Trivia / Imperator: Rome

• Ascended Fanon/Promoted Fanboy: While the game was poorly received by the playerbase, it did spawn a highly successful and popular Game Mod titled Bronze Age Mod. The success of this mod lead to Paradox giving early access to CK3 to the modding team and they promptly decided to move their mod to that game after a bit of testing. While this helped Paradox with their general bad PR situation regarding Imperator, it also further eroded any reason for the player base to stick to the game.
  • In the end, Bronze Age Mod seemed to have suffered the Imperator curse, as its Crusader Kings III incarnation (subtitled Maryannu) was last updated in Jan 2021. Separately, another modder (going by the online moniker of "Snowlet", and also part of the Invictus mod team) has taken over development of the Imperator version of the mod, with permission from the original team. This version is known as the Reborn - and also suffered from delays (before a November 2021 update, it was last updated in July 2021). However, things seem to be back on track with the mod getting a 2023 update and with promises of further expansion.
  • In another twist, Snowlet also revived Maryannu together with another modder in April 2024.
• Dear Negative Reader: Johan Andersson, the lead designer, manager and spokeperson for Paradox Development Studio, had rather... special reaction to the mounting criticism of the game and its release state, along with players' dissatisfaction with its mechanics.
  "I don’t understand why people want to buy a game that has major core features that they don’t like. Well, if the customers want something different, we’ll just have to change the game to do that."
  • The statement became particularly ironic once the mana system - which Andersson was referring to - was announced to be scrapped and removed from the game merely a month after the premiere.
• Dueling Works: Despite over a year apart in premieres, Paradox ended up dueling their own game, when a very important game update, with potential of finally salvaging Imperator, got scheluded around the same time as release of Crusader Kings III. As far as Steam activity goes, CK3 crushed Imperator without even trying, combining novelty factor, surprisingly polished release (especially considered the company's dodgy standards) and having simply far better brand recognition.
  • When Marius 2.0 for Imperator update was released in February 2021, it caused a slight decrease of players of CK3 and equal bump of players for Imperator... which lasted exactly two weeks, thanks to CK3 receiving new DLC and major patch, sending Imperator back into the abyss. Fandom speculates this was one of the final straws leading to the game being put into an "indefinite hiatus".
• Screwed by the Network: After very positive reactions to patch 2.0, Paradox remained silent about future plans for the game, only to reveal at the tail end of April 2021 that the developers so far assigned to Imperator will be split and moved around to other projects, leaving the game without the team so experienced in fixing and expanding it and no further plans what to do with it next. By May, Paradox Development announced that Imperator will not receive any new content for the rest of the year, while the staff was completely dispersed, predominately tied with trying to salvage Europa Universalis IV, where the release of the Leviathan DLC has led to a PR disaster. Many fans were convinced that Imperator had reached the end of the road, with growing resentment that the game got killed, although only time could tell.

---