plz dont do the Power-System in the next EU Game

[Nostalgium]

The whole mana debate is kinda self-defeating. There's no remotely consistent definition of mana (people are calling construction in Vic3 mana, people have called piety and prestige from CK3 mana, people have called HOI4's political points mana, etc) so it just ends up being "mana is whatever I don't like" which is obviously an unusable standard.

You forgot Stellaris and the brief time some people tried to brand alloys as "soap mana". That one always took the cake for me as an example of how reductive the "mana debate" can become.

Anyways, I disagree with the premise of the OP. Monarch Points isn't my favourite mechanic, but it's far from a crippling be-all-end-all. You can bounce back from setbacks, manage bad rulers, and outside of Europe, pretty significantly leverage institutions to gain a HUGE tech advantage, even as a large nation. The only instance where I can see bad rulers crippling a game is if you get a long string of low-stat rulers - and I don't mean 2-3-3 or something here, but a string of <4 total - or if you're doing some edge-case run where you need everything to go perfectly and for some reason a string of 5-5-5's or better is neccessary for your strategy to work out. I struggle to think of the latter, and the former can be mitigated by slower pacing and good diplomacy.

 

[MatthewP]

You have a point. People complain about the stuff they engage with. EU4 is one of the best strategy games ever made. I don't know what exactly sinked Imperator. But it seems PDX devs themselves talk about MPs as something to avoid. It's an evil meme, something for people to focus on as "unrealistic" or "unfun"!

I always have this same mixed reaction to mana. I agree with a lot of the arguments about how it doesn't make sense and skews various systems and hurts immersion. But at the end of the day this is the game I've spent the most enjoyable hours playing, maybe ever, definitely since I was a kid playing early civ and civ-clones. And it's completely built around this mana system that we all seem to now agree is awful. It's totally possible EU4 is so good in spite of mana, but there's a part of me that wonders if we're all fooling ourselves and just don't get what makes things fun and not fun very well.

 

[Brynjar]

And it's completely built around this mana system that we all seem to now agree is awful. It's totally possible EU4 is so good in spite of mana, but there's a part of me that wonders if we're all fooling ourselves and just don't get what makes things fun and not fun very well.

My impression is that some of the most prevalent issues people had with the system originally has been addressed over time (through abdication, consorts, advisors etc), but that there is still a very loud portion of the playerbase who still insists that they have no way to influence their monarch points, and that is the worst game mechanic ever implemented in a game.

Eu4 isn't a good game despite having monarch points. It is a good game in part due to the way the "mana" in the game is implemented, and how they interact with each other. "Mana" in this case includes monarch points, prestige, stability, power projection, legitimacy, money, unrest etc. Monarch points are either affected by, or can affect pretty much any resource in the game, be it tech, diplomacy or military power, either directly or through opportunity costs. That is in my opinion why it works pretty well. It even does it without being very micro intensive.

Whatever "non-mana" system Paradox ends up using for EU5 will only be good/decent if it is actually implemented in a way players feels matters, ideally without being a micro nightmare like some of the Vic3 resources appears to be.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

Anyways, I disagree with the premise of the OP. Monarch Points isn't my favourite mechanic, but it's far from a crippling be-all-end-all. You can bounce back from setbacks, manage bad rulers, and outside of Europe, pretty significantly leverage institutions to gain a HUGE tech advantage, even as a large nation.

EU 4 introduced a ton of agency wrt mana that did not exist when it started. Focus, level 4/5 advisers, government swaps, disinherit, and estates granting mana are all things that flat-out didn't exist on release. In addition, "tribal" governments that didn't have at least a 3 in a stat got an extremely punitive modifier in relation to that stat, doubling down on the bad RNG. Compared to now, the mana system was very toxic and RNG dependent. Complaints in the 1.0 - 1.6 era were definitely warranted.

You can still have an easier or harder time with RNG now, but there's so much more agency, more sources, and more potential expenses of mana that it's not nearly so toxic as a resource pool.

The meaning of the term "mana" and primary criticisms of it got warped over time. The reason the term was created was because a single resource pool contributes to things that are not logically related in any causal way. THAT is what distinguishes it from other game resources, such as money, prestige, stability, or power projection. Those are resources too, but they aren't themselves an ill-defined pool of resources that can become something else at the click of a button/wave of a wand. Even the ones you can spend, like prestige, have a similar pool of tasks/events that use it.

In contrast, with mana, you still use the same resource to have extra diplo relations and to make better ships. Ordering your cannons to actually shoot at the fort more impedes the advancement of your military. It just feels better now, because this mana is better-attached to the game's other systems, and the player has more agency over how much is generated and how it's spent. It's a functional mechanic among others now, probably not needing much more than a small separation of the jobs it does to make it stop being called "mana" and return to the usual general title of "game resource".

 

[Brynjar]

The reason the term was created was because a single resource pool contributes to things that are not logically related in any causal way. THAT part of it is still the case now; you still use the same resource to have extra diplo relations and to make better ships. Ordering your cannons to actually shoot at the fort more impedes the advancement of your military. It just feels less bad, because this mana is better-attached to the game's other systems, and the player has more agency over how much is generated and how it's spent.

The sad part is that if all the monarch point costs were replaced with a money, the origin of the mana term in EU4 would have been addressed, and some people out there would most likely be pleased. Advance your military with money? Of course it's an abstraction of equipment, training cost etc! Pay money for shooting at a fort? It's logical because ammunition and cannons costs money! Too many diplomatic relations? Just hire more diplomats/whatever with money! Need better ships? Pay naval architects/shipbuilders for new designs! All those things would make it less "magical" and "mana" like, but it would be a much less interesting mechanic.

A perfect amount of player agency is hard to achieve. Add too much and the game becomes too easy, too tedious/micro intensive, or both. I'll rather take a bit too little than too much.

 

[Vulkandrache]

The sad part is that if all the monarch point costs were replaced with a money, the origin of the mana term in EU4 would have been addressed

The only reason this might be considered adressed is that money is a term with a real-world equivalent we all are familiar with
while Mana is not something i use every day.
For the game itself there would be no difference. You could call money
"Influence granted through possession of previous metals gained from mercantile activities".
Thats long-winded for Mana in coin form.

The difference is that handling everything with a single currency tends to be more one-dimensional,
compared to the ability to convert between them and the possiblities for different forms of gameplay that can bring.

 

[Brynjar]

The only reason this might be considered adressed is that money is a term with a real-world equivalent we all are familiar with
while Mana is not something i use every day.

It also addresses the lack of player agency criticism some people have. It wouldn't be a good solution, but it would solve what some people claim is the problem with so called mana. Player agency and downtime seems to be the main issues the OP has with monarch points in EU4. They seem to ignore the existence of several features which gives the player some agency over monarch points, and the downtime issue isn't solved by removing monarch points. Just look at Vic 3 where plenty of people have complained about not having enough to do.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

The sad part is that if all the monarch point costs were replaced with a money, the origin of the mana term in EU4 would have been addressed

This didn't happen fully, but the expansion of advisers and points from power projection etc added ways to transfer ducats into mana, either directly or indirectly.

 

[Nostalgium]

EU 4 introduced a ton of agency wrt mana that did not exist when it started.

Sure - my post would've been different five years ago. But as you say yourself, a lot of the agency I wanted back then has since been implemented, and my main criticism of it is now one of... for lack of a better term popping into my brain, "theme". As you say, shooting your cannons more doesn't logically correlate with getting the next tier of gun at a later date. I understand where the term "mana" comes from, but I still think it's very reductive and not a very useful term for discussing how to better the mechanics of the current iteration of EU4.

 

[EU3NOOB]

There will not be any mana in any game I make, unless its a game about magic.

Yeah, I think you learned that lesson from Imperator, didn't you Johan? And this coming from a guy who didn't particularly mind the mana system, though I'm also not a stringent defender of the system either. I'm more of a "it is what it is" kind of guy, so long as the rest of the game is fun (which I thought was the whole point of video games but shrugs).

By the way, who was the head of EUIV development before the base game launched? I thought it was you (for some reason I've always associated you with Europa Universalis), but I might be misremembering, I mean, it has been almost a decade (damn, I feel old, but I'm only 31!).

Also, one last thing... you seem to be commenting a lot on EUV related threads there, Johan... Is there anything you'd like to share with the class there, Johan (I kid, I kid, I know you can't say anything, pesky rules and all that)?

 

[Johan]

By the way, who was the head of EUIV development before the base game launched? I thought it was you (for some reason I've always associated you with Europa Universalis), but I might be misremembering, I mean, it has been almost a decade (damn, I feel old, but I'm only 31!).

I was. Like all the games back then.

 

[Jernau_]

And yet the game has only a third or so of the players that EU4 has with these "annoying" power points. Imperator died/remained dead despite getting rid of "mana". At the end of the day power points or no power points won't make or break EU5. Actual fun mechanics to earn and spend whatever resources the game has can.

Imo imperator spent too much time on removing "mana", but the main problems were a complete lack of flavour to most nations except a few of the major ones and the micromanagement involved in pops and the tradesystem.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

Sure - my post would've been different five years ago. But as you say yourself, a lot of the agency I wanted back then has since been implemented, and my main criticism of it is now one of... for lack of a better term popping into my brain, "theme". As you say, shooting your cannons more doesn't logically correlate with getting the next tier of gun at a later date. I understand where the term "mana" comes from, but I still think it's very reductive and not a very useful term for discussing how to better the mechanics of the current iteration of EU4.

It's *used* reductively. Used in the still-reasonable context of a joke/criticism of one particular aspect of the game's systems, which is what makes sense, it still applies to modern EU 4.

Player tendency to call all the game resources "mana" is silly and/or nonsense. Every game needs resources to work with of some kind. "Mana" only applies when you're doing things like using oil to *directly* grow trees, or using iron as direct food for humans. Or...if the game actually is about magic, lol. Otherwise, if players are supposed to draw from a generalized resource, you might as well just use currency. Which is what EU 4 ultimately did, in many ways.

A useful takeaway from the term in the context of EU 5 is to consider de-coupling things that draw from a resource pool where it doesn't make sense. A significant chunk (but not all) of the agency introduced wrt mana in EU 4 ultimately comes from tethering it into in-game choices that consume money (advisers, military success). Not only positive generation, but also the "punishment" for ignoring a particular tech path (corruption) amounts to money, and can be ignored much more extensively if you are not at all constrained on ducats. The system of indirect/slow transfer of resources between pools at a cost can be interesting though, has been in EU 4. Thus maybe EU 5 can rework some of the systems and shift around what consumes which resource to clear out some of the inconsistency without altering the *type* of player decisions that go into juggling the game's resources.

By the way, who was the head of EUIV development before the base game launched? I thought it was you (for some reason I've always associated you with Europa Universalis), but I might be misremembering, I mean, it has been almost a decade (damn, I feel old, but I'm only 31!).

As he said, he was the 1st head of development of EU 4. That has passed between different people across the years before Tinto took over, with a rather impressive array of good and bad things implemented in the game and reworked as needed. The company, the individuals, and the player base have all learned in that timeframe.

And yeah, unfortunately none of us get younger in the process. But perhaps we get more wisdom at least.

 

[Ethanol]

For what it's worth i'm glad we had the monarch power system in EU4, the cracks have clearly shown themselves over time and I sure don't want them in EU5, but it made EU4 much more interesting and fun than EU3 and I feel like the experiment was clearly worthwhile.

So please do keep experimenting new ideas and concepts for EU5 !

I would just avoid using systems you that can't be maintained/balanced later on such as National ideas that basically determine from the start if the country you picked up is good or trash.

 

[TK3600]

Fantasy GSG confirmed!

Pretty sure it exists already by Paradox.

 

[olivenkranz]

I personally don't hate monarch points as much as you do and just hope that endless expansion( and thus improvement of the army) aren't going to be the only way to succeed.