Monarch Points - The Evil Root of All(?) Problems in EU4???

[VolitionNewlove]

They had an impact, sure, I don't think one can reasonably defend the thesis that (as the game seems to claim) the skill of the monarch was historically the single most important factor in how a nation was able to act. Consider that Britain fought the Napoleonic Wars under a monarch who was frequently confined as a madman, and a regent who no one has ever accused of brilliance, but did not find itself at all hindered from carrying out brilliant military and diplomatic policy. You needn't try to tell me that the monarch's rating also represents factions at court and so on- that won't fly, since one of the most common complaints here is that stats are set in stone for the entire reign, with no way to influence them.

Exactly. Monarch points works fine for a Feudal kingdom or duchy coming straight out of Crusader Kings II, but for a nation with a centralised bureaucracy, be it Great Britain, the Ottoman Empire, or Ming, the effects of the Monarch would be comparatively invisible to the work of all the ministers, nazirs, secreteriats, viziers, bureaucrats, directors, etc. These things are not represented at all.

I am fine with Europe getting some advantage that resemble the dominance they had during the game period. What I am against is unrealistic representation in the rate of resource generation. Having all else equal, i.e. both sides with no advisors and 0/0/0 ruler. A western tech group gets 3/3/3 per month and say chinese tech gets 2/2/2. That's a 33% difference. I would love to hear how is that justified.

I'm waiting for someone to try and make a genetics argument.

 

[unmerged(780209)]

I actually prefer EUIII to EUIV because of MP. It's such a fundamentally flawed decision in such a vital game mechanic that even though EUIV is better than EUIII in every other conceivable way, MP drags the entire product down for me.

SWM, I totally agreed with you until I started playing some of the mods on Steam that mitigate this problem: Increased Monarch Points, Ruler Traits, etc. I was seriously considering just abandoning EUIV and going back to EUIII or CKII, when I found that with these mods the game became fun again.

Another thing that made it fun was when I discovered threads on these boards describing vassal feeding as a tactic to avoid the incredibly BORING dynamic of

"Fight war. Siege endless provinces. ZZZzzzzz. Annex said provinces in peace deal. Core them using incredible amounts of Admin power. Suffer massive OE. Crush revolts. Grit teeth and wait until the coring timers time out. Rinse and repeat over and over."

GOd that sucked! Then after discovering the mods that changed all that so I could play a diplomatic rather than a purely military game:

"After 100 years of plague and darkness. Finally O Lord, a light!"

Then of course they totally destroyed it all with 1.4 because of the Protectorate system, which I believe cannot be modded out.

 

[Ibrins]

I don't have 400 hours in the game, but I have played multiple campaigns and have consistently in those campaigns felt that MP was my limiting factor. My defining memory of EUIV was during my Hindustan campaign, when I bribed the Spanish Empire with 40k in gold that I accumulated because I couldn't spend fast enough to offset my income because I ran out of MP.

I've never seen a game where money, the thing that makes the world go round, is so useless.

Ah, Hindustan. I'll give you that one. Indeed, it's incredibly easy to accumulate huge amounts of money throughout the game as a non-western nation, and be in a huge deficit of monarch points prior to westernization, so that's definitely a situation where the MP train takes a hell of a lot longer to gain enough speed. And that is just one of the issues with non-western nations. Taking into account all the regional differences, the Asian nations should probably get some unique mechanics just as the NA natives did with CoP.
The game being focused on Europe, however, I base my thoughts and impressions on European gameplay, since it represents the developers' aims most accurately. And, as I said previously, monarch points have never ruined my day when I was playing a European nation. Granted, that's my experience with the game, and I won't deny its potential flaws outright, - for all I know everyone but me might be rolling shitty rulers ALL the time! - but so far, I can at least say with conviction, that, at the very least, the monarch point system is MILES ahead of the consumable specialists of EU3.

 

[unmerged(780209)]

I'm waiting for someone to try and make a genetics argument.

You mean the racist "White Europeans were just superior argument?" :unsure:

 

[swm]

I can at least say with conviction, that, at the very least, the monarch point system is MILES ahead of the consumable specialists of EU3.

See, I can't even give you that. Consumable specialists sucked, but at least they were remotely within your control. With MP we don't even get that.

I'd rather have a profoundly broken mechanic within my control than a mostly broken mechanic beyond it. That's a bit of a subjective call on my part, but given the volume of complaints around MP I'd say a fairly good portion of the player base agrees with me.

 

[unmerged(780209)]

The big problem with monarch points are that they devolve into simple optimization problems. How do I get more monarch points? Hire better advisers. And that is pretty much it. How do I get more efficient at using monarch points? Idea groups, westernizing, and maybe some minor fiddling with events/governments/decisions. And that is pretty much it.

You can be richer than Midas, and that doesn't change your monarch point accumulation. You can be Ares reborn and your legions swarming up the Danube and down the Rhine - and your monarch point gain is utterly unaffected.

So for any given king you are going to be have X AMP, Y DMP, Z MMP. Well you can always trade off, short changing something military so you can functionally get (Z - e) MMP and (A + e) AMP effectively - nope. By and large each type of MP is not involved in strategic tradeoffs with the other types.

Well maybe there are deep interconnections in the buildings. Not really. Most buildings provide simple things like money + MP now for more money later, money + MP now for more manpower in just a bit, and a few incidentals (stronger missionaries, spy defense, faster troops on the roads, etc.).

So in short, to a very large degree, you have a finite number of AMP, you figure out the most cost efficient use of them and it is a fairly trivial optimization problem (how much will go into coring, how much will go into ideas, how much will go into tech, and how much will go into stab - rejigger the ideas and run with it). It doesn't matter if you have godlike administrations or lobotomized ones - the optimal AMP spend is pretty much static for any given set of goals, all the dice rolls do is allow you to pursue the same course faster or slower. There just aren't that many viable deviations. Everything in EUIV pretty much sits inside a vertically integrated silo that is controlled by just one type of resource: gold determines how big a mercenary horde you can manage, AMP determines how many bits of land you can core, and your military effectiveness is determined my how much MMP you can effectively dump into tech/rerolling generals/using forced march and the other MMP abilities.

Contrast with, well real strategy. Take WWII. You want more airplanes. Well great, that means you need to devote more of your refining capacity to aviation fuel - less gas for industry and that might even impact something like food supplies or in theater logistics. Of course you also need more manpower on the assembly line, so that comes out of the infantry or the farming sector or somewhere else. Likewise, you may need to retool some factories towards aviation production - so fewer tanks or trucks or what have you ... unless of course you build new factories, but that may limit your construction of other things like airfields and drydocks. You had as basic inputs: manpower, oil, agricultural land, mining resources, machine stock, construction capacity, and money. Doing something in one area necesssarily meant doing less in another. If you needed to, you could effectively increase any one of these, but only at the expense of the others.

EUIV is utterly unlike real strategy in this way. Your monarch points are just about utterly independent of your policy. Sure you can nibble around the edges and idea slots are very competitive ... but without strong interplay, it becomes too easy to say "That option is less cost effective than this one". So once you've made your choice, there is precious little that remains a strategic trade-off. Oooh random event where I lost stab or I lose gold - hmm well my limiting factor is AMP, not gold, so pick the gold. Hmm, my heir is crappy at ADM, so do I slow down my conquest, let my admin tech stagnate, or not purchase the idea set now? Tech stagnating is the most cost effective, let's roll with that. It is so easy to see the cost effective expenditures that most decisions aren't strategic at all. All a penalty does is force you to wait, it doesn't suggest a real change in plan.

What works much better are mixed interplays. For instance the piety system for Muslims has a lot more real trade offs, hey I want this bonus - so I need to do this in this order - crap declaring on the Shi'ites is really tempting now ... but then I lose a bonus on tech now I need to see which is better and make situational trade offs. As it is right now, the dice say what is possible and you just run down the list with whatever your MP supports ... and then wait out the artificial boring hard caps whenever you hit them.

What EUIV really needs are ways to min/max things so you have some real strategic tradeoffs. Like say, allow you to spend a bunch of MP for a higher OExt cap or spend MP to mute AE. Right now, you just go full tilt until some hard cap cuts and to say stop, then you wait until you have the time/MP to overcome that cap. EUIV is very good at the Grand part of grand strategy - I love the world it creates - however as strategy goes, at is fundemental level it is pretty shallow and lacks a lot of interesting strategic tradeoffs.

Jomini, why not play one of the mods that allows you to invest in increasing your monarch points? There are several. That involves strategic choices.

Ex: Do I invest 200 Admin points now in improving my monarch's admin rating by 1 per month? There's a malus involved too (income hit) until my heir is trained. So, it would take 200/12 to break even or 16 years. Well, how old is my monarch or heir? Maybe better to invest in training the heir. Hopefully I break even before he inherits the throne if my king lives that long.

There's another mod that creates improved monarch points via events you choose when your ruler comes of age: 1) glorious administrator, 2) diplomat, 3) militarist and 4) generalist. The first three give you advantages in that one category, the latter lesser advantages in all 3.

This gives you a choice of what category you want to emphasize (and AI countries get to choose as well so it's not just a bonus for the player).

Etc.

Combine a couple of these mods and you have a lot more strategic choices.

 

[British Rage]

OP seems to be missing the point that you're not supposed to be able to control every facet of your nation

It was clearly a major design choice by the developers, in the same vain as removing the ability to create your own advisors

I would argue that if you dislike the sort of game where you can't influence every variable, then Paradox games really aren't for you

 

[swm]

OP seems to be missing the point that you're not supposed to be able to control every facet of your nation

It was clearly a major design choice by the developers, in the same vain as removing the ability to create your own advisors

I would argue that if you dislike the sort of game where you can't influence every variable, then Paradox games really aren't for you

MP is simply the most important currency in the game. Taking it entirely out of the players control means taking the course of the game out of the player's control.

It was a major design choice by the designers, and it was the worst mistake I've ever seen them make. They're talented people, to be sure, but they messed up big time here. If the RNG is the sole determining factor of the country's abilities, the player may as well not be there.

We're used to Paradox games where we have enormous influence over events. CKII for example, is my favorite paradox game because all of its random components are small and/or controllable.

Take, for example, tutoring. If I send my child to a high diplo tutor, he will most likely come out a good diplomat. Even though stat changes during tutoring are RNG based, the dice are rolled enough that the law of large numbers kicks in, preventing it usually from destroying you.

MP is the most important resource in the game, and is entirely out of our control. It is determined by only 3 dice rolls, and even a perfect ruler can't generate points faster than income.

That's not strategy, that's railroading. Railroading is the opposite of strategy.

 

[Zander]

MP is not "entirely" out of the player's control. You may easily feel it's TOO MUCH out of the player's control, and you may indeed be right, but choice of advisor level does affect it. As one example, getting a +2 ADM advisor getting +1 in all three is pretty similar in cost.

Again, I'm not saying that eliminates the issues you're talking about, but it's inaccurate to say players have 0 control over monarch points.

 

[swm]

MP is not "entirely" out of the player's control. You may easily feel it's TOO MUCH out of the player's control, and you may indeed be right, but choice of advisor level does affect it. As one example, getting a +2 ADM advisor getting +1 in all three is pretty similar in cost.

Again, I'm not saying that eliminates the issues you're talking about, but it's inaccurate to say players have 0 control over monarch points.

That's true but misleading. Advisers have problems. Sometimes you don't have the money, sometimes you don't have a good adviser available, etc. And even if the RNG smiles upon you, and you've been good enough at the game to get enough money to support it, even 3/3/3 advisers (which will absolutely bankrupt you if you're smaller than France) don't make up for a substandard ruler.

Players have a nonzero amount of control, but so little that it's negligible.

 

[Minigrinch]

MP resulted in technology being almost independent of economy, which is bizarre from both a historical and gameplay viewpoint. In fact, investing in your economy slows your technological progress, and vice versa.

The more complaints I see on this forum the more I begin to think MP is at the root of EUIV's problems, from coring/OE, to the lack of peacetime mechanics.

 

[Jomini]

cugel: such mods as I've tried have not been terribly balanced. I suspect that Pdox will either patch the game to something better or the mods will eventually equilibrate. I'm leery of delving too deep into the mods this early in the game's life - it is just too easy for Pdox to nuke mods and frankly I'm still impressed with their commitment to adding new features. Besides, as fun as mods can be, I kinda like being able to give good, reasoned feedback this early in the lifecycle so patches have more balanced feedback.

OP seems to be missing the point that you're not supposed to be able to control every facet of your nation

It was clearly a major design choice by the developers, in the same vain as removing the ability to create your own advisors

I would argue that if you dislike the sort of game where you can't influence every variable, then Paradox games really aren't for you

Can we be done with this cop out? Please. I've been at EU longer than Pdox has existed. Pdox has done many wonderful and great things with EU and I'm only playing because I love the series and the time period (I wrote a number of my masters papers on the time period).

But it is a blatant and lazy strawman to say those who object to the single most valuable currency in the game being effectively random and void of most strategic choice. Right now gold pays for military and incidentals and MP drives progress - depth for province improvements, breadth for conquests, and height for technology. Rarely do the two interact at all. In virtually every game, the only question is how expensive of advisers can I afford. After that's gone, it is pretty rare that any gold giving option is worth the cost of spending MP. Likewise, within the different MP types, there is very little interaction. For instance, if I'm coring something myself I might consider spending DMP on war exhaustion reduction ... but spending 75 DMP to save even 10 AMP is rarely a tough strategic choice. I always know if I need those 75 more than the 10 or vice versa, it is exceptionally rare that for any choice - events, stab gains, war exhaustion reduction, etc. - to be non-trivial.

This is poor strategy design.

I'm perfectly fine if the AI's personality is derived randomly ... just let the player know exactly what any stochastic components are and what the attitude actually does - having hidden knowledge that can be reverse engineered is elitist BS. Likewise, battles effectiveness should lie on a bell curve ultimately. I don't need this to be something where I can tabulate every possibility ahead of time.

But here is the rub, the closer something gets to pure random, the less room there is for strategic interplay. Take the classic game theory example: chess-with-dice. In chess-with-dice you play just like normal, but after each move a player rolls dice and if all his dice roll a six he wins. If you play chess-with-dice using three or more six sided dice each, then the game is virtually identical to normal chess. With just two normal dice, then you see a few changes favoring weaker players to play delaying games and stronger players hence lose a lot of strategic options for long end games. Playing with just one die a side makes the game lose any strategic value - if you can avoid any of the fool's mate like openings the game is just who can roll a six first.

Similarly in EUIV, Republics are far more strategically deep than monarchies. Elections require you to make strategic trade-offs; when do I re-elect a candidate, do I need more AMP or DMP right now? Similarly, having to trade off resources for piety makes the Muslim dynamic far more interesting than the other religions. Why, because while there is randomness, these aren't simple optimization choices.

I mean seriously, if the whole point of MP is to remove it from the player's control - then why does the Republic election mechanism exist? You cannot have that and then say - nope can't control MP. Obviously, Pdox built in a deterministic MP system and it works fine; there is nothing magical about random MP stats you can play the whole game without touching them. Now sure, I dislike how the price for getting that strategic depth is shucking some very nice mechanisms (being HRE, inheritances, most royal marriages, legitimacy), but it is a lazy thing to say the EUIV couldn't be better with a less random MP spread.

This was not a period where kings were randomly chosen with no background behind them. Even if you did get an inbred, mad idiot you had civil services that handily stepped in for the mad kings. Long ago when EUIV was first announced and they revealed MP, I thought it was great, but said I couldn't believe that Pdox would let players get tanked or have too easy of games with outlier monarch stats; they'd have some dynamic historical events so you could kill off the mad king (or retire her to a convent), wunderkinds would a bunch of negative events as historically the strongest rulers pissed off the most entrenched power brokers. But alas, Pdox really did think that random wouldn't have problems and it has not stopped causing problems ever sense.

 

[mcmanusaur]

long post

Good post.

For the record, I'm not really a fan of the MP system in and of itself, but I think EU4 has great potential regardless. I would actually identify other aspects of the game besides MP as severely limiting its potential.

If the developers wanted to make a simulation of Europe in the time frame, they've succeeded beautifully.
If the developers wanted to make an alternate history strategy game, they've made a poor decision with MP.

Uh, I don't think I would say that MP are an acceptable mechanic from a simulation standpoint, personally.

 

[Saintrl]

MP resulted in technology being almost independent of economy, which is bizarre from both a historical and gameplay viewpoint. In fact, investing in your economy slows your technological progress, and vice versa.

The more complaints I see on this forum the more I begin to think MP is at the root of EUIV's problems, from coring/OE, to the lack of peacetime mechanics.

I'm not sure if I read. Bigger countries that make more money can invest in better advisors hence bringing in more MP even if they have the unfortunate roll of a bad ruler. That translates to economy affecting technological progress in a way no?

 

[ARASHI]

In all honesty, i think Arash should just play as republic, that way you don`t get random rulers, they are perfectly predictable and player get`s a choice at what kind of MP is prioritised. That actually makes monarchies and republics quite distinct.

The last thing I need is being forced to pick republic due to a broken game mechanic. This is exactly what the discussion is about. No thank you.

There is no dept in them. Strategic impact!=depth.

Very well. Given how influential wonders are in Civ. I regret we cannot reach a concensus on that matter.

Western nation pays 600 for tech, 400 for idea, 3/2 is the cost ratio. Chinese tech nation pays 900ish(?) for tech and 400 for idea, the ratio is 2.2 Now, considering they have the malus to MP, the Chinese group is more pressed for MP, and more pressed to tech up, hence why the relativly cheap otherwise ideas are more balanced in terms of cost-benefit compared to tech cost for that group.

You repeatedly make reference to the relativity cost, without demonstrating a logic. In absolute terms the less advance groups always lose out by a big margin. If the MP reduction is designed to do what you claim it does. Then why doesn't PDS just scale up the idea cost for less advance nations just like they did with techs?

At least that is what i get as PI`s official stance.

And now we have someone claiming he has an official stance.

 

[darthfanta]

Exactly. Monarch points works fine for a Feudal kingdom or duchy coming straight out of Crusader Kings II, but for a nation with a centralised bureaucracy, be it Great Britain, the Ottoman Empire, or Ming, the effects of the Monarch would be comparatively invisible to the work of all the ministers, nazirs, secreteriats, viziers, bureaucrats, directors, etc. These things are not represented at all.



I'm waiting for someone to try and make a genetics argument.

Great Britain maybe, but definitely not MING. A line of lazy emperors was part of the reason why it eventually fell.

 

[ARASHI]

The big problem with monarch points are that they devolve into simple optimization problems. How do I get more monarch points? Hire better advisers. And that is pretty much it. How do I get more efficient at using monarch points? Idea groups, westernizing, and maybe some minor fiddling with events/governments/decisions...

You described very precisely how the MP system as it stands fail to offer strategic trade-offs and how the resource system structure causes it to deviate from a 'real' strategy game. I am delighted that a lot of fellows players do understand the underlying problems that we are facing.

 

[ARASHI]

Great Britain maybe, but definitely not MING. A line of lazy emperors was part of the reason why it eventually fell.

You surely know something about Ming's history and brought up a good point. Yes Ming has managed to get a beeline of terrible rulers on the throne and the dynasty fell apart eventually. But I would also like to point out that due to Ming's centralized government system, bureaucrats and the like still managed to let the empire lived for 300 years before it crumbled.

This is a perfect example of how both the rulers and the centralised government BOTH played an important role in deciding a nation's fate. Unfortunately the current system in EUIV failed to demonstrate that relationship.

 

[VolitionNewlove]

Great Britain maybe, but definitely not MING. A line of lazy emperors was part of the reason why it eventually fell.

Lazy rulers? The emperor, while theoretically all-powerful in , had little to do with the running of the empire. It's quite the opposite - Emperors from the very first (Hongwu) had been trying to dismantle the beauracracy in attempt to keep full power over affairs of government (and thus prevent them from undermining his authority and influence,) not that the Emperors had somehow become complacent to the bureacrats.

Even with these efforts by the emperor, Ming retained an intricate beauracracy, something unmatched for most of EUIV's timeperiod. Ming's faction system is intended to portray the power struggles happening in the Administration.

Ming encompassed a huge area, and had a huge population. It's unreasonable to think an Emperor could have managed these affairs decisively, and it was the dimantling of these institutions that was a major factor in Ming's decline and collapse, rather than the Emperors simply being "lazy."

The fact of the matter is, that Ming had always struggling from money problems, ever since Hongwu's disbelief in the concept of inflation. To claim that it was any one reason is silly, but I want to know where you got the idea that the Emperors were somehow supposed to be complacent to the Beauracracy.

 

[Me_]

Good post, OP. Well thought out. I haven't played a lot of EU4, but I agree with the general point. The huge role that Paradox has decided to ascribe to the random number generator and the poor balance do indeed seem to be the core problems plaguing EU4. Personally, I do not consider them "gamebraking", but they are definitely there and they are quite annoying.
As it is now, the game feels a lot more like Solitaire and a lot less like Freecell, if you know what I mean. You can try utilizing certain techniques to increase your oddds, but the end result is often determined not even by mechanics outside of direct player control, as much as a lack of mechanics, supplanted with a RNG roll. Frankly, I fail to see how this could be amended without an overhaul of most basic elements of the game, but knowledge of the problem is the first step towars a cure.
I'd also like to point out that one of the other big problems this game faces is its players: there is, and has been for a long time, a divide between those who see this game as a game an those who see it as a pseudo-history simulator. Those playing the game as a game will always be facing problems from the other group, as an inherent inability to model history within the confines of a video game means that the second group has nothing beside RNG to offer as an alternative to player-influenced actions.