"Mana" and Capacities Discussion Thread

[Word_Smith]

I would agree with this if and only if the things we have seen these capacities control were in Victoria 2 in a complex way. Influence capacity from every angle seems a more complex system than having 9 diplomatic points that you can spend and accumulate over time from nebulous places. Beurocracy is replacing a single slider. Authority is completely new and doesn't even have a Vicky 2 equivalent to compare to. None of these, imo, are more abstracted or any reduction in complexity, and thus I don't believe you have a point here.

You are absolutely correct about influence, in the sense that the new system is superior to Victoria 2 (if only because the old system was incredibly barebones). I would disagree with you on bureaucracy and authority, however.

For bureaucracy, it appears to eliminate regional differences in administration in favour of a Stellaris-style admin capacity or EU4-style governing capacity system. In Vicky 2, how well a given territory was administrated depended on a variety of population-level factors within a given province, including culture, literacy, and population wealth. You would need to gain a foothold with an accepted culture in order to integrate a province into your administration. The new system, it seems, eliminates this by allowing you to accumulate bureaucracy tokens which you allocate at will. There's no complex process of assimilation, education, and promotion. You just pick whether to allocate your bureaucracy tokens to province A or province B, regardless of the situation on the ground.

Authority is even more concerning, but we lack enough information to make a solid critique. Suffice it to say, it appears to lean into the "gamey" 4X-style aspect and away from the simulation aspect. I truly hope that it doesn't end with situations like the player offering to pay some workers to maintain a road, and they refuse to work because you lack enough authority tokens.

 

[Word_Smith]

In the knowledge this is way too early in the dev diaries to post more than a hunch and I am not even a Victoria fan but generally speaking, I believe Paradox will be seeking to increase significantly the playerbase of Victoria, which was the smallest (albeit extremely vocal!) of all Paradox titles. This attempt to bring many more players to the title doesn't bid well for those who favor comparable complexity to Vic2, which was probably the hardest game from Paradox to get into. I think more realistically, one should expect a streamlined version of Vic2 and "mana" (or simplification in the word of the OP), in one form or another will be present, even if certainly not with the catastrophic results it imposed on Imperator.

So, for the hardcore fans, don't get your hopes too high as the game will be developed for a much larger audience with the consequences of such.
Just my (probably not very popular) opinion at this stage.

This is the likely motivation behind Paradox's decision to simplify many aspects of their games, yes.

Personally, I believe that the problems with accessibility are not caused by the game's complexity but by the lack of decent tutorial systems available in many Paradox titles (I can guarantee you I wouldn't have understood Vicky 2 or EU3 without watching a Youtube tutorial series). By implementing robust tooltips and tutorials, Paradox can easily broaden the playerbase without alienating the fans and dumbing down what made the series popular to begin with.

 

[Drogan]

Mana = Bad. Are capacities Mana? I don't think so but maybe a little bit? Idk no yes nah

 

[Spartakusbund]

Tbh I would be fine with the capacities if they were gained via the pops and not flat amounts from the laws. Repressing the press should lower pop consciousness, making them more loyal and giving you authority. Government systems like oligarchy should only gain authority if the oligarchs are powerful, and loyal (in the government). amounts tied to international status should be gained according to the amount of prestige (or percentage of world average like being a GP) instead of flat amounts for the different tiers. With those changes I think most people would like them.

I strongly disagree that Loyalty of Pops and Authority should be linked.

Imagine an anarchist state that has a high functioning economy that delivers lots of cheap goods to POPs. Those POPs should have very high Loyalty, reflecting their belief in the system. The state, being anarchist, should absolutely not have high Authority.

 

[Spartakusbund]

For bureaucracy, it appears to eliminate regional differences in administration in favour of a Stellaris-style admin capacity or EU4-style governing capacity system. In Vicky 2, how well a given territory was administrated depended on a variety of population-level factors within a given province, including culture, literacy, and population wealth. You would need to gain a foothold with an accepted culture in order to integrate a province into your administration. The new system, it seems, eliminates this by allowing you to accumulate bureaucracy tokens which you allocate at will. There's no complex process of assimilation, education, and promotion. You just pick whether to allocate your bureaucracy tokens to province A or province B, regardless of the situation on the ground.

You don't pick and choose to "allocate tokens" though. Bureaucratic Capacity just gives you a measure of what the administrative burden of your nation is. If you don't have enough bureaucrats to meet that burden, you get a malus. If you have more than enough, you get a bonus.

Again, if all bureaucrats do is add to your Capacity and do nothing else on the state level, then you will be right and there is a slight downgrade in complexity compared to Vicky 2. But given what they've already revealed about how states and infrastructure, and what they've hinted about services, I doubt that's the case.

Authority is even more concerning, but we lack enough information to make a solid critique. Suffice it to say, it appears to lean into the "gamey" 4X-style aspect and away from the simulation aspect. I truly hope that it doesn't end with situations like the player offering to pay some workers to maintain a road, and they refuse to work because you lack enough authority tokens.

Again, you've misunderstood the Capacity system. They aren't tokens. You will never "run out" of them and see a situation where you can't apply a decree to a state. Instead, if you go over, you take increasingly large penalties, reflecting the fact that your head of state has overstretched his resources. And if you have a lot of slack, you can implement reforms much faster. That seems like a very well designed system to me.

 

[Helmic____]

I strongly disagree that Loyalty of Pops and Authority should be linked.

Imagine an anarchist state that has a high functioning economy that delivers lots of cheap goods to POPs. Those POPs should have very high Loyalty, reflecting their belief in the system. The state, being anarchist, should absolutely not have high Authority.

On the contrary, a real anarchist state should be even more dependant on authority (the game currency) and making the pops do things for free than a regular country since it won’t impose the same things economically. Why doesn’t it make sense that a system where the pops are loyal, either through love of their ruler, but most likely through force, shouldn’t be the one that can force their pops around?

However a fringe ideology that never ruled any country long term shouldn’t be the basis of a game mechanic.

 

[Word_Smith]

You don't pick and choose to "allocate tokens" though. Bureaucratic Capacity just gives you a measure of what the administrative burden of your nation is. If you don't have enough bureaucrats to meet that burden, you get a malus. If you have more than enough, you get a bonus.

Bureaucracy represents a nation’s ability to govern, invest in and collect taxes from its incorporated territory. It is produced by the Government Administration building, where many of a nation’s Bureaucrats will be employed. All of a nation’s Incorporated States use a base amount of Bureaucracy which increases with the size of their population, and further increased by each Institution (such as Education or Police - more on those later!) that a country has invested in. Overall, the purpose of Bureaucracy is to ensure that there is a cost to ruling over, taxing and providing for your population - administrating China should not be cheap!

The key here is incorporated states. The player chooses whether to incorporate State A or State B on a whim- so long as they have enough offices filled with bureaucrats somewhere in their empire.

Again, if all bureaucrats do is add to your Capacity and do nothing else on the state level, then you will be right and there is a slight downgrade in complexity compared to Vicky 2. But given what they've already revealed about how states and infrastructure, and what they've hinted about services, I doubt that's the case.

Again, I sincerely hope that you're right. But I don't see that given the information we have.

Again, you've misunderstood the Capacity system. They aren't tokens. You will never "run out" of them and see a situation where you can't apply a decree to a state. Instead, if you go over, you take increasingly large penalties, reflecting the fact that your head of state has overstretched his resources. And if you have a lot of slack, you can implement reforms much faster. That seems like a very well designed system to me.

As I've been reiterating, this sounds like a worryingly similar hybrid of EU4's governing capacity system (where you select which provinces take up your governing capacity on a whim) and Stellaris' admin capacity and empire sprawl system (wherein you build a bunch of offices on a single planet which administrate your entire empire). France should not be able to effectively administrate an illiterate Swedish province because they have a well-staffed office in Paris.

I can't speak much to authority. It may be an interesting system, it may be a terrible system. I am reserving my judgement for when more information is revealed. Still, I am worried that they intend to substitute the varying levels of economic planning power afforded to the government in VIcky 2 with a system that seems more at home in Stellaris or EU4 than Victoria.

Don't misunderstand my disagreements with you to mean that I don't understand where you're coming from. If your predictions are indeed what we see from the dev team in the coming months, then Victoria 3 will be set up to be quite a splendid game. Sadly, Paradox in recent years has made me pessimistic about their changing design philosophy, and I'd rather voice my concerns now then log onto the forums a year from now only to find people complaining that Victoria 3 replaced the fascinating simulation mechanics of its predecessor with boring, 4X-style point-systems.

 

[Spartakusbund]

On the contrary, a real anarchist state should be even more dependant on authority (the game currency) and making the pops do things for free than a regular country since it won’t impose the same things economically.

Huh? An anarchist state by definition would not use force on its population. A centralized state wouldn't even exist to force people to do things in the first place.

Why doesn’t it make sense that a system where the pops are loyal, either through love of their ruler, but most likely through force, shouldn’t be the one that can force their pops around?

Because Loyalty isn't a measure of the power you have over a POP. Loyalty is about the POP liking and trusting the system because it provides them with a good living standard, at least based on how its been described so far.

However a fringe ideology that never ruled any country long term shouldn’t be the basis of a game mechanic.

I used anarchism as an extreme example. Should a liberal democracy that has a strong economy have more Authority Capacity than Tsarist Russia? No, I don't think so.

 

[Spartakusbund]

The key here is incorporated states. The player chooses whether to incorporate State A or State B on a whim- so long as they have enough offices filled with bureaucrats somewhere in their empire.

We don't know how states get incorporated, but I doubt you can do it on a whim. Like reforms, it probably takes time.

France should not be able to effectively administrate an illiterate Swedish province because they have a well-staffed office in Paris.

I don't see why Bureaucratic Capacity should be the mechanic to model why that would be difficult. The Turmoil mechanic will do it as it's currently described: the Swedish Pops would be very disloyal due to their culture and cause lots of Turmoil, driving down the taxes you get from the state.

 

[JustJacque]

I'll also note that ruling your far off territories with bureaucrats in your capital will be inherently and inefficiency due to how infrastructure and markets are working. Sure you can have your administrators all based in one place, but then you are having to ship all your paper to that one place, reducing the amount of local productions and trade of other things that can happen (and thus you need to import more of that too and thus need to build yet more infrastructure and so on.) I think we will find players naturally are encouraged to spread out the workload a bit.

 

[johnty5]

Freedom of the Press does not give you Road Maintenance. Having restrictive political freedoms gives you a higher Authority Capacity, not a lower one.

This seems to have thrown a lot of people. The simple fix would be for the various levels of political freedom to be a negative modifier to a higher base of Authority. That makes more intuitive sense ("I've got freedom of the press, so that lowers my authority") rather than the various level of freedom all being positve modifiers to Authority, but with the lower levels of freedom giving larger positive modifiers.

 

[Paghalay]

If these capacities were behind the scenes and you were never shown the value of them, or told they exist, you just saw the repercussions of going over them, no one would complain about it being "mana" and instead see it as some behind the scenes complexity.

 

[Varren]

I truly hope that it doesn't end with situations like the player offering to pay some workers to maintain a road, and they refuse to work because you lack enough authority tokens.

That's not going to happen. Authority-based edicts are not about paying workers: They are about forcing the peasants to do your bidding by fiat. Furthermore, all capacities are soft caps: You can exceed them whenever you want, so long as you can deal with the penalties.

The key here is incorporated states. The player chooses whether to incorporate State A or State B on a whim- so long as they have enough offices filled with bureaucrats somewhere in their empire.

If incorporating a state is something you can do on a whim, then how it interacts with bureaucracy will be the least of the games problems. As of right now, though, the devs have not said anything about what incorporating states entails, and I see nothing productive about assuming the worst possible decision and denigrating the rest of the game because of it.

 

[Word_Smith]

If incorporating a state is something you can do on a whim, then how it interacts with bureaucracy will be the least of the games problems. As of right now, though, the devs have not said anything about what incorporating states entails, and I see nothing productive about assuming the worst possible decision and denigrating the rest of the game because of it.

I can't fault you for that assessment, but Paradox's design decisions in Stellaris and EU4 have only left me with cynicism. I can only hope that your predictions are vindicated in the coming dev diaries.

 

[Lorehead]

The thread asking what makes something “mana” convinced me to start calling resources that regenerate slowly with minimal player control, manna-from-heaven, and unexplained resources that the player spends on unrelated, unrealistic things, spell points.

Capacities are not at all ike manna from heaven, which I object to a lot more than spell points. Passively idling while I wait for the chance to do something is boring gameplay. If I’m lucky, there’s at least something else I can do to kill time. At best, it’s a very frustrating way to add speed-bumps to a game design that wasn’t meeting its goals. You wouldn’t need to put a timer on how often a player can do the thing they want to do, if there were an organic reason in the system for them not to do that so often, or for it to take longer. At worst, this is something idle games start doing to you only after they’ve got you hooked, to get you to spend money so you can go back to the fun part of their game.

is it spell-point-like? That’s a lot more subjective and we don’t know how immersive it’s going to be. Some political scientists use metaphors like “political capital” and “state capacity” in the real world to understand how real governments operate, so there’s no reason that the concept has to detract from immersion.

 

[Grim Deadman]

Looks I'm a bit late to the party, but here are my 5 cents regardless:
If we look at what bureaucrats are actually doing, we will find a vast array of heterogeneous activity. The amount of types of taxes collected, the notary activities, the legal procedures - if we have to model any of it in detail, you would need a supercomputer with an actual AI and machine learning to succeed. In a game, some sort of abstraction is unavoidable. I would even go as far as saying that a very high level of abstraction is unavoidable. What matters, then, is a) how realistic are the outcomes that the mechanics produce and b) how fun are they to play. None of these questions can be answered before actually playing the game, so I really suggest we all relax and enjoy the anticipation.

As a side note, I would like to nonetheless endorse OP for the lovely initial posting. I appreciate the effort that went into the preparation.

 

[Baneslave]

Personally, my biggest potential concern with capacities is that they seem to be primarily increased by building buildings. I'm assuming this is a directly response to people's concerns about not being able to influence in game resources, and also done to make the gain of capacity more tangible (less abstract). I'm somewhat concerned that this will make it a bit too 'gamey'. In my opinion, improving Bureaucratic capacity should be done via investment in 'government administration' (in the abstract) rather than a literal 'government administration building'... but given how these forums behave, I can understand why the devs have chosen specific buildings.

Ehh, I prefer Victoria 3's system of "need bureaucratic buildings and bureaucrats to work in them" to Victoria 2's "only bureaucrats are needed" system.

Victoria 2's system lacked control. Having smaller amount of bureaucrats paid well was not possible, as quantity of bureaucrats always expanded to the amount defined by the budget. Having many bureaucrats with bad wages was not possible in long term either. Controlling where (government hired!) bureaucrats were being hired was not possible.

By controlling max amount of bureaucrats with buildings, like Victoria 3 does, and player has the ability to build buildings as they see fit (as long as they can afford them) player has more control over system. Hopefully we see system where loyal, well educated and well fed bureaucrats can staff single building with more efficiency than their disloyal, illiterate and starving brethren.

 

[Word_Smith]

As a side note, I would like to nonetheless endorse OP for the lovely initial posting. I appreciate the effort that went into the preparation.

Cheers dude.

The replies to this thread has given me a lot to look for in the dev diaries to come. I hope it was a thought-provoking discussion for everyone else as well.

 

[alexti]

Personally, I believe that the problems with accessibility are not caused by the game's complexity but by the lack of decent tutorial systems available in many Paradox titles (I can guarantee you I wouldn't have understood Vicky 2 or EU3 without watching a Youtube tutorial series). By implementing robust tooltips and tutorials, Paradox can easily broaden the playerbase without alienating the fans and dumbing down what made the series popular to begin with.

"Accessibility" problem seems to be more of a myth. Many people simply aren't interested in Paradox games (and often in strategic games in general) because they don't like complex games. Not a long time ago Paradox has attempted to broaden player base with a more accessible and better looking game (Imperator), but it didn't seem to worked out well. I think they've reached a very good awareness of their games in the market, so people know about their games and those who are interested in them are already playing them. Paradox games are quite well documented, so learning them is not difficult even without any external aids.

 

[alexti]

Is simulation a core aspect of the grand strategy genre? How much abstraction is too much abstraction?
Will the capacities make Vicky 3 more complex or less complex than its predecessor? Should Victoria 3 be simpler than Victoria 2? Why or why not?
Is mana fundamentally at odds with the simulation aspect of the Victoria series?

That's an interesting post.

I don't think simulation is a core aspect of the grand strategy genre. The genre is pretty much defined by Paradox and most of their games don't feature that much of a simulation. In Victoria simulation is a core aspect. However, it's possible to make a good grand strategy game with a lot of abstraction instead of simulation (for example, EU4). It's advantageous for the company to produce games with different amounts of abstraction - it allows them to make more games that have distinct character.

It's hard to tell if capacities will make Vic3 more or less complex - we don't know enough details. In Vic2 complexities were coming from many interactions between different game mechanics. So far it looks like Vic3 is following the same path. I hope that Vic3 will be more complex than Vic2 - it's kind of a niche of this serie.