25 Best Imperator: Rome Mods Worth Trying (All Free)
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Paradox Interactive’s successor to their 2008 hit Europa Universalis: Rome has been out for a while now.
And that can only mean one thing: mods.
You’ve probably played through so much Imperator: Rome that you’re looking for new content to keep the gameplay fresh.
Not to say that the base game is lacking, but new is always more fun.
Well the modding community has been able to come up with some interesting ways to enhance your Imperator: Rome experience, from little quality-of-life mods to complete overhauls.
Another graphical upgrade mod here, this time focusing on the terrain in Imperator: Rome.
Modder ¡pp-man¡ felt that the vanilla textures were quite flat and needed a makeover.
So he made Enhanced Terrain to introduce a bit more “color, saturation, and depth”.
He touches on grass/plains, farms, light sand, water, and roads, among other textures in the game, replacing them with more vibrant and realistic ones.
That’s all he’s completed as of now, but he plans of continue his work to eventually retexture the entire game.
Wowza.
If you like the looks of his current work, you might want to keep an eye out for future updates.
While there are graphics mods that simply make things look a bit better, others aim to switch up specific designs for a better experience.
The UI is often overlooked in this department.
With all the information needed to manage your empire, it can get quite overwhelming scrolling through all the different menus just to find exactly what you’re looking for.
But let’s take a look at a couple of mods that will hopefully help you along the way, starting off with the Better Army UI by Magnar.
A perfect example of a simple mod that’ll help you avoid digging through various menus.
Better Army UI simply gives you supply consumption details directly in your army view window.
It may seem like a tiny little detail, but it will save a lot of time if you’re logging hours in this game.
Agamidae’s better UI isn’t actually completed as of writing. But he’s made quite a lot of progress since he started!
His overall goal with overhauling the UI is to show more and obscure less, as he explains in his description.
He does that through a number of different ways, including making certain menus easier to get to. Or adding information to menus that would otherwise not have relevant data.
Some examples? Sure, how about adding treasures to the religion map, and opening the peace deal window with a quick right-click of the war icon.
In a more recent update, he just added morale bars in the combat window, making battles more interesting to watch.
This is being updated on a daily/weekly basis, so it’s a good idea to keep an eye on this one to catch active improvements in the future.
Menus aren’t the only aspect of Imperator: Rome to be improved on by the community.
As advertised by modder Dragonpants, “Tired of only building libraries in all your cities to keep up with research? Want more interesting buildings and alternative playstyles for cities? This mod is for you.”
The mod completely changes how you approach building structures in the game.
It aims to crush the current meta of spamming libraries for research, basically.
And it makes other building strategies feasible, like building military, academic, or industrial cities depending on the structures you choose to focus on.
Rebalances have been made to building prices and bonuses as well. Quite an interesting idea.
If you enjoyed Improved Buildings, you might want to add onto the “building aspect” even further with Buildings+ by Vawser.
Instead of changing things up with the structures that are already available in the base game, Vawser actually adds nine new buildings for you to play around with.
You can now build town halls, markets, inns, and temples, among other new structures.
Each of them have their own set of bonuses as well.
All this, along with the Improved Buildings, mod should make for a fresh Imperator: Rome playthrough.
It’s not just visuals that get makeovers in Imperator: Rome, as modder Audiomancer provides us with this music overhaul for the game.
Many long-time Paradox fans only have Europa Universalis: Rome to compare with Imperator.
Well Audiomancer seems to be one of those fans, and offers a simple way to take a trip down memory lane.
This mod adds at least an hour’s worth of music to what Imperator: Rome already offers, adding in the entire Europa Universalis Soundtrack by Andreas Waldetoft.
AI seems to be a constant target for modders, as the community always finds areas to improve enemy AI behavior in strategy games.
It’s inevitable, really, as we’re far from creating the perfect AI at this point.
But thanks to modders like Glavius, we get closer with each new release.
This AI mod changes a few behaviors to make enemies behave smarter, more aggressive, and more challenging overall.
If you’ve played through the campaign a few times before and are looking to up the difficulty level of your next playthrough, here’s a great way to do so.
Beyond UI and AI updates, making map changes is another way to spice things up a bit.
Map and terrain play a huge part in planning out conquest and expansion routes, in your overall strategy really.
And making changes to the map can greatly affect how your game plays out.
Imperators’ Navigable Rivers changes things up with a focus on rivers and waterways found across the map.
The mod actually adds 450 river systems, ports, and lakes, giving you a lot more freedom to make some interesting moves.
What makes this interesting is that several of these river systems are navigable for fleets, making naval warfare a much more important aspect of the game.
If you’re looking for a bigger map overhaul, Greater Earth Map by Emperor Penguin might be what you’re looking for.
The map is still currently a work in progress, but can already be downloaded as a preview and should mostly work fine in-game.
What’s impressive about this mod is that the map is probably the largest map ever created for a paradox game, almost doubling the size of the vanilla map for Imperator: Rome.
Yes, doubling!
Navigable rivers are already integrated into this map, so waterways spanning across all six inhabitable continents will be passable by naval vessels.
Emperor Penguin’s aim is to create a base world map for modders to build off, so you can do pretty much whatever you want with all the space you have here.
If you’re looking into creating mods for this game yourself, keep an eye on this project.
If you’re a fan of the warfare aspect of Imperator: Rome, why not change things up with the Improved Battles mod by user Dragonpants?
From the same modder that brought us Improved Buildings, Improved Battles aims to give us more epic battle experiences.
Always a welcome update.
He does this by changing around some battle values, like maximum warscores, base morale, and war exhaustion, to make fighting battles longer and more drawn-out.
There’s simple changes, and then there are mods that actually add in new gameplay mechanics.
Slavery in particular can be quite challenging in this game, since it gives added population problems as an empire.
As your slave population increases, it takes more and more resources to keep them alive.
Slave trading, bad as it is in the real world, was a large part of Rome’s history during this time.
So the mod adds a bit of historical accuracy as well.
The mod simply lets you buy and sell slaves through the decisions menu, so you won’t be forced to hold onto your slave population longer than you have to.
Another great way to spice up your playthrough is adding a few new missions to help pass the time.
You’ll be given a more linear objective-based approach, which is great for players who don’t want a totally freeform experience.
Well the Missions mod gives Rome a few new missions, which aren’t really all that deep to be honest.
But it’s just a good way to play the game with a clearer sense of what should be accomplished next.
Perfect for mindlessly booting up the game and playing for a little while.
The mod changes the tutorial menu into an objectives tab, which basically tells you what to do next, whether it be to conquer a particular region or build a specific structure.
Units are almost always overhauled in strategy game mods, whether it’s to add some variety, introduce new units to mess around with, or improve historical accuracy.
There aren’t many unit mods for Imperator: Rome at the moment.
But kam2150’s Historical Units and Military Traditions is a great option for right now.
This mod aims to tackle all three points, changing existing unit types, adding new units to the mix, and improving on military traditions for more historical accuracy.
Basically the perfect improvement mod for newer units in-game.
Emendatio Historiae Imperatoris collects the efforts of three Imperator: Rome modders in their quest to improve virtually every aspect of the base game.
With this mod, they’re building their own version of Imperator: Rome.
The idea is to include all the changes they think will make the game better as a whole.
With this mod installed you’ll notice a lot has been changed in terms of map design.
Over 100 historical countries have been added across the map, along with two new regions.
A number of gameplay changes have been implemented as well, mostly focused on making diplomatic and political engagements more interesting.
There are still loads of changes planned for future updates, so while this is still in development, it might be worth keeping an eye on.
The grand strategy genre is mostly made up of period pieces, focusing on a particularly interesting timeframe of the past.
Modders have taken advantage of this time and time again, creating their own scenarios of overlooked time periods.
And the mod Diadochen is a great example of this in Imperator: Rome.
Diadochen tackles the beginning of the Diadochi Wars, just before the events of the base game.
This allows players to take a step back and actually influence how the game would start by default, making for an interesting backwards expansion of the vanilla campaign.
If you’re looking to take an even larger leap towards the past, The Bronze Age feels like a fitting place to step into.
This mod takes us all the way back to 2115 BCE, at the height of The Bronze Age.
The scenario is that civilizations in the Near East are in turmoil, with struggles spread across Egypt, Anatolia, Greece, and Central Asia.
This period-specific scenario will feel like a completely different game for sure.
It features a completely new map, tech trees, building systems, and many other unique gameplay elements. Give it a try if you’re a bit bored of vanilla.
Instead of taking us to a completely different time period, Imperator: Barbaricum seeks to add detail to regions overlooked in the base game.
Focusing on the northern European barbarian tribes, Imperator: Barbaricum sees you taking the helm from one of a dozen new tribes.
As you can guess, this took a lot of work to build!
The mod builds gameplay mechanics around this concept as well, adding in new formable tribes, overhauled cultures, and new flavor events to make the playthrough a bit more interesting.
Gladio Et Sale sells itself pretty well right off the bat. The mod team cites Veritas et Fortitudo (a popular Europa Universalis IV mod) as their main influence.
Aimed at giving players a more realistic and immersive experience, Gladio Et Sale implements a number of changes to the game.
These include an expanded map, population rebalances, added trade goods, new unit types, and much more.
There’s much to explore here, and since it’s still being updated, there’s probably a lot more on the horizon for this mod. For sure give it a try.
One of the more ambitious mods for Imperator: Rome, called “Ashes Of Empire”, takes us to the Dark Ages right as Justinian I has been crowned.
The mod covers the transitional period from Late Antiquity to the Middle Ages, connecting the events just before Crusader Kings II.
There’s are tons of changes to explore, including new nations, religions, cultures, and even new characters that are (naturally) historically appropriate to the time period.
Overall, a great overhaul mod for Imperator: Rome.
And like with most of the mods on the list, Gladio Et Sale is still in its early stages.
That only means there’s more to be expected down the line, so keep these mods bookmarked to check in over time.
