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Update: If you cannot get it to run, disabling your networking should allow it to run for now. Credit to mcphail.

Paradox Development Studio and Paradox Interactive have today released their latest grand strategy game Imperator: Rome, as expected it's come with same-day Linux support.

Imperator: Rome is the newest grand strategy title from Paradox Development Studio. Set in the tumultuous centuries from Alexander’s Successor Empires in the East to the foundation of the Roman Empire, Imperator: Rome invites you to relive the pageantry and challenges of empire building in the classical era. Manage your population, keep an eye out for treachery, and keep faith with your gods.

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Like with most grand strategy games from Paradox, there's a lot of mechanics you will need to learn before truly getting into it. To help with that, Paradox have a tutorial series ready for browsing over on YouTube.

GOG actually sent me a copy of it, although these types of strategy games aren't usually my cup I've given it a run. Imperator: Rome comes with a fancy looking launcher, allowing you to adjust things like fullscreen settings, resolution, picking which monitor to display on and language. A feature I tend to find quite useful as a multi-screen user:

However, clicking play on Ubuntu 19.04 seems to result in something not quite working right as the launcher quits and the game is nowhere to be seen. Trying to run the game directly, brings me the Imperator: Rome logo screen and then that too also quits to the desktop. I tried deleting the Launcher and Imperator folders in "/.local/share/Paradox Interactive/" (in case their account login system is overloaded) and now the game when launched directly gets me a tiny bit further to what looks like a loading screen, but then crashes to the desktop once again.

Our contributor Samsai, who also owns it from GOG is able to launch it. However, they've encountered other major problems like poor performance and "jittery" scrolling so it doesn't seem great there either. Samsai is using an AMD GPU and I have it confirmed from multiple others on an AMD GPU that it works, but others on NVIDIA like me it's not working for. So in this case, it seems specific to NVIDIA GPUs that it won't work.

Looking around, it seems there's a large amount of people having issues across all platforms. Some people like me can't run it at all, others that can like Samsai above are seeing major performance issues, others have it constantly crashing.

Paradox is one developer I am willing to give the benefit of a little extra time though, given their constant support for Linux with their strategy games. However, there's no getting around that this was a bad launch.

If you love huge strategy games you can find it on Humble Store, GOG and Steam.

Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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37 comments
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Liam Dawe Apr 25, 2019
Quoting: mcphail
Quoting: liamdawe
Quoting: mcphailIt launches and runs from the Paradox Launcher on my machine with an old GTX650. The music stutters when the screen scrolls or updates, though, and I'm here because the game just locked up half way through the tutorial!
You're the first NVIDIA user to say it works, is this on the proprietary driver or the open source driver?

I'm running the 396 driver on KDE Neon 18.04.
Interesting, I wonder if it's an issue with a later NVIDIA driver or later GPU models then in that case. The 396 driver is pretty old now though...
mcphail Apr 25, 2019
Quoting: liamdaweInteresting, I wonder if it's an issue with a later NVIDIA driver or later GPU models then in that case. The 396 driver is pretty old now though...

The recommended system requirements are for Ubuntu 16.04, so I suspect they haven't been building or testing on the latest hotness.
14 Apr 25, 2019
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Quoting: TheSHEEEPNow we just need to wait the usual two years until the first 14 big patches and four full-priced DLCs make the game great!
Worked with EU4, worked with Stellaris, I have no doubt it will work here...
When wasn't Stellaris great?
Fakeman_Pretendname Apr 25, 2019
Not sure if there's been a small update since or there's a difference between GOG/Steam/Paradox Launcher, but I've had it running fine for an hour, on Nvidia, on Ubuntu 18.04. It's the version from Steam (though bought from Paradox and activated on Steam).

It loaded exactly as expected i.e. launcher launched and game ran fine.

Propriety Nvidia 418.56 (The Vulkan one), from a Geforce 960M. Constant 30fps (which is about what I expect off this laptop/graphics card). I left all the settings on default, so it's a straight "load it and run it" with no tweaks etc.

I've been playing through the tutorial for about an hour so far, all seems to be running perfectly :)

Hope it's because of an update and it works for you guys too, rather than me just being lucky!
Liam Dawe Apr 25, 2019
Quoting: Fakeman_PretendnameNot sure if there's been a small update since or there's a difference between GOG/Steam/Paradox Launcher, but I've had it running fine for an hour, on Nvidia, on Ubuntu 18.04. It's the version from Steam (though bought from Paradox and activated on Steam).

It loaded exactly as expected i.e. launcher launched and game ran fine.

Propriety Nvidia 418.56 (The Vulkan one), from a Geforce 960M. Constant 30fps (which is about what I expect off this laptop/graphics card). I left all the settings on default, so it's a straight "load it and run it" with no tweaks etc.

I've been playing through the tutorial for about an hour so far, all seems to be running perfectly :)

Hope it's because of an update and it works for you guys too, rather than me just being lucky!
Steam did get updates, GOG is lagging with it as usual.
shawnsterp Apr 25, 2019
Eh, I know I'm just adding to what seems to be a trend, but it seems to be running fine for me. Vega 56, ryzen 7 1700 and an absurd amount of ram. Having said that, I have not done but 5 minutes of the tutorial, and I have not seen hardly any units. So, it may slow down (looking at you, hearts of iron).

As far as the initial startup, I could not proceed past the EULA if I actually scrolled to the bottom. I had to have it at the top (like I did not read it lol) for it to accept it and move on. I doubt that is other people's problem, but I thought I would mention it.
shadax Apr 25, 2019
I just created an account to report that I am able to launch the game with gtx 950 using Nvidia's proprietary driver. However I wasn't able to launch the game from the launcher I had to go into the Imperator folder in my steamapps folder and then click on the binary to run it directly without the launcher. Performance has been pretty good but I haven't played very long, I wanted to report my findings first so that other people can run the game.
slaapliedje Apr 26, 2019
Played a tiny bit of the tutorial, 2080 RTX on PopOS 19.04 (nvidia 418.56 driver installed via repos).
Seemed to scroll just fine.
SuperTux Apr 26, 2019
Using Steam had to use the workaround posted here:

https://steamcommunity.com/app/859580/discussions/0/1676938384244288207/

"Startup fix for Linux
The paradox launcher is failing to start with this error:
error [SteamService]: Failed to initialize Steam API: Error: Steam initialization failed. Steam is running,but steam_appid.txt is missing. Expected to find it in: /home/NOPE/.local/share/Steam/steamapps/common/ImperatorRome/launcher/steam_appid.txt

The fix is to run this from the terminal:
~/.local/share/Steam/steamapps/common/ImperatorRome/binaries/imperator
Which will launch the game directly.

Thank you flyinglama for this information."

Running great so far, other than the launcher issue.


Last edited by SuperTux on 26 April 2019 at 3:56 am UTC
TheSHEEEP Apr 26, 2019
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Quoting: 14
Quoting: TheSHEEEPNow we just need to wait the usual two years until the first 14 big patches and four full-priced DLCs make the game great!
Worked with EU4, worked with Stellaris, I have no doubt it will work here...
When wasn't Stellaris great?
Any point before the Star Trek: New Horizons mod came out ;)

More seriously, though, the 2.2 update really turned the game around. From "Well, this is nice for some easy space LARPing" (which, admittedly, was pretty great to begin with for that) to "Wow, I actually need to plan things now and cannot just click random buttons!".
And that wasn't the first "game changing" update.

Over time, all the Paradox grand strategy games tend to become something that only resembles the initial version on the surface.
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