It’s also stupid because monarch points were an improvement and a useful abstraction. It also provides some meaningful gameplay around ruler quality as well as national focus.
People who hate ‘mana’ are wrong. The concept is good.
Bring back sliders!
I really think the poor implementation in Imperator at release really ruined them using mana again, even though it works well in EU4.
I have no issue with ‘mana’, although I must admit I did think Imperator was better when they moved to a system with only one piece of ‘mana’, political influence, and then modelling other systems as equilibrium values that can get pushed up or down over time.
It really depends on the implementation. With imperator at launch, whenever you wanted to do X it was really a guessing game what kind of mana would be used to buy it. They were so abstract and interchangeable. EU4 did it right, and it looks like Victoria 3 is putting serious thought into its ‘mana’ systems.
Case in point: gold is ‘mana’ under many definitions yet noone ever has a problem with it.
Yeah I don’t think there’s any problem with ‘mana’ per se. It’s a resource of sorts. Civ has gold, production, science, culture in recent iterations – none of these are problems because they’re part of a model that describes some sense of reality. I think what people may dislike about EU4’s monarch points is that it’s mostly fixed based on your king’s abilities, rather than responding to things you do such as expanding your country. This makes a lot of sense, especially for the era, but also removes player involvement in the cycle of trying to strategically increase their resources.
Wut?
Advisors, upgrading advisors, national focus, power projection, estate interactions, event choices, certain missions, policies.
You have a ton of influence over how your nation gains, and spends, monarch points. You can also play games with disinheriting bad heirs, or triggering succession crisis events to pick a better heir (though with potential weak claims). A monarch will provide between 0-6 in each of the categories. A nation gets a base of 3 in each. You can get level 5 advisors, and have a lot of ways to influence this choice, and cost. Realistically a larger empire will be banking 12-14 points, on average, in each category.
Rulers are important, but the court is equally so. It is always possible to have at least 10 in any category if you so choose, even with a useless Plantagenet king.
One thing that came out of the DD is confirmation that resource extraction locations have natural limits. So arable land is a limit on the number of farm buildings in a state, the size of an iron deposit limits how big that can get, etc. In contrast, production buildings don’t take up “space” in this sense.
Also, each building needs pops to run it of course, including transportation infrastructure and construction capacity.
This should have interesting dynamics when say oil or gold is discovered in a state with low population.
It will be interesting to see how the model gold rushes, since by and large. No government intervention was required to encourage migration to these new regions.
I like the approach - also the urbanisation mechanic. I still want to learn exactly how those subsistence farms work - and what other subsistence buildings there might be!
wilcoxchar said:
One interesting thought I had with bureaucrats now consuming paper. Since the game runs up to the 1930s, it would be interesting to have a late game tech for very early computerization that would begin to reduce the amount of paper consumed per bureaucracy but make government administration start requiring maybe electric gear or telephones/radios.
Wizzington said:
I like this idea and may in fact end up stealing it.
The official forum for this game is even worse than average for a Paradox game, it’s kind of depressing. I’m so excited for everything I’ve seen of this game so far, and then the forums are just people who are furious it doesn’t work exactly how Vicky 2 did.
Without “mana” to rail about they’re probably thrashing around searching for their next crusade.
The top subject this week is the players being allowed to choose what to build instead of the capitalist AI choosing for them. Not that the various capacities and equivalence or not to mana don’t get some discussion.
There is definitely a contingent that sees any divergence from Vicky2 as heresy, but that is tiny. Honestly, even the people who want capitalists to build their own stuff are a minority I’d say. It’s just that at this stage, there’s not much to write about except long drawn-out arguments. If you make a post about a neat potential idea, it will get 25 likes and zero replies. Complain loudly about the design and you are guaranteed as many replies as you can stand.
Personally I am saving my ire for when the reveal that they aren’t modelling the exact path each resource takes from producer to consumer.
Edit: Though god help me the amount of digital ink spilled over maintaining roads using authority. How can people possibly maintain roads without being paid? It’s inconceivable!
I long defended the way the different economic systems worked in Vicky(with the expansion) and Vicky 2. But the capitalist AI was just so dumb it was hugely frustrating to actually play that way. And it’s not like the capitalists actually built factories in a way that would maximize their profits. They built stupid unprofitable factories that would go bankrupt right away.
I hope they do something with the investment pool that affects capitalist happiness based on your decisions, but I’m definitely glad at this point that they aren’t bringing the old system back.
Also, yeah, plenty of people still think capacities are mana because mana is whatever you want it to be.
If it’s anything like real life, they don’t, but they also don’t get maintained.
Anyway, yeah, it’s big enough community (for a while now) that most of what it produces is circular garbage arguing against itself. Even being somewhat beaten by marketing doesn’t justify it, because every design decision is a choice about game design and realism that don’t really have perfect answers, and need to mesh together. And be fun. And all that crap will be moddable, go ahead and make your unfinished and unfinishable MEIOU.
The responses on this thread made me feel a lot better about reasonable people actually existing in that community: Worries about too much player control | Paradox Interactive Forums
Really not sure why I’m bothering to read anything other than the dev diaries on those boards but at least this one made me feel better.
Yeah aside from the dev posts, everything is at best speculation. The remaining posts tend to be dominated by the histrionics.
Maybe best to ignore them until we get to the real histrionics on release!
Oh I know it is. As a grown adult I don’t get overly excited games these days, but a new Victoria is an exception to that. Imperialism and Victoria taught me how awesome the 19th century is as a strategy game setting and hold a special place in my heart.
Yeah, I am pretty excited, and it’s not like I follow my own advice to stay away from the forums. I want to grab the devs by the lapels and yell “give me all the information now, now, now!”.