Ancient Rome grand strategy game gets surprise update and price cut

It’s an anniversary miracle

Marco Wutz | Apr 26, 2024

Paradox Interactive

The likes of Crusader Kings 3, Hearts of Iron 4, and Stellaris are the biggest successes among Paradox Interactive’s current line-up, but this doesn’t mean the publisher’s other offerings don’t have dedicated fan bases. In the case of one title, the community’s drive to revive the struggling game even led to Paradox developers sacrificing their free time to develop a new, free update – and that’s available now!

Patch 2.0.4 – called Augustus – for Imperator: Rome brings 158 bug fixes and 25 new tools for modders to the grand strategy game set in the ancient world. In addition, players can now earn achievements while playing with mods, enabling them to complete their collection in whichever way they like.

What’s more, Imperator: Rome got its price cut by 70% on Steam with all available DLC being half off.

Earlier this year, a community effort birthed the Imperator Day event, which saw the game’s peak concurrent player count double. A second Imperator Day, this time with support from Paradox, managed to surpass expectations once again.

“This surge in community engagement prompted several former Imperator developers – such as Johan Andersson, Peter Nicholson, Evan Wu, and once again Niels – along with other developers like Lorenzo Berni and Erik Nikko who are passionate fans of the game and wanted to contribute, to begin work on the 2.0.4 patch as a gesture of appreciation to the Imperator community,” Paradox stated.

This update for Imperator: Rome not only fixes a whole lot of bugs, the developers did their best to provide modders with new tools to give them even more power over the future of the game – it is as they say: Rome is eternal.

You can find a trailer celebrating the update on YouTube and the full patch notes on Steam.

Published Apr 26, 2024

MARCO WUTZ

Marco Wutz is a writer from Parkstetten, Germany. He has a degree in Ancient History and a particular love for real-time and turn-based strategy games like StarCraft, Age of Empires, Total War, Age of Wonders, Crusader Kings, and Civilization as well as a soft spot for Genshin Impact and Honkai: Star Rail. He began covering StarCraft 2 as a writer in 2011 for the largest German community around the game and hosted a live tournament on a stage at gamescom 2014 before he went on to work for Bonjwa, one of the country's biggest Twitch channels. He branched out to write in English in 2015 by joining tl.net, the global center of the StarCraft scene run by Team Liquid, which was nominated as the Best Coverage Website of the Year at the Esports Industry Awards in 2017. He worked as a translator on The Crusader Stands Watch, a biography in memory of Dennis "INTERNETHULK" Hawelka, and provided live coverage of many StarCraft 2 events on the social channels of tl.net as well as DreamHack, the world's largest gaming festival. From there, he transitioned into writing about the games industry in general after his graduation, joining GLHF, a content agency specializing in video games coverage for media partners across the globe, in 2021. He has also written for NGL.ONE, kicker, ComputerBild, USA Today's ForTheWin, The Sun, Men's Journal, and Parade. Email: marco.wutz@glhf.gg