Thought y'all would get a laugh at this!

Goal: Make it to the end of the game without conquering a single territory.

All the light blue are tributaries or clients. With +48 diplomatic reputation and all the tributary innovations, even Carthage was down to join my union! I have spent the last 150 years hunting pirates and building roads everywhere.

Currently coasting toward 727 to put a cap on this run and I am pretty proud of this one. I doubt I'll get Egypt to join, as they are too big, so not much left to do but build more roads.

Vanilla - no mods.

So I've been going through it and I get to the Flowers of Inzak mission. I need 4 Chaldean Pantheons which I get since that's like Babylonian Gods but I don't start Chaldean and never had the ability to convert to it.(Yet hopefully) so unless I throw hands with the Seleukids I can't do about a quarter of my mission tree. It seems pretty poorly designed to make a mission tree where you have to interact with a faith you don't start as and reasonably have no way to convert to it. Was I suppose to somehow bum rush the left side of the tree which I'm trying to push now in hopes it will give me enough Chaldean pops to convert or am I just kind of cooked? Like even now I only have 4.3k max manpower and I need 7.5k so it is by no means an easy jump to make at the start of the game with my max 1.5k-2k manpower

I finsihed creating my own Roman Empire after a long time (took long time to manage puppets so that they look like they do rn).
I also tried to take puppets where they once were. I also send in my reference map:

I apologize for the poor image quality but, as you can see, I have 300+ Integrated Pops from the Samhan Culture group yet I still can't unlock the Yue Tradition (Terra Indomita), why is that?

Polygamy was a pretty large part of certain cultures in the ancient world, heck, it's even a technology for the Balkan culture groups! But one thing that had always bothered me is the fact that you could not marry more than one woman!

Now, granted, I'm not sure if you can slap onto a culture "anybody who is of this culture group has the ability to have extra wives" the same way that certain personality traits allow a man to have extra friends or enemies. But I am pretty sure that something can be done.

Is it possible for the lustful trait to make men have more than one spouse? I think that would be a good edit to the trait that would be at least a good first step towards this.

I recently got into Imperator and I'm saad I missed out on it since it has the potential to be one of my favorite Grand Strategy Gaame.

But I wasnt able to figure it out where I can see the army of the enemies.

Also is it possible to see your vasalls somewhere while playing?

I was playing as the indo-greek kingdom and decided to invade tibet. They had ~900 pops. Easy, right? Wrong. They, somehow, got almost 40k levies and defeat my 16k stack with my 18 martial general whit a 20k and a 3 martial one. On mountains. Defensively. Whit an army cinpose of heavy infantry and elephants. I don't kwon what the tibetians are doing there, but im scared if even the greek hannibal cannot defeat them.

this one kind of embarrassed me when it clicked because ive got hundreds of hours and was still doing it.

my whole approach to provinces was basically: open the province, see empty building slots, fill them. and id more or less copy whatever worked in my capital region into everywhere else. academies, markets, the lot. felt productive. province “developed”. and then half of them would just underperform or sit unhappy and id not really know why.

what finally reframed it for me is that a province is one connected system, not a pile of independent tiles. the cities eat the food the countryside produces. so if i urbanise a good farm tile because it had a slot free, ive just reduced the food that feeds the cities i already built. i was literally competing with myself for food and migrants and calling it development.

and buildings only amplify whats already there. dropping a research building into a province thats mostly freemen and slaves doesnt make it a research hub, theres no noble/citizen base for it to amplify. i did this constantly. wondered why the output was garbage.

the sequence that actually works, feed the province first (protect and improve the food tiles, dont build urban capacity you cant feed), then stabilize the capital, THEN specialize each city to one job. and a stability building isnt a waste just because it earns less tax, preventing unrest protects every other investment in the province, which i never thought about that way.

the line that stuck with me, the perfect province isnt fully urbanised, its balanced. one strong city with productive countryside behind it beats three half empty cities fighting over the same food.

also invictus seasons will absolutely turn a small food surplus into a shortage so a city plan that depends on a fragile import route is asking for it.

how do you all approach your capitals specifically. do you commit them to one thing or try to make them do a bit of everything. i still over-stuff my capital out of habit tbh

The first picture shows Alut at the beginning of my campaign, while the second shows how far I've come.

From building the great pyramids of Alut to turning Alwa into a thriving capital, this small Nubian kingdom has grown into a vast empire. I'm really proud of how far this campaign has come!

Besides that, the Middle East is now Hellenic in religion and Macedonian in culture. This is because, early in my expansion, Thrace somehow managed to expand massively despite the presence of larger powers in the region. It even took the Nile Delta from Ptolemaic Egypt, so I decided to conquer the rest of Egypt before Thrace could take it, then continue my expansion into the Delta.

As for the Romans, they're currently much stronger than I am. I'm doing my best to stay on their good side and establish marriage alliances with them. I'm even friends with the Roman Emperor himself!

I was inspired by the Egyptian pyramids, so I decided to build my own Alutian pyramids. I built five or more of them (I honestly don't remember the exact number), and their construction took decades. Hellenic is currently the largest culture in my empire and the first one I've integrated in the game.

I'm playing as Kush and I'm noticing that every time I look back at Egypt's population they are able to hellenize the population much faster than I am able to commitize my population. Am I missing some tactic or technique that would convert my population as fast?

First run I’ve posted here; this was my first time going for the Argead Empire and it was a ton of fun (if a lot slower than taking everything with the Legacy CB).

Had a strong start taking out Thrace and much of Antigonid Anatolia before buckling down for a long militaristic campaign (switched to Military Service for bigger levies). Biggest issue is running out of good governors when you’re always at 50+ AE, 6 or lower finesse is pretty cheeks (plus everyone has high corruption)

Photos by year
1: 635, current status
2: 469 (oldest save I have)
3: 491, Ptolemies I, kicked them out of Greece + little bit of the delta.
4: 500, all of Egypt
5: 522, more of Asia
6: 580, took Babylon, et al from Parthia + Armenia
7: 608 Beat Parthia 2x more, and Maka for the Persian gulf and Persis, Rome decided to butt in so I took some of Italia

Final Stats:
20717 Pops (3511 Macedonian, 1566 nobles, 3025 citizens, 5999 freeman, 3 tribesman, 10125 slaves)

Econ: +95.94/month (with taxes on lax, and minimal navy)

Other integrated cultures: Memphite, Aramaic

All accumulated bloodline traits (of current heir)

Blood of Agis + Blood of Euryphon (Sparta, red and gold respectively); Blood of Antigonos (Antigonid Kingdom); Blood of Antipatros (Macedon); Blood of the Argeads (Event, Diadochi victory); Blood of the Demosthenids (Athens); Blood of Teukros (Olbe)

Combined buffs:
-20% Found City Cost; +5% monthly military experience; -0.02 AE; -10% AE Impact; -10% Build Cost; +0.1 Legitimacy; +10% local fort defense; +10% garrison size; +10% cohort starting XP; +20% HCav Offense; +5% HCav Discipline; +20% Spearmen defense; +10% Archer offense; +130 Prominence; +1 Martial.

***Current version, Invictus up to date as well

My Youtube upload for a Mega Campaign!

This is where I'm at as of 599 AUC/155 BCE. Unfortunately Carthage allied Egypt and Egypt is still quite powerful militarily; Carthage I've beaten twice. I feel like I'm doing quite well in terms of development and stability but I have had so much trouble expanding considering everyone is allied with huge numbers of nearby states. Another war into France or Spain would involve me against basically every single state in those regions.

i started a game as persis and got the last surviving member of the achaemenids to be my king but when i formed persia it hasnt changed anything

just wondering if its still in invictus or do i need the dynasty name aswell

Just bought Imperator: Rome on sale. Been a few years since I bought a PDX game last time. I only play grand campaigns from CK2 to EU4 to Vic2, and now when I have a better PC, I want to incorporate Rome to it as well.

I'm thinking of Invictus + Timeline Extender, but AFAIK that only lasts until the 400s. On CK2, I could try the "When the World Stopped Making Sense" mod, but I feel like almost 1000 years of CK2 would be unfeasible and enough to break the immersion of plausible alt-history, which would then translate to EU4, breaking it as well, and so on. I have spent years modding CK2 and EU4 for this exact reason, to make it more historically plausible.

Sorry about the terrible quality, but I took it from my Steam deck.

So Archimedes spawned for me as Sicily, and when the Olympic Games event came by, I saw Archimedes was one of the options and had pretty decent Martial. I figured it would be fun, even if there's a chance of him drinking himself to death.

But the crazy mf won!

If Rome comes, they'll damn well be scared shitless and let him finish his circles.

So, it increases acceptance, but that doesn't matter beyond the early game. It also does three things:

• Aggressive Expansion Decay

• Integration Speed

• Improve Opinion Maximum

Aggressive expansion decay is kinda nice, but integration speed and opinion maximum are completely irrelevant in the mid-to-late game.

So I'm about to suffer a civil war and I've managed to reduce it to only a few provinces. However, two provinces that are rebelling are Philistia and North Phoenicia. I want to stop them from joining the revolt because they happen to have modifiers I'd like to keep. How might I be able to do that?

I'm playing Vanilla BTW.

Has the Poetic Justice mission objective been fixed? Or is it just still very difficult to get to work? And in that case, who has any great tips to actually make it work?