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No. The more we yell that we don't like vague abstract meaningless "currencies", the more they try to put them in. Like CK2 they slowly changed from piety and prestige being a measure that is checked to a currency spent on things, which is how CK3 is. Imperator was designed and was only changed after them going through the 5 stages of grief. It's just an easy way to balance things without actually balancing choices.

Stellaris, which I love in a lot of ways...has what I desrcibe as a plinko problem where all the ways to do things all winds up in a similar place despite myriad fine tuning you can implement across myriad layers. The inflection points for modification are so numerous that none of them is especially meaningful but you still have to tune the system for it to work best.

And CK2 is kinda fun in how Tribal uses Prestige to get things done and it can be painful to ween over to Feudalism if you don't check your P's and Q's first.
 
Pdx most recent games, hoi4, stellaris, and IR, all lack mana, monarch points. Is this a sign that the feature will no longer be implemented in newer games?
If you don't consider Stellaris' minerals (the magic clay that suits everything) and Imperator's political influence mana, I don't know what you actually consider mana, because those variables are hardly different from EU4's monarch power.
 
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If you don't consider Stellaris' minerals (the magic clay that suits everything) and Imperator's political influence mana, I don't know what you actually consider mana, because those variables are hardly different from EU4's monarch power.

Minerals at the release of stellaris were perhaps that but they moved away from it. Now you need new other resources and even the old strategic resources have much more use as well. Played a few games as a fanatic purifier and minerals are almost worth less, same with food and unity but I have been energy starved for almost 100 years. Bad luck with tech order as well so my dysonsphere still isnt giving me energy yet and its past 2300.

Alloys, consumer goods, ameneties, unity, admincap are all new resources and with the more uses for energy credits minerals is just something that matters the first few decades of the game and all you do with it is build normal buildings and processing. You cant do anything outside of that with it.

Mana can usually be used for many rather different things and the only limitations is how broken it is. Diplo mana in Eu4 can be used to improve land, reduce war exhaustion, change culture, improve mercantilism, have diplomatic relations, improve tech, get ideas, use policies, recruite leaders, cost for peace deals, diplomatic annexation/integration, cost for some decisions and change trade capital. I might have missed some but they are all quite different but all use one typ of resource and most of them are instant as well.

Not comparable to stellaris minerals at all. Influence is the closest with how its used for diplomacy, taking systems, building megastructures and certain decisions and edicts. But it is still more limited in stellaris than any of the 3 "mana" in Eu4 and much closer in scope and not nearly as abstract.
 
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If you don't consider Stellaris' minerals (the magic clay that suits everything) and Imperator's political influence mana, I don't know what you actually consider mana, because those variables are hardly different from EU4's monarch power.

I don’t think the problem is with mana, so much as with mana being the end all be all currency. Flow of minerals doesn’t determine who wins Stellaris. PI doesn’t determine who wins Imperator. PP doesn’t determine the victor of HOI4. They all help get things done, but they aren’t always the best method to get things done.

In the beginning of EU4, it was like every mechanic was dependent upon how much MP you could accrue over the long term. Those with the most MP would decimate everything in their path. This is still the case, but there are more avenues to accrue MP instead of just waiting for the month to tick, and ultimately hoping the RNG gives you an awesome heir that lives 95 years.
 
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With instant effects you can do stupid stuff like declare no CB war and get to - 3 stab and next day you are up at +3 again. Or get an event that gives +1-2 stab while at 0-1 stab and spend mana to get +1 stab before you get hit by +50% modifier and then take the event to get to +3 stab. Same with war exhaustion, inflation, corruption and the whole absolutism mechanic is as made for using instant mana to get broken results.

In earlier EU titles getting to - 3 stab could actually hurt since it would probably take a few years to get to even 0 stab again and not 3 clicks. Entire mechanic are easily just ignored by instant mana spending. Last 3 WC I did combined I spent probably less than a month total below 0 stab or above 4 WE or above 3 inflation.

Then you have a problem with instant effects and not "mana". Besides that if you spend admin points to go from -3 stab to +3 you cant use those points to do something else so doing it is not without negative effects.

The way people go on about the "mana problem" is a joke. Its just a currency and nothing else.
 
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Then you have a problem with instant effects and not "mana". Besides that if you spend admin points to go from -3 stab to +3 you cant use those points to do something else so doing it is not without negative effects.

The way people go on about the "mana problem" is a joke. Its just a currency and nothing else.

I admit, I've kind of been flummoxed by the whole "Mana is a bad mechanic" because the way I interact with resource systems isn't predicated on there needing to be some feedback mechanism to creating the resources.

I've spent some amount of the past few months fleshing out a game I'd like to create and the 'everything feeds into everything' idea is really cool but it also becomes difficult to find a place for manipulation and inflection points.

For more historically grounded games it is a little wonky to have a meta resource that just appears and can be applied to different applications but...

Overall, for a game, it's not something that corrupts everything else unless its the end all be all of resource interaction.
 
I don't really care about it, it have its strengths and flaws compared to "normal" resources and I do understand why they choose to use such resources.
 
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I really hope that pushing buttons and getting instant stuff would be a thing of the past. Mana itself ( as resources that doesn't depend on your actual investment) is something that will probably be a trademark of some pdx games one way or the other.
 
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Mana abstraction wasn't as big a problem as its execution can be. For example, piety in CK2 or prestige in EU4 were forms of mana that actually served a purpose, were fully tied to most mechanisms and had gameplay impact...on top of being rare enough to be functional. Even influence mana in Stellaris is tied to certain things, as weird as it is.

The worst kind of mana is what PDS sadly went with - a weird generated, accumulative currency (usually based on ruler stats and not much more) where you aimlessly click a button to gain some unfulfilling reward at the cost of some arbitrarily fixed number of that currency, and you do this every X years or you don't get bonus. That kind of thing is tedious even for board games (where mana as a concept is actually used well) let alone realistic video games.

Imagine if Victoria 3 came out and had things like "Click button to spend 150 industry mana to instantly build this textile mill" or "Click button to instantly award XYZ party +25% seats in the parliament for 300 political mana". Or a mana that you have to click every 5 years or you don't gain +50% production bonus for your RGO. Or a button that takes away 500 "military mana" and in return gives free military units out of thin air. I would've refunded that game within hours. That was essentially their approach with EU4 in 2017-19 and Imperator Rome's release, and you see how that turned out.

Hopefully now that Johan has admitted that mana in that form is a bad idea, we aren't going see any more of that.
 
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Pdx most recent games, hoi4, stellaris, and IR, all lack mana, monarch points. Is this a sign that the feature will no longer be implemented in newer games?
I hope so because with ledgers and modifiers I can work better than with clicking 500 times to move my pops, another 100 times to change their religion, another 100 times to change their culture, and 3 more times to kill a pig, and this after every successful war. Even the clicking after 10-20 years to get the boni from the estates is already too much if you don’t want to play FarmVille.
 
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If you don't consider Stellaris' minerals (the magic clay that suits everything) and Imperator's political influence mana, I don't know what you actually consider mana, because those variables are hardly different from EU4's monarch power.

You have significantly more control over mineral production in Stellaris than you do monarch points in EU4. There are significantly more currencies in Stellaris than there are in EU4, so even if you are constrained in minerals, you can compensate by developing other areas. There are more systems in Stellaris which require no direct mineral input than there are systems in EU4 which require no direct monarch point input.

Honestly, there's a lot of differences. The closest thing Stellaris has to mana is Influence, which, not coincidentally, is by far Stellaris' worst mechanic. Thankfully it just has less prominence than monarch points in EU4.
 
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