finished my first imperator campaign
it was fun, the macedonian mission tree was underwhelming, I expected it to center around reconquering alexander's empire but it was about some boring shit with greece I already forgot about, after that I got generic generated "conquer/expand X region" missions and I stopped paying attention to them
the game is surprisingly simple mechanically, it looks really daunting at first, but after a while you learn the simple mechanics and realize there's really one or two ways to react to things, like if a character is disloyal you just bribe/give free hands or bring them to trial. I feel like I know 90% of what I need to from my first campaign, which I never felt with any other paradox game.
my biggest gripes come from managing a big empire. You can't really manage multiple provinces as one, you can only manage each individual province one-by-one, which is super annoying when you want to do things like change the policy of multiple areas, set automatic trade, or fix something after your governor just decides to do whatever the fuck, and you need to change them every single time a governor dies/becomes disloyal. After I had enough legions I stopped caring about religious/cultural assimilation because it was too much of a pain in the ass. Rebellions were really annoying too, it felt like there was basically nothing I could do and they spawned left and right, no matter my stability or how much I change their happiness. Disloyal characters were a nothingburger, every now and then I'd see the civil war notification and bribing one or two characters or bringing them to trial made it fuck off
I don't think I'll do another campaign anytime soon, from what I've seen, campaigns don't have the unpredictable chaos of CK3 nor do nations have the very different playstyles of EU4.
I think its worth trying if you give enough of a shit about at least one specific ancient civilization