refused to buy an unfinished game, they panicked and tried to fix it with a roadmap of patches. But that was too little, too late. No customer base means no DLC which means no customers.
As for me, I was really hyped for Imperator. But I wasn’t sure if I wanted to jump into a paradox game with zero DLC to flesh it out. Then, when it released, the negative buzz kept me far away from it. If they ever make a sequel, I have high hopes for it. They already have a foundation to build on, and with CK3 they proved they could actually create a fun, finished, game before releasing it.
I think it’s some combination of option 1 and having a higher internal opinion of the game. Despite their reputation for releasing a ton of DLC, I generally consider their games complete in their target aspects at launch. CK2 and 3 launched with quite fleshed out mechanics for playing a Crusader King. Europa Universalis, to my understanding, launched with a fairly complete set of mechanics in Europe. Stellaris wasn’t a great game at launch, but that was core design failures rather than being unfinished.
Point 2 is weak because it fundamentally misrepresents Imperator in context of video game development in general and Paradox grand strategy games in specific.
With regard to the former, I will attempt to post a meme made by askagamedev on Tumblr. You should see either an image or a messy but functional link.
https://64.media.tumblr.com/c6c38456c161872eef64df2afd9458e5/tumblr_inline_oddlksh8HV1r2xhmf_500.jpg
With regard to the latter, functionally all Paradox grand strategy games in the last decade and change have released in a relatively feature-light state and been expanded over time, with a mixture of DLC and free updates. Between Europas Universalis, Victorias, Hearts of Irons, and Crusader Kingses, they have iteratively improved that business model to a degree few game studios can rival.
No, the reason that Imperator failed must be something that distinguishes Imperator from the more successful Paradox strategy games. And my in my armchair-quarterback-with-hindsight opinion, Imperator probably failed because it doesn’t have a distinct mechanical identity.
EK2 isn’t just the medieval Paradox game; it’s a game built around dynasties and characters. EUIV isn’t just the early modern Paradox game; it’s a game built around colonialism and empire-building. Victoria II is about industrialization and economics, HOI is about war, but what is Imperator about? Is it just the Hellenistic Paradox game?
Early in the game’s life cycle, Imperator seemed like a mashup of other pre-existing Paradox games. No prior Paradox grand strategy game combined Victoria’s pops and CK’s character focus, but that doesn’t make me want to play Imperator instead of CK2 or Vicky.
Either they didn’t figure out how to explain the game’s mechanical focus to consumers, or they had to cut some feature crucial to its intended mechanical focus, or the Imperator creative leads thought a game that was just “the Hellenistic Paradox game” would sell like hotcakes. Or something.
I fully concur. The reason I never got that much into Imperator: Rome is that it’s neither meat nor fish: it’s just a jumble of CK, EU e Victoria mechanics with some ancient flavour, but without a distinct focus that distinguishes it from the others.
I get the feeling their idea was that imperator would be the “best off”. It would have EU mappainting, CK family management and vicky pops. EU5 stands to get pops as well, and I get the feeling they like it as an idea to represent the masses in their games. Since their older games have manpower just appear out of thin air. You can call it a lack of identity, but I get the feeling the pitch (internally) was it would be the synthesis of all big paradox titles.
The problem is, many underestimate the cost and difficulty of this kind of gamedev. It’s not enough to ‘get the history right’, but it also must play well/be engaging, and crucially, the AI must be able to at least superficially partake into it.
With a good jump-start point like all “core” Pdox titles have, that challenge is lessened a fair bit, but I:R had no suck luck and had to reinvent the formula without the luxury of being able to spearhead/reimagine elements (POP focus, off-hand warfare) that Victoria 3 instead got.
Turns out, crafting a new GSG mechanical identity is real hard.
Well to be clear, Imperator was EU:Rome 2. And the original version was extremely similar to EU:Rome. I know most people don’t remember EU:Rome, but they should really learn the history before making sweeping statements.
The problem was they went all in on mana at a time when the mana hate was raging. That was the primary problem. Most people agree that Imperator 2.0 was a 6-8/10 and Imperator 1.0 was a 3-5/10. The problem was that Imperator had already been abandoned by the time 2.0 rolled around.
It is also the case that the game did not nail certain parts of the ancient world flavor. People were spoiled by EU4 full of DLCs and Imperator was closest to EU4. But the mana focus was what got the community totally riled up.
I only played the “complete” or “2.0” version of Imperator. And it was still very bare-bones with a tricky, unintuitive interface. And I’m a Paradox veteran and been playing since EU2. I have completed the Tutorial for EU4.
But I bounced off Imperator, hard. It’s not terribly, but this is nowhere near an 8/10 game. On its best day it’s a strictly mid-tier game. Crucially, it offers nothing new whatsoever, which is rather a problem for any game.
Here is one problem: Sure, Imperator was never going to do complex, Total War style tactics, but the battles in this game are barely notable and of little interest. Any given fight has almost no impact on the larger game. I think that’s exactly *wrong* for this subject matter.
I feel like part of the problem was a distinct divide in differences, basically between the more board-game “juggle currencies and abstractiosn” and the more “simulationist” side. Post-development the game moved significantly towards the simulationist side.
One thing that your analysis of paradox games leaves out is the combat system. Not the way armies are raised, but the way they actually fight. The EU4 is fairly simple with straight forward battle lines of units that have only a few stats each, affected by a few modifiers and randomness. CK2, on the other hand, has a much wider range of units, no formation, but the all important, semi-random tactics that have a huge impact. Not familiar with CK3 or Imperator on this.
Comparing these systems, not just to historical reality, but also to each other and what they say about their “Theory of Battle” could be fun.
I especially like what Victoria 2 did with their “theory of battle” – I’ll elaborate here for those who’ve never played.
Trying to simulate 1836-1936, they came up with a system that showed the move towards trench warfare in a really interesting way IMO. Basically, it uses a “combat lines” system like EU4, but the width of the lines is heavily dependant on technology. Specifically, it gets *smaller* as tech goes up – units get individually stronger, but as you stop using dense-packed blocks of men and start using thinner lines and trench warfare tactics, fewer men can fit into a battle.
An early-game army will not tend to fill up the available width in even one province, so the bigger army can often envelop the enemy and win a single pitched battle to get a huge advantage in a war. But by the WW1 era, the major states have gotten both far more densely populated and much larger geographically, and they can use this population more intensively as well (especially when mobilized for a major war), making armies massively larger. But the available combat space is also greatly reduced, meaning that the net effect is that you can easily see full stacks fighting in every province along a whole front, Western Front style, and still have reserves left over. That basically removes most of a player’s typical tactical options in games like CK/EU, and forces you into “meat grinder” fights where you can only really win by collapsing the enemy’s economy and/or population, unless you have a big enough tech edge to bull your way through directly.
They explicitly described this as their approach (https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/threads/developer-diary-12-military.461253/), and I think it worked pretty well. Vicky 3 went in a totally different direction for warfare, abstracting away most combat entirely, so the same mechanics aren’t so much a thing there. It’s a valid choice IMO, even if it’s been controversial with players, but I have a soft spot for the Vicky 2 approach here.
I don’t like Vicky 3’s approach because I, at least, still engaged in warfare a lot, but didn’t have a lot of decisions. I didn’t even make too many decisions in the industrial-political system that fed into the war; the military production methods are a linear progression and the political system dictated the choice of military law on interest group power. It was very set-and-forget for something I spent so much time doing that dictated the fate of nations. The only thing that feels like making a decision is how much armament manufacturing to build and how to keep it running in peacetime.
Wow, things scaling *down* with progress is a bold game design choice indeed! But I can see it working thematically, even if moving endless stacks might get a little boring…
Just from that one example it seems there could be a lot to discuss here! And we know that Devereaux is, at heart, a military historian first
It helped that your units got stronger at the same time, so you were able to fit roughly comparable combat power into a fight before and after (and that’s assuming you’d already capped out your width – if you hadn’t, it was pure power increase).
Also, it’s worth noting specifically that the width of any given battle was the *smaller* of yours or your enemy’s, not each of you using your own width. So you weren’t just restricting your own stack sizes, but also your enemy’s.
It was a bold and unconventional choice, but it was well considered, and it worked out as designed. The combat had some other issues (boring siege mechanics, for example), but the battlefield changing over time worked well.
Ck3 abandons the tactics structure for a rock-paper-scissors system among the units of your men-at-arms. Having a countering unit reduces the countered units damage by up to 90% if of equal numbers. I tend to build a diverse army weighted towards the heavier men-at-arms types because they have considerably higher base stats and regiment numbers are capped.
What I don’t like about this system is that vassals don’t contribute men-at-arms, leading to a theory of history where the medieval battlefield revolved around a core of professional soldiers directly loyal to the king with no land holdings. You do get levies from nobles, but their stats are worse than even light infantry and you only get light infantry because they counter heavy infantry.
Oh, I should also mention the knights, though I routinely forget about them. They’re actual characters serving in your army, and they get massive damage output based on their prowess stats. They can be landed or landless. They do provide a major portion of your combat power, but it’s easy to forget they exist because the system automatically picks the best knights.
Levies are mostly there to bulk out your numbers, especially for stuff like sieges where you just need to hit a given level of raw manpower, and stats don’t matter. And it’s not like this is Vicky and they affect your population when they die, so you might as well use them, because there’s no real cost to it.
I do wish vassals you were allied to (e.g., your brothers and any sons you’ve given land to early, plus local notables that you married your daughters to) would bring their men-at-arms when you got into a war, though. That’d make internal alliance-building way more meaningful.
I do use the levies I get, but when I get a choice between levies and money I always pick money to support the national army. It feels wrong for the period.
I liked CK2’s retinue system better because you had to get pretty big and pretty far into the game to make them the centerpiece of your army.
CK2 was a good first attempt, technically second I guess, at making a thematic and period appropriate warfare system. Then in CK3 they said why not go backwards and make a system that is less interesting and less period appropriate in every way.
Certainly a bold design choice in a game called Crusader Kings 3. I guess The Sims: Medieval was already taken.
@guy, a medieval ruler choosing money instead of levies is entirely right for the period. Medieval vassals often had the choice of paying cash instead of serving in the army, and the liege lord would very often take the cash instead of the service and use it to hire mercenaries. The vassal doesn’t risk getting killed, the liege lord doesn’t have to worry (as much) about limited terms of service and people not obeying orders or not working together because of some petty dispute or feud.
Same thing happened to some extent in the medieval Byzantine empire, and even a good number of Islamic rulers much preferred a reliable mercenary/paid force of ghulam cavalry over their nominal vassals.
I always felt that CK3’s system was a direct downgrade to CK2’s (where different holdings provided different troop types, not just generic “levies”)
CK3’s design goal was to simplify stuff that wasn’t part of their “core vision”. That vision is quite distinct from CK2, and also as the devs have literally commented, from the name of the game. They’ve specifically said that warfare, and explicitly crusades, are not a core aspect of Crusader Kings 3.
That fact that the middle ages can’t be represented properly with a trivial combat implementation because of how the military tied into every aspect of the societies and polities apparently never occured to them.
The Middle Ages can be represented quite nicely without going into detailed battlefield tactics: this is the basis of Marxist / Annales style history. There isn’t much correlation between medieval kings being successful on the battlefield and being successful at territorial expansion or longevity. Richard I Lionheart was a better general than Philip Augustus of France, the latter was the better at “map painting”. In the fall of the Roman Republic period Julius Caesar was a good general and Octavian / Augustus wasn’t, but the latter rule for a lot longer and achieved a lot more.
I don’t see a problem with a game about being a king forcing players to not spend time micro-optimising battlefield force composition and tactics.
You can represent them through scripting, sure. But a sandbox won’t work right.
Additionally any given character doesn’t have to min-max tactics and composition, but they do have to exist.
Indeed in a proper system the player as king could only manage one army at a time and even that with help from multiple other characters, whether vassals or professional officers in the Roman style.
You might note in my comment that I said: “That fact that the middle ages can’t be represented properly with a trivial combat implementation because of how the military tied into every aspect of the societies and polities apparently never occured to them.”
What part of that made you think I was talking about micromanaging battle tactics? And in fact it suggests *less* control for a king over “composition” as well.
EU4/V2/CK2 style army micro isn’t the be all/end all. But the fact is that the *new* systems in CK3 and V3 are *worse*. If the old style is a 4 or an 8, depending on your preferences, the new style is a 3 or a 6, as far as providing an experience that closely matches the experience of a historical or fantasy ruler properly.
Also, there’s *insane* micro in bonus stacking and accolades for knights/MAA in CK3. Much worse than anything in CK2.
@Axioms Of Dominion, I assumed you were talking about micromanaging battle tactics because this particular thread is about details of army composition and effectiveness on the battlefield, and because elsewhere you rank Paradox games by comparing them to programming languages with C++ as the “best”.
(For those who are not programmers, C++ is the ultimate in Programmer Autonomy, where you can specify and tweak every single aspect of everything that happens.)
If that’s not what you mean by “trivial”, more detail please?
C allows you more. C++ is strongly typed. In C you can cast from an integer to a string and back without the slightest issue — or change in data.
C — it combines the strength of assembly language with the flexibility of assembly language!
@Mary Catelli: C++ lets you do that too with a reinterpret_cast. They used a separate keyword for that one to visually flag “this is the cast with all the guardrails off that you shouldn’t use unless you really know what you’re doing” as opposed to the other types of cast like const_cast that are used for restricted purposes that can be mechanically checked within the type system. C just uses the same syntactic mechanism for all types of cast, so you can’t visually distinguish the safe vs. unsafe uses.
Jumping through hoops is not necessary in C.
“In C you can cast from an integer to a string ”
You can do use C-style casts in C++ too. You just generally shouldn’t.
You shouldn’t do them in C, either. They are a major cause of hard-to-track-down bugs.
But you can, very easily. Which is autonomy and all that.
(How did we go from battlefield composition to stupid programming language tricks? Oh well, still beats modern day politics IMNSHO.)
C++ allows one to change the ways array indexing works by overloading [], e.g. so that negative integers work; and to change how pointers are dereferenced by overloading * and ->, e.g. so that what you think it holds the address of has no actual relation to how it is used. Those are hypothetical but C++ does overload >> to be the equivalent of C printf() and << to be the equivalent of C scanf.
And C++ allows template metaprogramming, which is not actually a Bene Gesserit technique from the Dune books but sort of like as if you could use the C preprocessor to do calculations at compile time.
C is simple, elegant, dangerous in unskilled hands. Very few people would say that C++ is simple and elegant.
Yes, please do a series on the fall of the Roman Republic!
Regarding your outro, I did play the first HOI (the only main-line Paradox products I haven’t played are the Roman ones and EU1), and it was an odd duck. In particular, technology was purchased with industrial output directly, meaning tech growth and military production traded off against each other. And the tech tree was such a mess that I don’t think there was any way to actually visualize it in the game – it looked like this (https://oldpcgaming.net/wp-content/gallery/hearts-of-iron/4.jpg), with a bunch of main-line techs (golden icon) that branched off into short additional paths from there (silver icons), but the “spine” techs often had weird cross-dependencies that were not immediately obvious to new players – I scotched my first run by forgetting to research one particular tech tree that turned out to be essential to almost all later techs.
Also, the resource system was bizarre. You’d trade resources for other resources, but you’d trade them with an abstract global market, whose price just varied. I don’t even remember how submarine warfare played into this, since it wasn’t a point-to-point trade like with the later games.
It was a very good military sim, especially for its day, but the economic/technology side needed a ton of work.
In the previous weeks there was a question that popped up several times: If the game would simulate the Roman military advantage, particularly in manpower, then that would incentivize every player to adopt the Roman system unless it is limited to Romans only.
But the central role of the people in the downfall of the Roman Republic makes me think that a suitable, historically based trade-off could be resources vs control: Republics would give the player more manpower to work with, but limit their control over who is appointed to offices, who can be removed from office, who to declare war on, when to make peace, and the laws you want only pass some of the time. Monarchies allow direct control over these things, but give you fewer military ressources (number of soldiers and competence of generals) to work with.
That way the skillset for monarchies and republics could be different: how well can I handle what the game throws at me vs how well can I manage my limited resources. The choice between both would be a matter of preference, while the skill level required would ideally correlate with the size of the empire.
(But tbh I would hope that if they do Imperator II they will make you play a character like in Crusader Kings. The mechanics for administrative states in CKIII and the mechanics for merchant republics in CKII could maybe be refined over time and at some point reach the polish necessary to make playing Cicero fun. But preferences on this vary – I get the feeling that the people drawn to Europa Universalis are of a different type than those drawn to Crusader Kings and you can’t make a game that fits what they both want.)
One design problem I see with doing this is that AI republics will absolutely run roughshod over AI monarchies. Admittedly this will contribute to AI Rome becoming master of the universe.
I’m also not sure I’d remove control of war and peace from the player. It’s really frustrating to be dragged into a war and being unable to peace out.
I feel like a system where republics are better (like, you know, RL history) requires some of the things standing between you and it to be represented well.
I’d be curious to see a game take the personalities of CK3, but run with them even harder – instead of an abstract victory mechanic, have it measure how well each character achieves their own goals. If you play as a zealot, you get score for converting provinces, building temples, etc., and lose score for hiring infidels, losing holy wars, etc.
But critically, these would need to be directions that are fundamentally personal, not state-level. If a monarch gains points based on their personal power, not their state’s power, then the idea of decentralizing the state to get a more powerful overall state might leave you as a king of a larger area, but with lower “reign score” even so. It may still be worth it, but you need a really massive expansion of your raw power for it to pay off, not just a 5% bonus.
After all, the biggest single reason republics didn’t happen more often is that the aristocratic elites didn’t usually want them to happen, and they held enough power to block it from happening. If you want real historical accuracy, you need to model that, in a way that players will care about.
And reward stability, by making the verdict of history play into it. If a zealous character converts some provinces, but then dies in a failed holy war and they all switch back, then he wasn’t really a very successful leader at all, and won’t get a great score. (Have this diminish over time, so you’re not a medieval lord getting graded primarily by what Bronze Age tribesman would think of you, but not too quickly – maybe have it decline over a century or so, if you assume a CK-like span of history, and double that for cultures that have special reverence for ancestors.)
I wonder if you could do this as a CK mod. Probably, but I’m way too flighty with my creative projects to actually do it (sadly).
The biggest issue I see with what this ‘reign score’ actually *does* in-game. Slapping on a bunch of random bonuses for having a good score is just going to feel arbitrary and take away from the game. And having the score the entire goal of the game doesn’t really work within the sandbox-no-actual-victory-conditions style that paradox games have.
Yeah, if you were designing this from scratch, you might use a Paradox game engine to speed up development, but you wouldn’t want to be advertising it as a new Paradox game – this would be an incorrect direction to take for CK4, IMO.
But if you do it right, the bonuses would not be random, any more than the CK3 stress system is random. The things that cause you stress are all fairly natural given your character’s personality, and players don’t seem to mind the fact that a Brave lord would view hiding from danger as a bad thing, or a Lustful one might get stress reduction from successful efforts to seduce a paramour.
Honestly, if I was making it as a mod, I’d probably start with every point of added stress being -1 reign score, just to anchor the scaling properly. Adapt what’s already there in the mechanics to the new design philosophy of the mod.
“then that would incentivize every player to adopt the Roman system unless it is limited to Romans only.”
The solution in my mind would mean it’s a struggle to achieve the Roman system. All government’s have entropy, Rome was the polity that was most successful at resisting that entropy and achieving an effective government. Everyone would want to achieve the kind of effectiveness of the Roman system, it’s just that for the successor kingdoms it should be a struggle just to maintain an effectiveness of having a remotely professional army and not being in civil war.
I think it ties to a more fundamental issue that paradox has; achieving historical effectiveness is generally taken as a given so the only thing for the player to strive for is ahistorical effectiveness.
The level of detail in a Paradox game is simply too low to represent why some powers blobbed hard, Romans and Ottomans being two good examples, while others floundered. And why others were unable to imitate the ones that did well.
The only effective way to design such a system is to have cultural and political differentiation and inertia. That requires depth not available to a fast paced tick based design model.
It would also arguably turn off casual players even if you had a great UI/UX and strong explanation of game systems, which Paradox games rarely have.
Doing a bunch of bonuses just isn’t an effective strategy. If you want to move beyond an abstract Civ-esque system you need to model what actually made monarchies and republics different and also the ways that specific monarchies and/or republics differed from the baseline of their government form.
The Roman republic was a republic within the city and surroundings of Rome but it was their foreign policy which was crucial to their success. Among a few other things.
Similarly Macedonia was a monarchy but many other existing monarchies had much less success than they did.
There are also basically no Paradox games that deal with the directionality of Macedonia. The pull to the east for cultural reasons.
CK3’s famously anemic and disappointing “legends” certainly can’t reflect these sorts of cultural pressures and legacies.
“will refuse to follower the player’s orders,”
follower -> follow
“why kind of person was Sulla or Caesar”
why -> what
No, I like that one better as-is 😉
“harder to maintain character loyalty, though some indirect interactions”
though -> through
On top of all the accuracy difficulties, there’s also the problem that republics just aren’t very much fun. There is a bunch of stuff tied to a bunch of characters that are hard to distinguish. A lot of stuff is static with occasional disruption and trying to actually maximize the effectiveness of your characters would be a micromanagement nightmare. It would be very nice if the game gave you a proper struggle to maintain the power of the republic but then actually rewarded you for doing so. And as you point out, the republican government appears to be quite effective in this era so it would be a historically plausible dynamic.
Reading these recent articles has made me wonder if it would be possible to remake the old boardgame Republic of Rome with more realism by putting the players not in the role of a group of Senators but in the role of a loose assemblage of common citizens. Send your members off to wars so that they come back with spoils and buy bigger farms, moving up the ranks of wealth (which are conveniently codified for us). The more important your group of citizens are the more you can attract more effective Senators as patrons who will vote in your interests because they benefit from prosperous clients. The players are keenly interested in stuff like land reform and colony votes not as a way to placate the masses but as a way to enrich themselves. I dont think these kinds of mechanics would transfer to a Paradox style game but seems like food for thought.
I’ve always felt like a hmmm, politics/life cycle game would be fun for a republic of rome simulator. You play as a family, you try to get family members elected to offices marry them off, etc. Basically focus entirely on roman internal politics.
So Historia Realis: Rome. I haven’t talked to the dev in a while but I’d expect a release probably next year. Has a Steam page but not sure how updated he keeps it.
The longer, more deeply, more broadly I read in history, starting when a child and now old as dirt, what cause the fall of any organized polity/state/governing system is the confrontations between those who wish the expansion of rights and participation in governing and those determined to refuse this (in the case here, the Social War). This inevitably leads to civil war — at least it did in the United States — it seems, at least when the polity is larger than Sparta, for instance (not that anyone in Sparta really wanted to rid themselves of the Helot system).
This, obviously excludes acts of god, such as climate change (as with the great Middle Eastern empires’ silting up of the irrigation systems on which everyone from god-king on down depended) or the conquest by a stronger military group with better military leadership.
And as mentioned here too — vast dichotomies between large numbers of obscenely wealthy and everyone one else. When there is nothing else to strive for in terms of status, the obscenely wealthy will fight each other for being Master of Rome.
The thing is, Rome did eventually extend citizenship to the socii, so this feels pretty incomplete as an explanation for why the Republic fell.
I wonder if something like a political faction system from Stellaris would be suitable for representing that: As the time passes, factions that favor a specific policy, or combination of policies form and spread across the population, and their loyalty/happiness changes when actions taken and events happening match/oppose their policy—and named characters become members of factions as well.
In republic (and possibly non-polities) all citizen/free pops could join factions and they could possibly force their member characters to positions of power, pushing their agenda. In monarchies (and possibly elitist non-policies) only elite pops faction would be impactful, and instead of forcing their member characters into positions of power, they would hinder the functions of the realm when not having position, possibly causing strife and rebellions. Lower status faction could still impact the amount of support the disfavored elites receive in their opposition to the dominant faction.
If factions with opposing goals become too strong at the same time, it could lead to civil wars.
I am heartened to see someone taken seriously like Bret is make the argument that a Paradox game doesn’t actually simulate the key aspect of the relevant time period. Maybe in a few months or years Bret can be persuaded to see that Crusader Kings 3 *also* fails at this most basic task, because it lacks a meaningful social simulation. Note that CK 2 failed as well in this particular area, but it gets some slack because CK3 had a decade of dev time beyond CK2 and a larger team and budget plus the lessons from CK2 to build on.
More on topic, it is absolutely correct that Imperator not only doesn’t handle the real shifting morass of historical governmental change but also is incapable of doing so. Not only does it fail to represent any sort of public or really even oligarchic, Greek, style voting assembly, but it really fails to represent what differentiates governments and politics at all mechanically. Like all Paradox games, including both Victorias I’d argue, the game lacks mechanics and system that represent the functioning of government. It doesn’t just simplify but never engages at all.
Whether it is EU4, Imperator, or even CK2/3 which sorta half asses it for “feudal monarchies”, the *structures* of governments don’t really exist. Instead you mostly get minor modifiers. EU4, even with the government reform system, mostly is identical to Imperator/EU:Rome in giving a limited selection of bonus chunks. Even expanded EU4 governments from DLC simply staple on more bonus chunks and perhaps a sliding bar of some kind.
A key issue which impacts basically every Paradox game is the concept of “autonomy/control”. Quite a lot of the problem Paradox has is because of their complete “damnatio memoriae” of geography. Sure you get dice roll penalties and perhaps “development cost penalties” or w/e. But the lack of consideration for geography wends through every single Paradox game.
Consider highlands. Whether we are talking the Deccan or Anatolian or Spanish plateaus or the Scottish Highlands, or various mountainous parts of Italy it is widely understood that states from classical to pre-modern times had difficulties with these areas. You can even look at something like the famous Sherwood Forest when talking about state control. Bandits and rebels are very often focused here as are “hill peoples” which in fantasy or fact are famous for being difficult to manage.
EU5 in the future, and previously MEIOU & Taxes, had systems like “control” or “communication efficiency” that vaguely model this but those are really quite insufficient. For instance neither of those models the difficulty in tracking military movements in non-open flatland areas. Even with the much smaller PC “locations” as the map baseline you still need a sort of “stealth” system so that small disruptive forces can move about without being caught. This is also part of the issue with the lack of support for low intensity or low-scale raiding/warfare which was endemic to pre-modern history.
Paradox, and especially CK3 where they make claims to model characters, similarly fail to give more than cursory thought to “social geography”, which academics might know under the name elite terrain or something. Basically they fail to represent in a meaningful way many different and often interconnecting foundational aspects of history/sociology.
Because Paradox games are tick-based, sometimes called pseudo real-time, and on top of that their speed through the years is quite fast to allow casuals to get passed the early game, they probably don’t have room for this stuff, but it is this lack which renders so many of their goals null and void. These things are *required* to meaningfully differentiate between polities. That’s why they use bonuses and minimally in newer games a few special laws or actions. And we haven’t even gotten into the lack of “cultural gameplay” which is why the games feel bland and flavorless to everyone. Because even the secondary gameplay loops much less the core one are virtually identical for all polities in every one of their games. Layers and layers of special mechanics and missions trees can’t even truly fix this. One nation has a special mission to conquer Persia and one Southern France but in practice the experience is no different aside from the province names.
It is actually quite possible to represent the experience of Rome in a mechanically interesting and unique and flavorful way in a video game. Just not under the Paradox model. Even something like Historia Realis: Rome is somewhat limited, and the scope of just Rome sort of draws it away from GSG territory, but you would get the flavor and feeling of Rome there at least, unlike “Imperator”.
I should note that Imperator is in my top 3 PDox GSGs, I’m not hating on it specifically. It would have been a top game if it had managed to grab even 4-5 DLCs of the modern $30 PDox style. Although PDox prices are nuts IMO.
Because Paradox games lack so many foundational systems of history they can’t possibly represent why some states rose so far and fell so fast, whether Rome or something like the Ottomans, in a meaningful way. Bret I believe has blogged extensively here about the unique Roman systems that propelled it to the peak, along with some fantastic luck as is always needed, and so he must know that not a single Paradox game has the foundational mechanics to represent those differences. Hence the spam of “Ideas”, “Reforms”, “Decisions”, and so on in EU4 or somewhat in different form in EU:Rome 2, err I mean Imperator.
Each game has a target level of detail. Paradox is more detailed than most, but they’re not trying to build an actual simulation of the ancient world here. They’re trying to build a fun game whose mechanics are informed by history, but the gameplay does come first.
So yeah, they’re not as detailed as they could be. No argument. But it’s not that big a deal overall – not every game needs to be War in the Pacific.
I’m not sure why so many people are so insistent about posting bland truisms of game design all the time.
Of course every game has a target level of detail.
But I am talking about the limitations of Paradox games as far as addressing extremely common and popular complaints about them.
For instance that Rome didn’t really feel like Rome nor did it feel particularly different from other polities in Imperator. Carthage is another example from Imperator.
And I also address the broader general complaint. That polities in any given Paradox game lack flavor or feel bland or boring or samey.
Maybe I should restate this for clarity, there are a series of top 5/top 10 most common complaints for each Paradox game and for GSG games more broadly, that come up absolutely constantly.
And Paradox often claims they are trying to address those complaints. Although my comment doesn’t require that to be the case to have a point.
Regardless those complaints in fact can not be addressed under the existing Paradox model. Just as Rome can’t be properly portrayed in Imperator.
Additionally EU4 layered on an endless number of events, which you can’t possibly know about until you read the extremely bloated wiki, and also endless “government reforms”, special units, national idea reworks, and massive mission trees in order to try to address these complaints. And they probably spent more money and did more programming doing that than it would take to address these complaints through systems and mechanics. And EU4 at this stage is famously bloated by bespoke mechanics applying to single nations.
EU5 made many attempts to resolve some of that bloat, and it will probably end up much less bloated while achieving 75% of the impact the bloat achieved, but it will still fall well short.
The vast majority of nations will feel bland and samey and the game will be neither a sandbox nor a history theme park ride, nor will it be able to provide for the rise and fall of iconic nations nor prevent blobbing.
You might think of EU4 as Javascript, or PHP, and EU5 is something slightly closer to the metal/mechanics but not quite C++. C# maybe? In any case a truly well made game has a level of detail which supports gameplay/thematic goals/claims. Nearly every Paradox game fails this test.
Now EU4 is a perfectly fine “incremental game with a map and history flavored cookies”. Mechanically that’s how it plays. But that’s not really the presentation of the marketing, nor is it the expectation of your average player. EU4 is a 7 out of 10 compared to the goals of EU5, and an 8.5/9 out of 10 as an incremental game with a map. It is a 4-5 out of 10 if you consider the dreams of an average veteran player.
Following on from your commentary in the last part about how the game could have modeled the cursus honorum, I think this might actually feed into how the game could have simulated the failure of the Roman Republic.
As a player, you are going to want to elect praetors and consuls who are good generals because conquering the map is fun. Over time, the player would also have an incentive to unlock a mechanic that allows the appointment of proconsuls and propraetors in order to keep a particularly good general in the field for a prolonged series of campaigns. This very clearly leads to a situation where a Roman player is incentivized into developing a Julius Caesar type character who becomes a massive problem for the republic itself.
This isn’t a good fit for the existing mechanics, in which Rome can bestow imperium upon just about anyone at any time and occasionally does so for the sole purpose of placating a powerful family by giving one of their mediocre sons command of an unimportant army (I use some of these for road construction), but that mechanic is a lot less interesting anyway.
I find myself wondering what “the Fall of the Roman Republic” looked like to someone from outside Rome. It is not obvious to me that anyone from the legionary-providing classes lost anything from the establishment of autocracy in Rome itself, unless their family farm was close enough to Rome to allow voting in Roman elections. I imagine that by Caesar’s day such legionaries must have been something of a minority.
Why should they risk death fighting against a rebel general just so that someone else could have a vote? What could the Roman voting body offer them that a rebel general or autocrat could not?
And I find myself thinking about our hosts observation in a prior essay about the shortage of ambassadors in the ancient world. If Rome’s “allies” and colonies had sent such people to Rome, in the same way that eg English towns sent representatives to Parliament, presumably they would have been involved in the Republics internal politics. Which would have given the people and legionaries from those cities more of a stake in the existing political system.
As it was, the army would appear to have evolved into an institution whose members had no reason to be loyal to the political system it was meant to serve.
There is a point that the establishment of the “Empire” was arguably pretty gradual: We look at Augustus rise as a watershed, but it’s not neccessarily the case from the POV of people right there that it would be: Remember that the grab bags of powers he had acquired were quite personal and disparate and it’s entirely possible that had things not gone as they did things would have dissolved back to at least another round of politicking, just like Sulla’s attempt at reordering things.
(The Partial Historians makes a pretty good argument that Rome’s first emperor wasn’t Augustus, or even Tiberius but Vespasian, since he’s the first one who actually codifies the position in law)
I think the short answer here is principles. That wasn’t enough to stop the descent into de facto monarchy, of course, but I would imagine that it was the biggest single risk of the transition – people liked their republic, and didn’t really love the idea of it being taken away. (They didn’t want additional decades of civil war to keep it, especially when it had started to look pretty ramshackle, but I’m sure many were sad at the loss.)
People die for principles all the time – it’s not hard to imagine.
What principle should have told the average person outside Rome that he should fight to be ruled by a bunch of men in Rome, rather than be ruled by a single man in Rome?
The belief that the restraint provided by the debates of a committee leads to superior governance is quite pervasive and was certainly present all the way back in antiquity.
As with the Roman Republic, as with the Social War, or the US’s War of the Rebellion, and many other civil wars, these come when 1) a very large group wants entry to the classes who have decision making power, along with the concomitant perks and benefits, which include the opportunities for getting obscenely wealthy — and another very large group is determined this shall not happen; 2) when there are so many obscenely wealthy they are a class to themselves (or believe themselves to be) so, in order to keep playing the game of status markers — Who is the Master of Rome — they fight with each other, which means also coups.
Does not bode well for These Times.
i have a question about terminology. Is the term “Roman Kingdom” in actual use in the academic world? I got into a minor argument over dinner about this because the term seemed incorrect given my (limited) understanding of how the Roman’s operated under their kings. I’ve only ever heard it referred to as the regal period or the monarchy. I know that some Romans used the term “sub regibus” as in like under kings, but it doesn’t seem right to me to use the term kingdom given the amount of loaded baggage that comes with that. Anyway, just interested because wikipedia has multiple “Roman Kingdom and Constitution of Roman Kingdom” articles so I wanted to know if I was totally off base.
As far as future Paradox strategy games go, the games are generally about peer polity competition and interaction, but this doesn’t work so well with Rome since Rome worked quite differently from its neighbors so you end up with the choice of making a very details bespoke system for just one country and then inevitably for others as well or you try to make one political system that then abstracts away a lot of what makes Rome unique. This game seems to have really struggled with that.
I think what would make more sense for Rome would be to have people play as Roman statesmen more than the Roman state. Call it Pater Familias or somesuch and you would be able to manage your estates, gather clients, use your money to climb the cursus honorem, and then use your position to gain prestige and money. And then when you die you could start over as your heir. So more along the lines of CK but focused very strongly on the specific aspects of Roman politics instead of trying to make a general Ancient Mediterranean political sim.
I think that would be a good way of showing why the Roman state did a lot of the things that it did. For example if you were playing as a patrician statesman you’d have to make a lot of trade-offs such as “do I let the plebians become Consuls and deal with more competition for that position or do I keep them out and have to deal with angry plebians” etc. etc. etc. A lot of these choices would look very different from the point of view of an individual power-hungry dude than from the point of view of the disembodied state.
As I noted to another poster, you’re talking about Historia Realis: Rome, which is relatively far into development.
Paradox would not be capable of making such a game, because it wouldn’t contain their core design paradigm. They could hire a studio maybe?
Since people are arguing alternative mechanics in some places, here’s a hypothetical paradox game I made up last year covering roughly 10000 BC to the BC/AD boundary. (Also thought of a “Dawn of Civilization through 1000BC one” and a “BC/AD boundary to Crusader Kings” one, but the late antiquity one in particular isn’t much thought out.
Obviously this idea won’t be done for real. But I write as if it is, because such is the fun of these things.
Main points:
-Play as a small set of core provinces. If provinces are conquered, a player does not lose, but continues managing their province under the thumb of their conqueror. The conqueror only manages core territory directly and has to order conquered ones to do things, which they may or may not do, and they might decide to rebel. System seems to be work
-A simple form of politics could be factions within institutions, with Republics represented by simple council/assemblies/officials institutions existing and having power. Differences and subtleties like the 4 Roman assemblies ignored to keep systems simple and widely applicable. Institutions would also represent ministries, nobles in general, or any other group with politics and factions effecting the overall government. Factions represent groups within the government which could be groups of ministers in a bureaucracy, groups of citizens in an assembly, or equivalent elsewhere. Different factions getting angry and rebelling could lead to provincial governors and generals in those factions rebelling.
–Government I admittedly have to think out in more detail. If I want to work this out as fully as possible anyway, obviously no practical purpose.
-Since the idea is based on having lots of provinces interacting, a good AI would be needed for this sort of game, to avoid making to too easy to exploit (players would probably figure out tricks anyway, but good in these things to make it challenging,.
Hopefully a fun read if you are interested.
If we’re going to bring up proposals for different games that could theoretically exist in the Paradox-ish grand strategy space, I did some forum archaeology and found an idea I posted back during the days of EU4 pre-launch dev diaries: https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/threads/game-idea-paradox-mega-campaign-as-a-single-game.645766/
tl;dr, have a Paradox-like game, but designed to cover a really big span of history, not just one era, by adopting somewhat different mechanics in a few places. In particular, by giving the player a bit less agency over things like tech, and having infrastructure/civic innovations/etc. require upkeep, you can model a descent into dark ages *with game mechanics*, instead of forcing it on players with scripted events, or using it as a starting scenario.
Read the link yesterday, was a fun read.
Looks like we thought of some similar stuff. Wonder if there are unseen issues with changing how research/technology works, or creating more flexible systems that can evolve a number of ways.
Also, I got a chance to read over your ideas – it looks like a pretty nifty idea. Probably too complex to ever actually get made (more’s the pity), but I like the mindset.
“the Hellenistic Mediterranean is unavoidably split between wildly different polities all of which are fairly central to the experience and core historical narratives.”
I’m not sure this is true. There was only one power, Carthage, that seriously challenged Rome for an extended period, and might have won its wars against it. That suggests that the remaining non-state polities and monarchies were not as important as all that, and it didn’t really matter which of them was more successful in their wars against each other: they were all fated to be overwhelmed by whoever won the Punic Wars in the central Mediterranean.
And that suggests to me that the game should have focussed on the two rival republics, and their internal politics, which must have had much more in common with each other than with the non-state tribes in the West and the non-state monarchies in the East.
There’s other games that’d take that approach, but it is not the Paradox way. These days, if it’s on the map, it’s playable. And if it’s big enough to cover more than like 2/3 of a province, it’s usually on the map.
Might have been better for this specific game to do it your way, though.
I’m not saying they should have made the non-Republics unplayable, just that they
should have devoted more effort to getting the republics right than the monarchies. The important parts of the map are more important than the unimportant parts.
I want to object to an outright inaccuracy, you absolutely can switch from Dictatorship back to republic. Indeed it’s expected you’ll do this and only move towards empire in the late game, using dictatorships strategically to give a boost in power during a crisis.
You’re confusing the ‘appoint dictator’ interaction, which appoints a notionally temporary dictator as ruler but keeps the country as a republic, with the actual government reform into a monarchy, which is not reversible.
Perhaps I was misinterpreting it, but I played Imperator: Rome when it was just released and I interpreted the game’s portrayal of dictatorship and empire as something to be avoided. I also found, in that version, that Republics were considerably *more* stable that monarchies; I didn’t have the least trouble with a long run as Carthage but when I played Egypt I was plunged into a civil war ticker the moment old Ptolemy Soter kicked off. I also assumed that was intentional as well. The disadvantage was that Republics could be “locked up” for long periods when it was difficult to get Senate approval for anything, although after a while I started to get the knack of managing that. I haven’t played the current version and have no idea whether the game changed or I just misinterpreted it.
I do think it’s unfortunate that the final version of Imperator ended up with the teleological march to Empire. Games are best when they’re about interesting choices, and it’s not much of a choice when Empire is distinctly better than Republic – especially when it seems it was actually the reverse; things were good under Augustus and the Five Good Emperors but there were long stretches of poor governance, even besides the nasty civil wars. And it’s pretty telling that Rome pretty much stopped expanding once the emperors took over.
Republics are likely to have more disloyal people, because their loyalty is affected by faction disapproval and you’re very likely to have at least one unhappy faction. However, a disloyal pretender on succession is a much more drastic problem because they accumulate powerbase from supporters, plus at least under some conditions you take a 20-stability hit from having them.
“it’s pretty telling that Rome pretty much stopped expanding once the emperors took over.”
I’m not sure it’s actually telling. Various responses:
– No longer conquering all your neighbors is not a bad thing
– Relatedly, emperors not being driven by urban elections to wage war is not a bad thing.
– Probably the biggest reason for expansion stopping is running out of places worth expanding to. Germany was forest and thick soils. South of Libya was desert. Britain was conquered by Claudius, but AIUI never profitable and the first province abandoned. East was the Parthians, a state rival who could hold their own.
By the time of Augustus, Rome had basically already conquered all the vulnerable places that supported intensive agriculture with the tools of the period.
Regardless of ethics or incentives, the Emperors frequently wanted to conquer more land; they just were far less successful than the Republic had been.
I don’t think Germany was much less developed than Gaul. It is true that it’s much harder to access from Italy and supply issues hurt the Romans’ ability to deploy armies there. But I think the key issue was the loyalty of generals. Until the very late Republic, a successful general was not a threat to the Republic; but under the Emperor a successful general was a serious threat; generals attempted to seize the purple with some frequency and succeeded on numerous occasions. That drastically changed the incentives both for the Emperors (who had reason not to appoint and/or use the best generals), and for the generals (who had reason to start a civil war rather than copying Scipio or Caesar). I’m not sure I agree with Deveraux’s contention that the Empire was relatively stable; it had 11 dynasties in 500 years, which doesn’t compare well to most long-term empires, even if the polity usually remained intact.
On stability: would be curious how it is being measured/judged as well, but I can see how he’d say that. It seems like emperors were more likely then in other systems to get overthrown, but it might be that at lower levels, the empire ran more steadily. (Vs., say, Medieval European lords fighting out lower level conflicts, Assyrian provincial rebellions, or succession disputes where the dynasty technically stays in place but still involved a war.) Possibly a lot of less famous monarchies were even more messed up.
Will ask the question in a patreon thingy or other comment at some point.
“What I have instead sometimes argued is that monarchy, usually hereditary monarchy, is the ‘base state’ of large-scale human political organization. It is the oldest form of state government and thus tends to be the form that other – often more capable and effective – systems decay down to if public trust and capacity wither (assuming the state doesn’t collapse entirely).”
This may be pedantry, or the more technical parts of my education talking, but I should have thought that the state that entropy tends to return a system to, is the stable state of that system. The state you decay down to, is your stable state.
Note that the stable state may depend on the external environment: Propane is liquid under modest pressure. Take the pressure away, and it vaporises.
Under pressure of war with each other, so many monarchical city-states decayed to the stable state of republics dominated by those who could only afford armour. Athens decayed to a stable state of a republic dominated by those who could not even afford armour.
Then Rome conquered the Mediterranean basin, the pressure of war with each other went away, and it decayed back into the monarchy it had originally been.
If military pressure causes monarchies to become republics like physical pressure causes gases to become liquids, shouldn’t we have seen the emergence of republics in the Seleucid, Antigonid, Ptolemaic, Epirote, Bactrian, etc., kingdoms of the Diadochi, though? None of the major successor kingdoms ever developed into a republic, despite the pressure of existing in a period of intense warfare. Shouldn’t Dark Ages Britain, which seems to have been pretty war-torn even by the standards of post-Roman Europe, have seen republicanism dominate the British Isles instead of the situation of upwards of fifty simultaneous petty kingdoms and, as far as anyone knows, zero republics?
This is only sticking to things fairly close to the cultural sphere of classical antiquity, too, but if we were to roam further we could look at, say, the Warring States period in China and observe that that period of major military pressure in Chinese history saw the emergence of seven major monarchies and zero republics; or we could observe a lack of any significant republics emerging in Central Asia when the region was incredibly violently split among warring Genghisid successors following the breakup of the Mongol empire, etc., etc.
“If military pressure causes monarchies to become republics like physical pressure causes gases to become liquids, shouldn’t we have seen the emergence of republics in the Seleucid, Antigonid, Ptolemaic, Epirote, Bactrian, etc., kingdoms of the Diadochi, though?”
I wouldn’t take the analogy that far for a long list of reasons. (Including, but not limited to, the ones you correctly pointed out.) I just wanted to make the point that a substance can have more than one stable state, depending on circumstances.
Certainly, it strikes me as interesting the way the Republic collapsed so soon after it conquered its enemies. I would be interested in other civilizations in which one city did likewise, and how its politics changed in the aftermath.
In particular, I am thinking of the tension between increasing the mobilisation rate of an existing society, and incorporating more people into the society to mobilise. Both may increase the size of the army, but they probably lead to quite different internal politics.
I’m sure it’s too niche of a title to warrant a lot of analysis on this blog, but Field of Glory: Empires has a rather complex system trying to model the phases and transitions a state goes through. It’s been quite a while since I played it, but basically there are some “resources” that the stat accumulates that can cause it to transition from “young” to “established” to “decadent” and potentially collapse into a less-sophisticated form (monarchy > tribal for example), from which it can then build up to the more complex society.
I’ve no idea how well this addresses reality, but it is a central mechanic to the game, and certainly has some interesting permutations. I’d love it if we could get a discussion of that mechanic on this site.
> it is something one might better be able to capture in a more narratively driven game.
Which makes me wonder: it’s outside your normal time period of expertise, but have you played Suzerain?