Hello everyone and welcome to another development diary for Imperator. Today you are sadly stuck with me, as Trin Tragula has the day off for New Years Eve. We’re busy working towards the beta milestone, improving interfaces, fixing bugs and teaching the AI new tricks.In todays diary we’ll take a look at some interface & mechanics changes that have happened in the last month, before we get back to our regularly scheduled diaries when Trin Tragula will talk about Mercenaries and delve into the Ethiopia and Arabia.With the evolvement of the game design, the fact of having one governor per province turned to be less fun than expected. The management and interaction with a large amount of governors in a medium-sized empire forced them to become too irrelevant.Now the map is divided into regions, where each region have 7-8 different provinces in them, and each province have 10-12 cities in them.Each region, unless its your home capital region will have a governor assigned to them, while each province have its own possible governor policy.Changing policies no longer impact the loyalty of the governor, as it turned it into a non-choice in most cases, but instead have a oratory power cost that is the same whether its a governor or your rulers directly controlled provinces.Units can now be assigned to cover an entire region by giving control over to the local governor, reducing unrest in the cities, and helping the loyalty of the governor.A lot of the times, you get messages about characters in our games, you go, who was that Naughtius Maximus anyway? So, we’ve decided to rework how we refer to characters in messages and in the UI, by referring to them by their titles, relationships to titleholders, or other statuses. So now, you’ll be able to see that the character attempting to befriend your ruler is the brother of the commander of the 24th Legion, and you can more easily ignore him.Another thing that became more obvious during playtesting was that just having characters, really did not give them the life they needed to create a living country. We had the concept of characters belonging to families in the game already, but it was merely a name and a prestige value, and nobody paid any attention to which family a character belonged to, so we made the following changes and additions.Each country have a list of official families that characters belong to. The amount of official families in a country depends on the size of the country. Not every character in an official family has a direct close blood relation, but they are all considered to belong to the same family. All members of the same family contribute to the family prestige, and reap the benefits and drawback of the reputation of that prestige.Characters may be in your country, but belong to a foreign family, and those characters will not marry on their own, or be entirely trusted.There is also a new Family View tab in the characters view, where you can view all families in your country, and their members.Finally, when conquering and annexing another nation, you now have choices of how to handle the families of that country, even allowing them to become families of your nation on a family by family basis if you so choose.One of the main problems we’ve had in our games is the constant need to check the tooltip of greyed out diplomatic actions, so you can see when you can send a diplomat again.In Imperator, we now tell you the date, above the list of actions, if there is a diplomat enroute. Also, primarily for multiplayer, you will see which diplomatic offer you have sent, if it has not been replied to yet.Another thing that we discovered during playtesting was how awkward it was with setting up trade-routes with foreign countries compared to internal trade, when you had to wait a day for the AI to reply, while trade internally was instant.So we changed how AI responds to all diplomatic deals, by no longer having them reply the next day, but instead checking it immediately, so you get instant feedback. This had the side-effect of estimated AI replies being more accurate since the state of the world have not changed between pressing the button and them replying.One of the main problems with the original EU:Rome was that a lot of the mechanics were hidden, and you did not really see what was happening. Now we have made it so you can see how likely a general is to gain the loyalty of a cohort each month.This is primarily based on the characters Charisma, but traits and laws are also important.One interesting aspect of our units was the problem that when you had enough money and access to certain goods, some types of units where always superior. One of the primary reasons for that was there was no difference between units when it came to how much attrition they would take in an area. So marching 20,000 men with War-Elephants through a low supply area meant they lost the same manpower as 20,000 Light Infantry.This have now been changed, so that Light Infantry costs 50% of a normal unit supply, Heavy Infantry & Heavy Cavalry cost about 50% more supply, while War-Elephants costs 500% of normal supply.The impact of this is that 10,000 Light Infantry will require a Supply Limit of 5 to not take attrition in a non-desert province, while 10,000 War Elephants require a Supply Limit of 50 to not take attrition, and 10,000 Heavy Infantry would require a Supply Limit of 15.This means that different terrain and areas have needs of different types of armies for efficient warfare.Most of the times when you have a nice capital surplus bonus of a specific Trade Goods you do not want to lose that bonus. That is why we have added a checkbox at the Trade View, where you can set it to auto-decline all trade proposals where you would lose your capital surplus bonus.The main information page in Imperator, is what we call the country overview screen. That one has been evolving constantly during development, and will continue to evolve as we work on the game. Since the last time we showed this screen in the middle of November, we’ve now added some nice pie-charts so you can depict the distribution of your population when it comes to type, religion and culture.You can now also directly set the governor policies of every province from this sortable list of provinces.Since the popularity and corruption of your current ruler is important for your country, it is also displayed prominently at the the national overview.Your Ruler Popularity reduces your tyranny, and in a republic, increases the senate influence of the rulers party. Monarchies and Tribes get other benefits of a rulers popularity, or lack thereof while corruption of a ruler has a few different drawbacks.First of all, most screens, including the character view have a “back” button, so you can easily get back to the previous one.Secondly, we’ve added automatic “shortcut-icons” to tooltips to tell you which button can be used from the keyboard for that action.Finally, we’ve added filter and sorting buttons to most screens with long lists of characters, countries or provinces.We’ve done far more of course, but there’s lots of development diaries left for you until we release the game. Happy New Year everyone!