There are 12 different governor policy you can enact on a province in Imperator Rome. All have their unique uses, pros, and cons. I have explained everything and ranked policies from best to worst below. Welcome to the Imperator Rome governor policy guide!
Changing a governor policy costs 10 political power. That cost can be reduced from innovations, country power level, and some other modifiers.
Also, governor policies randomly change every time a governor dies or replaced. Therefore, you should always try to assign a younger governor who will rule for a long time so that you don’t have to change governor policy very often.
Except capital region of course. Your provinces in capital region will never change policy. So, you can manually set them and be okay until the end game or until you decide to change policy.
Pro tip: Got a rebellious province? Don’t waste political power to change its policy to harsh treatment. Instead, get a new governor with high finesse and low corruption who will also probably automatically change policy to harsh treatment for free.
Imperator Rome governor policy tier list:
1. Encourage Trade
Encourage trade is the best governor policy for your capital region. Because you build nothing but marketplaces and focus trade on your capital province for nation-wide capital surplus bonuses.
Even though it’s not very beneficial on other provinces, I ranked it number one because your capital province equals to at least 20 non-capital provinces.
2. Religious Conversion
You need to convert all the provinces you conquered, otherwise you’ll face with revolts and reduced tax / manpower / research / levy.
Your best helper is religious conversion governor policy, especially if you can’t build grand temples yet.
Religious conversion policy is ranked above cultural assimilation simply because it’s easier to assimilate converted pops. So, your policy order should be religious conversion > cultural assimilation.
3. Cultural Assimilation
Assimilated cultures give lots of levies, manpower, gold, research, and commerce bonuses! You want to assimilate. But make sure to convert them first because that’ll help assimilation a lot.
Though keep in mind, you can’t assimilate everyone. There is not enough time! You should integrate some cultures, preferably most populated ones such as Macedonian, Punic, Bohairic, Armenian, Meroitic, and Median.
4. Harsh Treatment
It increases province loyalty very fast. That’s why it’s a higher-ranking policy.
You don’t want random revolts on your provinces. Also, loyalty below 30 locks the building interaction in the province. Only way to fix this is harsh treatment policy and / or a high finesse governor.
5. Bleed Them Dry
It’s my favorite policy for loyalty-guaranteed provinces. It’s much better than Acquisition of Wealth, let me expand why.
- Bleed Them Dry: Local tax: +30%, Province commerce: +20%, Provincial loyalty: -0.25, Monthly food modifier: -25%
- Acquisition of Wealth: Local tax: +10%, Province commerce: +10%, Governor Wage: +20%
Acquistion of wealth increase tax and commerce very little compared to bleed them dry also increase governor wage which is a pain in the ass in Imperator Rome. Governor wages are simply too high!
Remember though, bleed them dry is only for provinces with +0.25 monthly loyalty! You don’t want to deal with province disloyalty just for extra tax and commerce income.
Pro tip: Fully converted and fully assimilated provinces are good targets for bleed them dry policy.
6. Centralize Population
This policy centralize migration and slowly move all the pops in the province to the province capital.
It’s situational. So, when to use centralize population? I personally want to have metropolis on all province capitals in my capital region. You need 80 pops in a city to build metropolis. So, I do city planning, get 80 pops, built metropolis, and change my governor policy to something else.
7. Civilization Effort
Can instantly defeat barbarians by spawning levies on top of or right next to them on pause via levies map-mode. Thus, barbarians are not really an issue. They even increase population. So, civilization effort governor policy is not really preferrable when you can have better policies.
Besides, civilization levels increase over time already. The wonder effect cultural memorial helps also.
8. Local Autonomy
Both harsh treatment and local autonomy has same -40% population output reduction. However, harsh treatment deals with province disloyalty much faster. Therefore, harsh treatment is good, local autonomy bad!
9. Decentralize Population
Use this if you want to empty your cities and disperse population. I really can’t think of any reason to do this by the way. If anything, you want the opposite. Because populated cities with stacked buildings make the real money.
10. Borderlands
Manpower is literally infinite in this game. I never remember an instance where I’m out of manpower. So, this policy is pretty much useless.
As for the local fort defense bonus, well, you don’t want to be on the defense anyway. Best defense is offense after all.
11. Social Mobility
Are you playing tribal? Do you have tons of tribesman that you want to convert to other roles? Then social mobility policy is just what you’re looking for.
12. Acquisition of Wealth
Does increase local tax and province commerce by +10%. Sounds good right? Yeah, but it also increases governor tax by +20% which is too much.
In most cases, all the province gold goes to governor instead of Rome itself.
Governor wages are crazy. They can easily destroy your empire in mid-end game era if you fail to build a strong economy early in the game.
Final words:
All in all, best governor policies are the ones you convert religion and culture. Once the province is fully converted, you can bleed them dry and make real drachma!
Also take advantage of situational governor policies like encourage trade, harsh treatment, and centralize population. The rest will be easy!
Once you build a strong economy and a strong empire, governor policy change becomes somewhat meaningless. Let the governors figure it out.