Why was the game's GUI designed to be uninformative?

[Johan]

It reminds me of Rome 2. Before release everyone was telling Johan that the mana points are not a good idea but he insisted that the players don't know what they are talking about.
Then the game came out and people didn't like the mana points.
It took a long time to change, by which time many players gave up on Rome 2.

long time to change?

i literally posted the new design 1 month and 1 day after the release of the game. https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/threads/a-new-currency-design.1181893/

just above 2 months after release we had the beta out for a second huge patch that removed mana, reworked pops to be simulation, and much more..

plenty of things to complain about on imperator but the speed which we changed the core issues is not one.

 

[Johan]

Out of curiosity... Do you still remember your actual way of thinking from back then regarding mana?
Because from the players' point of view it is easily to see it as "devs think they know better than we do and dont want to listen", but I want to give the benefit of the doubt and ask, why did you stand with the mana back then, before changing the tune after release?
Were you truly so sure of the mana system, or did you have doubts even before the game came out, which allowed you and your team to pivot quickly to change it?

I was 100% sure of "mana" being great. Its a good tool to balance countries and stop snowballing. At the time we started with Imperator in late 2017, EU4 was huge and our most played game at the time. Of course we would base mechanics on what worked great.

But yeah, it was 100% the "devs are sure they know better". I ran PDS for over 20 years, first as studio manager and then as creative lead. Not a single game that far had failed, and I thought I always knew best.

Changing it when you want to do something different is trivial. Actual gameplay code does not take that much to do. It is UI and AI that is time-consuming. And luckily we had made a great "currency" system that was used for everything in Imperator, so we could just remove the mana ones from it.. Took about 1-2 days to fix for 1 person.

 

[Johan]

I would argue that the core issues of the game never got fixed (bad/passive AI, a huge amount of the tags feeling pretty much the same, bad UI (yes, it's still extremely off-putting in 2.0)), but unforunately a very loud part of the playerbase kept complaining about issues that didn't really matter, so those got prioritised and changed quickly.

Fun thing about the AI in Imperator. We simply never could get the AI to handle the loyalty mechanics good enough, so the game was nerfed to oblivion for 1.0, so the core of the game, the internal character management, was trivial for a player, making the game feel much emptier.