LordNeidhart,
That's kindof the point... Trust is an important and potentially very valuable resource.
Trading an equally valuable one to secure it is what EU4 is all about -- strategic decision making.
Making it comparatively cheap (since let's be honest: MP, Prestige, and Ducats are generally very cheap resources) devalues its importance to the game.
Mind you, I did include the situational MP/Ducat/Prestige/etc. event in my suggestion. Though I think their cost should be quite high: on the order of 2-5 years of your nation's production - comparable to a ruinous war with a Major. Since that's ultimately what you are trying to prevent.
Monarch points are an order of magnitude more valuable than trust, however, especially considering we're not speaking of a single 150 ADM, DIP or MIL hit in order to normalize relations, but multiple ones. And remember, a "measly" 150 MP every 20 years is considered such a massive boon that the game mechanics only allows the Estates to grant you that amount when you're willing to push your country to the brink of ruinous civil war by giving them almost too much power.
Ultimately, however, beyond the simple matter of A - MP being many, many orders of magnitude more important than trust and B - My willingness to bet that no player on Earth would give almost half an Idea cost for the sake of simply 5 trust, or almost an entire European technology for the sake of 20 or so, especially NOT when they sit in the more MP-starved regions of the world where Monarch Points are at a premium, there's the fact that strategic decision making in a grand strategy game has to bow down to the demands of plausibility when possible, not actively work against them.
The tech system is by far the thing that needs reworking the most in the game, with one of the point pool being an insane amalgamation of two or three different schools of governance, and the other two either the most valuable resource in the game, or basically useless, with very, very little ability by the player to influence its acquiral, the most recent and meaningful method having literally been introduced to the game with this last patch. It's just one degree away from being a crazy abstracted resource with no justification for its existence and no justifiable veil of plausibility, and I'm glad that the devs seem to have noticed that and are dialing back its myriad uses to things that are sensible and related to internal national infrastructure only, while adding more potential sources of it.
But, to return to the main point, then, how does a nation build trust with another? In what way does sending over monarch points helps represent strategic coordination beyond simply saying "we are now doing some strategic coordination, behead some of your government officials/trader-noble-diplomat-shipbuilders/military engineers as sacrifice to the Great God Pan"?
No, what you do is send over manpower, and have the corresponding effect of reducing unrest in specific provinces of the target, to simulate military cooperation in putting down growing dissent or unrest [which, incidentally, is also the way revolts in one's own country should be curbed, not through MP, but through a meaningful manpower investment, which makes sense, you're literally throwing men at the other men who want to kill your men to make them not want to kill your men as much. By being dead]. No, you send over money, and have the target country have more funds for whatever uses it choose. No, you spend prestige and legitimacy, signing treaty and compromises with the target country in order to reduce Estate influence, or increase their own Prestige and Legitimacy, or whatever other possible application of the resources are imaginable.
What a better strategic decision-making can you hope for, after all, instead of spending fantastic currency whose existence is justified as a promising but flawed attempt at representing political capital and measure government power, that literally only works once it's used inside your OWN country, or in vassal states that are soon to BE part of your country, and that completely breaks down every plausible justification for its own existence once turned into differently colored money to be freely exchanged between nations, than the trade-offs between investing your own tangible resources, resources that you can demonstrably expend without the need for complicated abstractions and nebulous attempts at claiming plausibility, to temporarily weaken your own country while helping support a fellow, initially hostile regime that you aim to build up cooperative ties with?
