Quote Originally Posted by QuintusSertorius View Post
Ultimately, unless you're autoresolving most of your battles, Command stars are largely irrelevant for the human player. You can ignore the imperium mechanic if you wish, but it isn't changing. Most of the boosts for Romans come with playing along with the cursus honoroum.
I play the vast majority of my battles and I swear that a commander with less command stars has units who act lazy/disobedient/idiotic in comparison to the well-oiled machine and seemingly more obedient troops of a general with more command stars. And by that I mean troops generally do things quicker, don't linger, and don't do weird stuff like spreading out across the battlefield, with one little tiny group within a unit charging and the rest just walking leisurely as if intense bloody combat isn't actually happening all around them. That and enemy units seem to rout faster and more often with a better general at the helm to scare them. I could be wrong, but I tend to notice these little things. I guess you're right, though, that these bonuses are secondary when it comes to just being prepared logistically to beat the enemy with a larger, more professional army.

We've just been discussing Embezzler in the main thread; keeping large surpluses will trigger it if your FMs are mostly sitting around in settlements.
That makes sense, but the catch here is that you also need attuned governors in order for most provincial settlements not to go insane with discontent, grabbing their pitchforks. Governors who are granted permanent imperium with the "Rector Provinciae" trait and ancillary need to stay in their settlement in order to retain both of those. I'm quickly losing so many able family members that even these types of governors are becoming limited. If I leave some of them alone to govern a settlement without a regular family member with elected office to babysit, the settlement would turn red, with under 80% content, and start rioting before rebelling. My usual rotation of capable governors is dwindling fast.

I think the game basically just wants me to experience mass rebellion, just to piss me off, despite my massive state budget, large amount of troops to garrison settlements, and building of amphitheaters in provincial settlements. Monthly and even daily games only seem to work so far before a suddenly really bad governor pushes everything into the red anyway. If I can't even keep the population discontent down with daily games + low taxes, something is really wrong here.