Imperator looking good there. I bought Rome I a little while back, and, uh. I dunno how I feel about it. My main issue is, well, imagine if your CKII court had about 100 people in it all of the time, and anytime anything happened to one of them--even someone you'd never heard of, who just has some minor senate position or something--you get a popup notification about it, just as big as if someone had declared war on you. Additionally, everybody's names are practically indistinguishable because they're all something like "Marcus Gaius Tarantum" or "Julius Gaius Usum" or "Usus Gusus Ususum".
Also, some fool recommended me Macedonia as a starter nation. Macedonia, as far as I can tell, has two options: brutally die at the hands of barbarians from Tylis, or gain barely any territory in the peace deal because the game has the EU4 pre-Art of War system where who gets what territory depends entirely on who occupied the province in the first place. (Additionally, the game's got a ridiculous system for gaining casus belli--the most reliable way to do it is order someone in an enemy country assassinated and hope the assassin gets executed.)
So a modernized version of Rome would be great. I'm not really that into Roman history (though I am currently periodically listening to Mike Duncan's History of Rome podcast,) but it's an interesting time period that definitely deserves a Paradox game. My main hope is that they go on to expand the game through the imperial period via expansions--the Republic is neat and all, but the Empire is where it's at, IMO.
India aside, also take a look at Carthage, specifically it's super thin coastline and it's teeny tiny holdings on the Massaesylian coast. Very small counties, or something new in the way of provinces?
From what I've heard, they're changing things so that each province has multiple cities in it--and you don't necessarily control all the cities in the province--to add another layer of granularity. Great move IMO, I just hope they optimize the game a little better than EU4 so that it can handle all those provinces.
E: In the screenshot, most of Iberia and almost everything northeast of Germania and the Danube is greyed out. Do you think it's terra incognita, uncolonized, or wasteland?