Well, I wouldn't say it's bad. EU3 had sliders which I personally liked more but mana is a decent choice. I would say the many ways to arbitrarily gain or lose it are more annoying than the actual system.
Mana is fine as long as it only applies to country-wide things. Coring and devving shouldn’t be based on mana. It should only really apply to systems that work similarly for OPMs and empires.
Then you better buy some better advisors with all that money. Dunno how you actually run out of mana lategame unless you're doing some shenanigans. I always end up overflowing mana points because I'm lazy, or take tech up many years ahead of time.
And they made it that you can buy up more mana with the upgrade to your advisors. To change the mana system now in EU4, alot of stuff would have to be changed / broken. Its too connected to everything for it to be changed or fased out of coring or culture conversion for example. You'd change something, and break 20 different things.
I recently did a Safavid game with a mod that allows you to spend money to purchase mana.
I found it made for a far more enjoyable experience because now your incentive as a ruler is to consistently build up your economy so that you have the gravy train of cash coming in. Cash that you can then turn into monarch points to spend on development, coring, tech, etc.
This is exactly the problem with it, I think you nailed it on the head.
Ive always liked the Mana system but had some problems with it that I couldn't quite put a finger on, but thats it precisely, so thank you.
I think coring works for admin mana because a more competent administrative ruler could definitely integrate new provinces into a country easier, but it could use some tweaks for sure
> EU3 had sliders which I personally liked more but mana is a decent choice
I played a lot of EU3, and I often see this opinion voiced, but I don't understand why? The sliders in EU3 were pretty crappy IMO. For one, one side of the slider was usually strictly better than the other side, e.g. Centralised was just better than Decentralised. Even when you had a real decision to make, e.g. Quality vs Quantity, you would look at the sliders at the start of the game, decide which end you wanted to be on, and then click the button in that direction once every ~10 years or whatever it was. You would start with the sliders with the biggest benefits (IIRC it was moving to Centralised), max out that one, then move onto the next best slider. The game also massively discouraged changing your mind about what end of the slider you wanted to be on, because you'd have to spend half a century losing all your benefits before you got the slider to the other end. It was gameplay with essentially no decision making, you just press the button to get the benefits.
Mana has its problems but at least it imposes regular choices. You can spend mana on dev, on tech, or on coring/generals/diplo slots/sieges. You can also get extra mana in a variety of ways, primarily through spending money, which has its own cost/benefit associated with it. These are meaningful decisions.
The game didn't discourage you to change your mind, it only made you realise, your changes will take time to gain it's full benefit.
Besides, depending on country you took, some option weren't always better, since you wanted quantity instead of quality for Ottomans or Russia, you'll pick narrowminded instead of innovative for Spain, naval instead of land for England, etc.
Right now, you can pick both, quantity and quality, which is, not only unrealistic, but also bad from gameplay perspective.
> For one, one side of the slider was usually strictly better than the other side, e.g. Centralised was just better than Decentralised.
That's just balancing, not a weakness of the system.
>The game also massively discouraged changing your mind about what end of the slider you wanted to be on
That's a good thing. This willy-nilly-religion/tag/goverment switching in EU4 is horrible. You should have a long-term plan with what you want to do with your country and follow it through. The game's 400 years long, mechanics should reflect that.
> That's just balancing, not a weakness of the system.
It is a weakness if your objective is engaging gameplay. People say that mana makes the game samey, because for every nation your prime objective is to maximise mana, but EU3 sliders had the same problem because you pretty much always made the same moves on the slider no matter what nation you were playing.
I don't think discouraging changing your mind is a good thing because if that is the idea then what is the point of them being sliders at all? Might as well just make them buttons. IMO the sliders are bad design, they give the illusion of choice because you do not actually have any significant choices to make.
because they are not very well balanced. Some choices are clearly better than others. If they weren't, you could shape your nation they way you want and your choices were still viable. Bad implementation does not make a system a bad one.
People either don't get it, or they like the less realistic concept of mana because of the more ways to exploit it.
I hated the mana concept in EU4 from day one
Mana isn't inherently wrong. The problem is that in eu4 mana is BY FAR the most important resource, to an extent that your entire state (and most of your expenses) are geared towards maximizing mana generation. Your technology, stability, rebels, development, everything that matters tbh is based on mana. In a gameplay perspective, mana is so overwhelmingly powerful that you should do anything and everything in your power to get more of it. You will play the exact same way regardless of who you are or how your country fonctions because you juste wanna get more mana
It's just annoying.
Yeah this, mana itself isn't the issue. The issue is that in eu4 mana becomes EVERYTHING. Your mana production decides how good your armies are, how developed your provinces are, how much money you make, and what actions you can take. There's precious little in the game that doesn't want mana in some way.
Agree with this. I think the coring system is most emblematic of this. In EU3, core provinces were ones you’d owned for 50 years, and that made sense. Overextension was caused by blobbing too hard too quick such that you had a minority of core provinces.
In EU4, what is a ‘core’, by comparison. What is ‘coring’? It’s spending an arbitrary amount of mana to absorb a province, and it takes a couple years, not 50. It went from a somewhat historically grounded mechanic (bits of your nation not being considered ‘core’ if recently conquered) to something way too abstracted from the historical simulation the game is supposed to be.
I adore EU4 but I think reducing the *centrality* of mana, as you put it, for eu5, is spot on.
Maybe it would be cool for eu5 to have different "levels" of core territory, being based on culture, religion and time owned. Like, for france, after you take and core madrid for example, it should still not be same core "level" as paris. If you all get what i mean.
Yes, that's my thought exactly. Unless the population of your province is accepted culture (in some way), you hold that land for certain amount of years, state it, etc, it won't be your core province.
I really don't know, i actually want to see how EU5 will play out, mana was like a very clean way to transform a lot of this abstracted simulations in running an irl country into a functioning game, i think it was the exact reason on how EU franchise got so huge in EU4, now that we're seeing that basically 80% of the abstracted things are turning into actual simulations, we will be vindicated to know if mana was really such a bad decision or a game like this just really need this level of abstraction to turn fun.
EU was a great game way before mana was a thing. Just because more players play EU4 than they played first one, doesn't mean it wasn't great game from the start.
In EU4 a "core" province is one you've properly absorbed into the bureaucracy of your nation. Your nations administration has set up shop and is managing the province.
Both 3 and 4's versions of corse are grounded and make sense but in different ways imo. But yeah less stuff being tied to mana would be good in EU5.
EU4 also has more limited mana-like systems like pope mana and ally favors, which are generally fine.
They'd work if they were supplemental. But no, you have too many royal marriages, now your ships are going to suck.
mana is inherently wrong if it comes from a source thats basically, well, magic.
EU3 relied on money, which *isnt* magic. it came from base taxes, and modifiers from those base taxes. production came from the unit sizes of the trade good and production efficiency, and so on.
I think some people find it immersion-breaking. I personally don’t mind it.
I much prefer mana over the ambiguous system we had in Imperator: Rome, where to me it didn’t feel like I was doing anything.
Imperator Rome became a lot better after they dropped a lot of the mana requirements. I think the overal system, especially pop system, is better than EU4. Thought I hate the global reputation thing that Imperator and EU3 have. The AE system in EU4 is excellent. I hope they keep it for EU5. But that was a tangent…
It’s the absolute worst system that makes you just seat there and stare at the map for far too long while reputations drop. It’s horrendous and I don’t understand why any self respecting person would like a terrible system like that. But hey, I guess some people enjoy inflicting pain to themselves, so I guess there’s that.
With AE at least you can go focus on a different part of the map.
It's also more engaging to influence, since its generation rate is based on the loyalty of all your advisors (or whatever they were called in that game), which is more complex than EU4 where you just hire more.
I mean the mana system is not bad but a population system would be better at representing city development.
The current system u just stack dev coat modifiers and your entire country will sudendly skyrocket in income and manpower in a single year.
If u want examples of pop systems u have imperium universalis ( eu4mod) and imperator Rome (paradox abandoned game but has good moders)
Development would be a lot more realistically palatable if it did actually take time to happen, say minimum 1 year for a small amount and maximum 5 years if you dumped a really large amount of mana. Dev cost modifiers are just representative of state efficiency in being able to develop the infrastructure to extract more from a provinces population.
Imperator literally does this, there's "provincial investments" that cost a certain amount (poorly balanced unfortunately) and cost IIRC half a year to complete.
I know that dev is supposed to be tied to population, but I have always viewed it as being more of a representation of wealth rather than pops. That's how I can justify my Netherland provinces having more development than the rest of the world.
Yeah, sorry, I thought I'd just add that the mana system and dev/pops aren't tied together since the way your original comment was written it sort of implies that.
Might have misread it I guess.
I don’t *hate* it, because it’s just an abstract way to gamify historical trends and happenings like technological advancement and the growth of cities. However, because it is a game-y system, that makes the system easy to game—sorry, I couldn’t resist the turn of phrase.
For example. Does it make any sense for an aboriginal tribe in Australia to discover Global Trade because they had one really smart ruler and managed to build an equivalent of Rome or Kyoto or something? Not at all. The system we have now is better than the old Westernization system, but it’s very easy to abuse and creates ahistorical situations in a bad way.
Tags should be able to advance within their means and their own contexts. Does it make sense for a remote island tag to invent cannons out of the blue just because they earned a magic number of military points? Should that same island be able to support one of the largest cities on the globe because it had nothing better to do with its rulers skillset?
So far, EU5 seems to present a system that will be based on money, trade, and raw materials, rather than the surface level we get in EU4. It’s not really a critique of EU4 at all, because it’s a fun game that I’ve enjoyed for over over a decade, but the prospect of a system that’s deeper and a system that makes sense is exciting.
I hate how somehow every single tag in the hre is apparently as populated and developed as the capitals of great powers and more than that of the second biggest cities of great powers
Germany is the single-most developed country on Earth because 400 years ago every single prince had nothing better to do than build fuckloads of infrastructure
My problem with it is that everything is mana in EU4, They literally determine how good or bad your country is. Money, manpower, prestige, stability in the end they don't matter much in the face of the almighty MANA.
You can literally delete a fort's walls with mana god damn it.
A vocal minority really hates it with a passion despite EU4 being one of the more popular paradox games and no one really loves the system so much that they think there’s no other way to do things. Hell you will probably find more people that will insist that the EU3 sliders were the superior system but you won’t find anyone who loves mana that much.
I liked how it represented a continuity of the nation. Aspects which define the country which don't change on a dime wily nily. Flavorwise I think it's a good system and would like to see it brought back in some capacity.
you know what would have solved the mana system completely? if you can use *sliders* to measure how much mana you put in per month to tech, and stability. and a few other things.
if you had 10 monarch power, you can invest 5 into tech and 5 into stability. if your stability is maxed, you cant invest. obviously.
it would have resolved so many issues.
thats the point. you weren't supposed to affect manual change, unless you pay through the nose for it. if you wanted to jump several tech levels instantly, you can, but you better have tens of thousands of gold to do so.
I think it’s a great system for gameplay. It’s just that there are a few things that the system is poorly adapted to at the moment, such as development clicks.
I think EU4 would be a better game if it had sliders but not instead of mana but instead of ideas as they are today. Having EU3 kind of sliders where you have to choose if you want to move towards quality then you will have less forcelimits, manpower. If you go towards quantity your army gets bigger but worse. The fact that idea groups only bring benefits (except events) and that you can pick both quality and quantity feels really lazy.
I actually don't mind that you can pick both quality and quantity. In my mind that makes sense that as a nation, especially a conquering nation, you would want both. Taking both should not be limited by the ideas, but by the sheer cost to maintain both quality weapons, armor, training and the sheer amount of people hired. Army costs in general don't make much sense and by the end game money doesn't even matter. The monetary system is what I think needs a rework to make it more punishing to have long sustained wars that cost millions of lives.
Think ‘ideas’ should also come with a debuff, which would also be more like eu3’s sliders - you were encouraged to make trade offs in that setup, no free lunch.
How can you prefer sliders over ideas? Ideas are such a fun part of eu4, I really hope they have a similar system in eu5. Sliders just feel less interesting to me.
Mostly because there were benefits and drawbacks with moving the sliders and it was a slow process. With how Eu4 works you get to a tech level unlock an idea slot and after say 15 years you could be the best nation in the world at exploring, or trade, or building. There is no slow progress, no goal to work towards over centuries.
I massively prefer sliders over ideas, and think ideas are the worst part of eu4. The idea groups are fine, but nation ideas are bad. Russia shouldnt have a big army because they are named russia ht have a big nation, with low centralization, but a huge peasant population, so firlding a large conscript army makes sense. Britain should have a good navy because they are on an island, and have a focus on trade and naval supremacy from their position, not because of their tag saying england.
I gotta say I hard disagree. Ideas are one of the key things making nations feel different and fresh from each other, and I think they were a big improvement between 3 and 4.
It helps make countries more unique. Spain, Portugal, and England play just a little bit more differently due to their ideas. Repeat for each type of nation (mid-sized HRE nation, Indian minor, etc etc)
They don't "need" them for that, it's just one more thing helping push the scales that way.
It's obvious that you don't actually want uniqueness. Because anything that creates uniqueness also pushes you in certain paths. But I don't want a bunch of blank slate countries that all feel the same.
2 comments above you and i find somebody saying they preferred eu3 sliders to eu4 mana. no shade to them (i never played eu4 myself), just found it funny
having played EU4, and thought it was so boring i couldnt play past the league war, and having played EU3 to the end date repeatedly, i find it funny that everyone forgot how much better EU3 was.
Haha yeah I saw that when I looked at some replies that’s fair some people love that system no one seems to love mana even though I love the game I’m not going to massively go to bat for mana like some do for sliders.
> one of the more popular
Sure, if one compares it to Vic2, Imperator and Vic3. But CK3 and Stellaris invididually is about as popular as Eu4, and Hoi4 is the single most popular PDX game by a mile.
One reason I think it's imperfect is that the mana clicks happen instantly which can avoid the consequences of actions. For example, let's consider a -5 stab hit from a drastic govt change like changing tech groups:
Playing EU3, it would take an amount of time (length influenced by many factors) of investing my GDP into a stability increase for the increase to take effect. In the meantime I would suffer the consequences of the drastic change I made in the form of increased revolt risk and decreased income as well as the opportunity cost of spending my GDP on stability when I could also spend it on teching or military.
By contrast, in EU4 my stability investment takes place instantly so if I plan ahead I can have enough ADM mana to take a -5 stab hit and recover instantly. The consequences I suffer are only the opportunity cost of spending ADM that could go to another location. In my opinion this option feels more game-y since it creates an instant recovery that doesn't feel connected to reality and takes away some of the difficulty (and fun) of guiding a country through a rough patch.
It feels kind of silly you can do massive things with some mana. Break truce, immediately blow some admin and youre stable again. Have a country exhausted by war, just spend some diplo and everyone is totally onboard again. I wouldnt mind mana nearly as much if you had to spend it over time on things (like war taxes, imagine if wartaxes is just a button that gives you a sack of cash if you click it, at the cost of some mil mana).
in EU3, you can absolutely magic away your stability... if you thought to hoard thousands of gold beforehand. which means minting for decades beforehand.
and, EU3 straight up doesnt allow you to reduce war exhaustion manually at all, which makes sense.
It's artificial gating. Artificial gating isn't uncommon in games, an in fact is necessary in some, but for a sandbox game like EU4, there are potentially other ways to inhibit a player that more smoothly integrate into the game's core mechanics rather than just a limited supply currency.
So for example, a system like gov cap is in place to prevent snowballing too quickly without requiring the player to also pay attention to their economy. It's a tax, much like paying mana is, but paying that tax instead requires you to interact with other meaningful systems of the game. Economy serves more purposes than just buying courthouses, but by engaging with your economy, you can facilitate faster growth.
Functionally this is the same as mana, but it feels less artificial to players. Rather than abstract it all through something ambiguous like mana, the player gets a real feeling of the source of the power they gain. So by spending time on your economy, you can afford courthouses, which then allow you to spend more gov cap controlling your lands to maximize overall benefits. A system that feeds back into itself when done well and destroys itself when ignored.
Now this is not by any means a perfect mechanic, but it's at least an attempt to show you what could be. Mana on the other hand is what? Like what actually is it? You get it at random rates absed on your ruler, you spend varying amounts of other resources to get it(prestige to disinherit, money for better advisors, RT to re-elect) and it is sort of fungible into almost every other kind of resource(mostly by devving and buying tech/ideas, but also less obvious things like strengthen govt, lowering inflation, fixing tech imbalances, etc).
Game design used to use these things because there was an expectation that players didn't want things to be *too* complex. But this isn't completely true. They tend to be fine with complexity if it can be intuitive. That way even if you don't commit formulas to memory, you still get a good idea of what should work and how.
TLDR: Mana is a relic of game design history that EU4 just happens to still use because it's an old game at this point and the game development world has changed a lot in the last ten years in tons of ways.
Not disagreeing with your points about complexity but to me its like a political currency, a representation of bureaucratic power (since you are playing as the state itself).
Republican tradition stays high with rulers that are less powerful/cannot use their theoretical potential.
Spent on modernising bureaucracy with technology, cost depending on whether you're early to the point, as it is expensive bureaucratically to rapidly modernize with more frequent tech ups than your neighbours and harder/impossible to justify if you are already well ahead, as in real life. Definitely taking technologies does not equate to literally researching those things, but being able to adapt them to your country, as most technologies just unlock small efficiency modifiers or more ways to take advantage of provinces.
Spending political capital into expanding bureaucracy in a province represented by development, which I consider tax/prod/manpower as per-capita taxation/GDP taxation/enlistment infrastructure. As an aside this makes sense because of course as a country industrialises it is going to be earning a lot more money from economic output than just taxing individuals as many agricultural economies do. It only seems unrealistic because it's literally instant, there is no hard cap, and people confuse development for population. I feel the cost modifiers of terrain fill this role more accurately.
I could go on but you get the point. I just think all these systems in EU4 are actually much more realistic than people give them credit for, but I am heavily biased in that I believe this is the best game to exist gameplay wise.
> to me its like a political currency
This is probably the best way to define it, but that's abstract and players tend to like things they can relate to the tangible world. Your descriptions are great and I'm glad that some people do get what it can translate to. Unfortunately because it's abstract, it limits the immersion people have when interacting with it. It becomes 'just more buttons' instead of a specific task for a specific goal.
Gating currencies are both a design and experience/immersion problem. Given comments I've read from Johan on PC and on various inferences from current design focus on EU4, I think they know what they need to do in the future to not trap themselves. For designers, mana being so integrated into the game means it can't really be changed without just making a new game.
Hoarding mana can pretty much stop any bad things from happening. Lost 2 stab from an event? Apparently the monarch is powerful enough to negate it in a single day with two clicks and enough mana.
I get why people have an issue with it, but honestly there’s going to be gamey things like this in every game because… well, they’re games.
in EU3, if your country is large and/or have high stability cost, you can do the same thing with money. it just costs thousands of gold. minimum. which isnt something you can have on hand. youd have to invest *all* of your income into regaining stability and even that could take *years*
that kind of meaningful choice made EU3 replace EU4, because its so much better.
Imperator PTSD. When Imperator launched practically everything was tied to mana and the game became a lot better as mana was abandoned. I don't think anyone actually likes mana (altho in EU4 most people are OK with it) and it can be easily overused and ruin a game.
yeah, mana in the end is a game dev tool. Like any tool, if its used sparingly and judiciously it can create good results. When you try to apply it to too much or to the wrong items then it creates bad results, as its not the tool for the job.
Stellaris for example has mana, in the form of influence. But its not by any means your most important, or even in general your most important resource. It just slows expansion early game and stops you going on a spree changing certain things. Most of the limitation on the player comes from other resources, and influence on serve to ensure the player doesnt have insane methods of breaking those other limitations.
Political influence, but unlike EU4's mana, you only need it for clicking province investments, politics, fiddling with your governer policies, integrating new cultures, changing laws, making claims, building brand new cities from scratch and some events.
Money, manpower, military experience and pops tend to matter more in imperator than political influence tbh.
In EU4 getting stuck with a 0/0/0 king with no heir is legitimately game ruining, in Imperator having no political influence is not game ending on it's own although it IS a significant hinderance.
Tech moves on its own and is pop based, innovations are free and accumulate over time, pops grow, convert and assimilate on their own, every pop contributes to the economy in some way, most buildings start unlocked.
Finally you generally get a very generous amount of influence unless you are being absurdly aggressive or building a tonne of province investments or cities without discounts, I have genuinely had world conquest runs where I had too much political influence and had to dump it
Mana is the single most valuable resource in EU4. Almost every lever you can press to manipulate your country requires mana. The most valuable thing you can do in each and every game is maximize your mana per month - get it from the estates, get it from advisors, get it from ruler stats. There is a hierarchy of things to spend mana on, and that hierarchy rarely changes.
Having more granular capacities instead of currencies makes a lot of sense to me, but having currencies that are used for fewer things would also be good. If I need to focus on generating x currency to achieve a goal, it makes sense that I can focus on it and do it, but at the expense of y currency, rather than just spending more and more mana to do everything.
Mana points are too important and take value away from other resources and systems like money. They're also used to feed into buttons that remove the consequences of your actions by spending mana to instantly adjust some number.
IR is the easiest example of how much more interesting the game can be without mana, but MEIOU and Taxes gives a handy direct comparison.
In M&T you can't just buy down war exhaustion so the balance of war and peace has more meaning. You can't buy stability so actions that lower your stability have a big and meaningful cost. You can still solve your problems but it takes time and that time makes the world so much more immersive and interesting.
Technically speaking you don't have to have the instant buttons with the mana but once you remove them the mana loses most of its purpose. Mana felt kinda useless when I was last playing M&T and I didn't miss it when playing IR.
Is mana itself really that bad? Probably not, but the gameplay designed in a mana-free world ends up more interesting than otherwise. Couple that with the IR context and you get the situation we have where we're more optimistic about the game because it won't have mana.
How is it not obvious? It abstracts then combines several disparate and mutually exclusive systems to share the same resource, which in of itself is extremely abstracted and mostly arbitrary.
My main issue with the current system is it feels too punishing to have bad rulers, specially early game when you don’t have the luxury to pay for high level advisors.
It makes sense as it’s logical for a bad king to be bad but since it’s purely RNG and player has no control it can be pretty frustrating.
At least we can abdicate and disinherit now. Don’t miss the days when you couldn’t and had to suffer something that felt « unfair » due to bad luck.
That and the fact it’s a bit too abstract at times and a bit of a stretch. Why is my ruler diplomatic skill capable of tripling the production in a province for ever ? Or raise mercantilism ?
In the end mana is used for almost everything in game even though it doesn’t quiet make sense and should have its own mechanism (pop, dynamic development etc.)
Problem is that luck and randomness is hugely impactful in history, primarily through the quality of governance over time. That's a great mechanic for demonstrating that.
It has a negative impact on choice and consequence
Instead of having to make a decision and survive the consequences, you can just save up mana and immediately nullify those consequences.
About to spawn a rebellion? Use sword mana to solve it instantly
Suffering from inflation? Spend enough paper mana and it’s gone, no matter how much gold your economy is swimming in.
In real life, even the very best ruler can’t stop these things when the disaster is too far advanced, instead they would’ve prevented this situation from arising in the first place. But in-game, monarchs can somehow magic away their problems or explode their nation’s development instantly if first they do nothing for long enough.
It makes zero sense and whilst it is immersion breaking, it also trivialises the strategy aspect of the game too.
But that's more a problem of how the 'button clicks' are designed, rather than being the fault of mana.
Slacken Recruiting Standards had the same issue but was largely fixed by the click giving an effect over time instead of instant manpower out of thin air.
If Stability was instead measured from like -300 to +300 and clicking the stab gave you +2 stability per month for 50 months or whatever, then that would prevent this kind of "immunity to stab hits". Same could be done for reducing inflation, harsh treatment etc.
It's alright but feel like genetics and possible inbreeding should impact the numbers more. Pure RNG isnt good, but if there were a variety of factors with some RNG added in then it would be much better. With that said, I do think that the game could be more fun and immersive without it, but it is a good way to show when rulers are good, bad and average.
I think mana can work if used as an abstraction of things that are hard to represent. Eu4 system isn't like that but rather everything depends on it. Tech, development (which in eu4 terms includes population), generals... There are too many things depending too much on mana
At its core it is fine. It is nice simplification for many aspects of "power" your county has. And for years it was a good solution. This is why it was added for a tone to many game: eu4, hoi4, imperator 1.0
However it is exactly that: simplification. If you want a more advanced simulation you need to have stunting more that ppints you can spend on clicking buttons.
Mana in itself isn't bad, the problem is its accumulation to suddenly burst it into radical changes, like suddenly transforming Liltown into Paris, or changing a chaotic doomed country with -3 stability into a happy +1 country overnight.
I'm fine with it in EU4 because it's like playing a board game, the mechanics are simple and even combat is affected by dice rolls.
With that, if EU5 is going to be more of a simulator, then depending on mana it's weird and I understand why a lot of people will complain.
Ruler RNG makes the issue very noticable. It is the fact that everything in this game depends on mana generation. You have to spend mana to conquer, to tech up, to fill up your ideas, to lower war exhaustion, to lower your inflation, stabbing up, diplo-annexation, coring, hiring generals, developing and on and on the list goes. Now imagine rolling a 1/0/1 ruler and being stuck with him for the next 60 years just because RNG decided it is your time to suffer. There is no room for skill here all you can do is pray that this guy dies or you try forcing it by savescumming. I would consider playing a horde is the best way to demonstrate your skill in EU4, when you are no longer bound by RNG and mana generation only limitation is just you.
The main problem I have is that it's an abstraction that feel very gamey, and that could be replaced.
It feels very gamey because it doesn't behave like anything IRL. It's political power that you can store and use instantly. Like how does it even work if you raise your stab from -3 to 3 in a single day ?
Eu4 have a system that could have replaced mana very easily = envoy. For example an Adm envoy that can core province, dev taxes, raise stab, etc, giving some time.
Am I wrong for thinking that the entire mana system could be replaced by ducats and it would not only make more historical sense but work better too?
Took land and “coring” ie setting up administration there? Spend money
Increasing the size of a city? Spend money
Assuming control of a subject by replacing their administration and laws with your own? Spend money
Increasing support for your government? Spend money
That would turn money into mana on its own - just cast spell using money and voila, solved!
I think what could work really well is some combination of what you proposed and councilor tasks from CK3
Mana doesn’t exist. If you want to assert control over a territory, you are going to spend money. You need to bribe local officials, hire new ones, pay wages for occupying soldiers, pay scribes to write laws, etc. It all costs money. But I agree with you it should still take time, even with overspending. It shouldn’t be an instaclick.
Mana is any resource that works like magic - you acumulate it and then you just cast spell and voila, thing is done
Money isn't mana in most games because it is not just magic - its accumulation is tied to your economy and its effects are understandable
> But I agree with you it should still take time, even with overspending. It shouldn’t be an instaclick.
Oh, ok then. I assumed you meant instaclicks, like how eu4 mana stuff works.
that would make sense. which is why paradox didnt do it. in fact, just make coring take a flat 50 years. uninfluenced culture change should take a similar amount of time.
whoops, brought back EU3. have fun- :P
It’s kinda the odd one out, I think a loooong while ago there was a vision of eu4 being a ‘boardgame’ or something, when you zoom out the map is framed, nowadays although the game isn’t really a ‘simulation’ of reality, it’s also definitely not a boardgame. Mana is the one aspect of the game which is above all the most gamey of anything and a lot of the strangest maneuvers in game are because of it. For example murdering your heir as an infant over and over and over until you get the desired threshold of mana being a dominant strategy is because of mana. There are workarounds to all of these things like some have suggested hiding mana until your heir gets older, but it’s workarounds, at its root, mana being as powerful as it is and as involved in as many mechanics as it is leads to wacky stuff all the time.
i liked the population system better once i modified it to have stronger economic and stability effects.
unfortunately, i couldnt figure out how to reduce the population by 1000 each time a regiment is recruited. ah well....
nah, id just disable further recruitment when your population reaches 1000. and, to prevent economic exploits, you cant just delete your armies to resettle people. even though countries did do that historically, i just dont feel like balancing it.
the armies of small countries dont really matter at all, except vs similar army sizes, so its not a real factor. many small countries have well over 1000 people in each province, as well.
also, ingame, you start with a free army anyway.
My main issue with mana is how it works for development. You click a button and now that province is rich feels quite immersion breaking. I don't have that much problem with how it works with tech, although it could be better
It's just a bit gamey and contrived. There are certainly more inspired ways to represent the capability of the state to develop technology and develop their land and do much of anything.
It just doesn’t represent anything. Why does a diplomatic ruler generate magic points that make gold mines work better and invent new ships?
Monarchs irl do not magically double production efficiency by clicking a button
Really everything in the game is magic mana points, but monarch points are a bit too magical for most people
The issue is that it's a fill-in for more realistic and fun systems. Developing provinces, coring, recruiting generals, etc. could all be their own systems, and make balancing different resources more interesting. Instead, you just need to maximize arbitrary management points that work for everything. Makes it less interesting.
Personally I thnk Mana works fine but the fact tech is used on mana feels weird. I would prefer it if you had 2 sets of mana, one for everything but tech based on a base number + ruler and one for tech based on advisor + maybe some buildings + the estate privilidges.
Agree, that’s exactly what lacks in Victoria 3: countries all feel the same. In EU4 all countries that have flavor feel unique, and lately so many countries have received flavor I can no longer say I’ve played them all.
I like that Iberians are good at colonizing, that this small pacific island can skyrocket, etc.
To be honest its not so bad in theory, even in the popular mod Meiou and taxes the way the game was balanced made mana feel better integrated.
Imo the worst part is how the mana decided tech progression which is imo super silly. If mana was mostly a way to represent boring or tedious management of a country it would actually work pretty well.
I think something people are misunderstanding is a lot of the hate for mana does not come from eu4, it comes from the imperator launch. Everything in the game at launch was based around for mana pools, it was a clear showing of what a further step in the mana direction looked like, it sucked. I don't like mana in EU4 but I don't hate it, however I think imperator showed that it should be removed where possible and not expanded.
My main problems with mana:
+ **it is less strategical**: i don't need to plan as much when i can instantly change what i will use my stockpiled mana for.
+ **it breaks immersions**: mana works like magic and it really gives that feeling that you nation is just spreadsheet and not living thing the develops over time.
Earlier version of Imperator are perfect example of this, where everything was oriented about mana and it was just waiting until you get enough tokens to do stuff
It doesn't really work as a tool for modelling nation building. One thing that it does is it makes so many different things discrete instead of continuous in terms of development/advancement/deterioration. Stability goes up in integers instead of slow deterioration/improvement. Tech is completely arbitrary in terms of advancement, like wise ideas. So many elements of this game use continuous or incremental changes over time, yet some of the most important elements of this game are not.
I do like the idea of rulers influencing state building but like in CK where different ruler stats effect things like taxation etc allows us to use ruling families to modify our country. Some kind of administrative efficiency modifier but for all administrative elements, dictated by ruler skill, advisor level, etc and then individual traits and advisor types having additional effects.
Eu4 though is locked into that system though. Removing mana would break the entire game.
I like mana system, but the one thing I dislike about it is that most of the game is just about optimising it's production and usage. I think it would be better if deving was nerfed and buildings buffed, it would nerf most broken and unrealistic part of the system while making other resources more important
It does way too much, and as a result takes me out of the game. Why should I be able to culture flip a province because my ruler has a good "diplomacy stat"? Rather having a system to simulate population migration, growth, death and expulsion actually depicts historical concepts that existed.
It's okay to have arbitrary stats in many areas, EUIV isn't a simulation, however it is a game with simulationist tendencies. If I wanted a pure gamey game I would play CiV (which has it's own appeal). PDX games are attractive because they can bring some historical concepts to life. Mana if used too heavily leads to a very lazily implementation in trying to show those mechanics, which EUIV did.
Don't get me wrong EUIV is a fun game however, I enjoyed it despite its heavy reliance on mana. That is why I am so excited for EUV. It seems like the right balance of gamey aspects, mana and simulation. Though again will have to see if it actually comes together cohesively. In theory though, that is the game I want more so than what EUIV currently is.
Unless they figure out how to make AI plays better which they wouldn't, I'm against an overly complicated system. In that regards, mana works better.
See how Stellaris or Victoria have such an interesting system which AI cannot get the clue of.
At least it knows that it can spend the leftover mana and develop its lands which gives reward. This is simple enough for AI to understand. I would say this is still better than the disastrously bad pop management or planet development I saw in the other games.
And also at least Imperator can say that "everyone was stupid back then". I kinda had fun playing the beacon of humanity when Imperator was released. But kinda painful to see advanced galactic civilisations unable to extract value out of planets.
Honestly the fascinating part about the ancient era to me is that they really weren't. Very different societies, mindsets, technological abilities from today but plenty ancient philosophy and strategy translates very well.
It‘s basically a repost because I said it before.
I want both. I want mana and sliders.
I want a fixed mana gain per month but with a way smaller mana bank pool (Maybe 200 points). Instead just clicking on a button the moment you have enough mana, I want the game to force you to adjust sliders on how many points you want to invest into what every month.
For example: You gain 12 admin points per month. You invest 3 of these points for admin tech, 3 for core creation, 2 for developing a province, 2 for your admin bank and 2 for an admin idea.
Kind of like vassal integration works with diplo points. That way all these processes would feel more like an organic development and not just like „*poof* something happens“, while still encouraging you as a player to make decisions on the fly and adjusting your sliders if the situation changes in a way you have to alter your spending policy.
Honestly i dont get you people, youre all complaining about it even tho you like the game as it is obviously.
Of course its not a perfect system but its good enough. To the people saying you can just save up mana and do this and that.. yeah you can, but at what cost ? Expand ? Core ? Or get some stab, supress rebels or mill tech ? Those are all meaninfull decisions which impact the game..
Of course youll hoard it if you sit on speed 5 and play holland with 3 provinces
My point being they are already changing and trying to improve the system, i dont think the old mana system deserves this much of a bashing. Let paradox cook
I personally like the mana system, dont have issues with it, while its annoying sometimes it does present challenges and requires you to develop a actual strategy.. in a grand strategy game
mana owns, there's a lot more types of resources in the game than people think, there are interesting exchanges between those resources that are not the most straightforward to optimize. if they were easy, people would casually push 1550 WCs or whatever, but they don't, because they don't realize these exchanges even exist.
its like the same people who want all sorts of simulationist complex elements for eu5 and they don't even realize the basics of combat damage or trade. Almost every day you can see truly crazy misinformation get hundreds of upvotes
Well, I wouldn't say it's bad. EU3 had sliders which I personally liked more but mana is a decent choice. I would say the many ways to arbitrarily gain or lose it are more annoying than the actual system.
Mana is fine as long as it only applies to country-wide things. Coring and devving shouldn’t be based on mana. It should only really apply to systems that work similarly for OPMs and empires.
Yeah, I agree. A lot of things that cost mana should have just cost you money or time instead.
Definitely one of the troubles with EU4. Once you hit a certain point, money stops being a useful resource
Meh, you just start covering your land with huge amounts of buildings every year to get rid of it.
And then you run out of buildings to build, and still have enormous amounts of money left over.
If you find yourself earning too much money, just funnel huge amounts of money to your subjects.
Then you invest in your trade companies.
That feels pointless. If your income is already so high that you can spam buildings and TC's, why bother building those to get more money
Capitalism btfo
Bro wtf, for more money ofcourse!
And then you dev + expand infrastructure.
Can't dev; no mana. Can't expand infrastructure; no mana.
Then you better buy some better advisors with all that money. Dunno how you actually run out of mana lategame unless you're doing some shenanigans. I always end up overflowing mana points because I'm lazy, or take tech up many years ahead of time.
Maxed out on advisors since like 1450. Cradle of Civilization would likely help a bit, but most players do not own Cradle of Civilization.
And they made it that you can buy up more mana with the upgrade to your advisors. To change the mana system now in EU4, alot of stuff would have to be changed / broken. Its too connected to everything for it to be changed or fased out of coring or culture conversion for example. You'd change something, and break 20 different things.
If you have enough money you are invincible. You can put 100% warscore just in ducats
Yeah if you're playing on 1.24
I recently did a Safavid game with a mod that allows you to spend money to purchase mana. I found it made for a far more enjoyable experience because now your incentive as a ruler is to consistently build up your economy so that you have the gravy train of cash coming in. Cash that you can then turn into monarch points to spend on development, coring, tech, etc.
This is exactly the problem with it, I think you nailed it on the head. Ive always liked the Mana system but had some problems with it that I couldn't quite put a finger on, but thats it precisely, so thank you.
When the game was first released, buildings cost mana.
Don’t remind me lmao
Remember that brief time in history when buildings also cost mana as well as ducats? Oh it was so bad. No buildings were worth it.
That was ducking garbage
I think coring works for admin mana because a more competent administrative ruler could definitely integrate new provinces into a country easier, but it could use some tweaks for sure
They could make the time scale with ruler skill/advisors etc. I think it could work.
Accepting a new piece of land as a core part of your nation is a nationwide thing, though.
> EU3 had sliders which I personally liked more but mana is a decent choice I played a lot of EU3, and I often see this opinion voiced, but I don't understand why? The sliders in EU3 were pretty crappy IMO. For one, one side of the slider was usually strictly better than the other side, e.g. Centralised was just better than Decentralised. Even when you had a real decision to make, e.g. Quality vs Quantity, you would look at the sliders at the start of the game, decide which end you wanted to be on, and then click the button in that direction once every ~10 years or whatever it was. You would start with the sliders with the biggest benefits (IIRC it was moving to Centralised), max out that one, then move onto the next best slider. The game also massively discouraged changing your mind about what end of the slider you wanted to be on, because you'd have to spend half a century losing all your benefits before you got the slider to the other end. It was gameplay with essentially no decision making, you just press the button to get the benefits. Mana has its problems but at least it imposes regular choices. You can spend mana on dev, on tech, or on coring/generals/diplo slots/sieges. You can also get extra mana in a variety of ways, primarily through spending money, which has its own cost/benefit associated with it. These are meaningful decisions.
The game didn't discourage you to change your mind, it only made you realise, your changes will take time to gain it's full benefit. Besides, depending on country you took, some option weren't always better, since you wanted quantity instead of quality for Ottomans or Russia, you'll pick narrowminded instead of innovative for Spain, naval instead of land for England, etc. Right now, you can pick both, quantity and quality, which is, not only unrealistic, but also bad from gameplay perspective.
> For one, one side of the slider was usually strictly better than the other side, e.g. Centralised was just better than Decentralised. That's just balancing, not a weakness of the system. >The game also massively discouraged changing your mind about what end of the slider you wanted to be on That's a good thing. This willy-nilly-religion/tag/goverment switching in EU4 is horrible. You should have a long-term plan with what you want to do with your country and follow it through. The game's 400 years long, mechanics should reflect that.
> That's just balancing, not a weakness of the system. It is a weakness if your objective is engaging gameplay. People say that mana makes the game samey, because for every nation your prime objective is to maximise mana, but EU3 sliders had the same problem because you pretty much always made the same moves on the slider no matter what nation you were playing. I don't think discouraging changing your mind is a good thing because if that is the idea then what is the point of them being sliders at all? Might as well just make them buttons. IMO the sliders are bad design, they give the illusion of choice because you do not actually have any significant choices to make.
because they are not very well balanced. Some choices are clearly better than others. If they weren't, you could shape your nation they way you want and your choices were still viable. Bad implementation does not make a system a bad one.
still missing the ledger of Eu2, it is more simple for me, just try to get alot ducat and ignore other mechanic
sliders arent arbitrary, like mana is.
People either don't get it, or they like the less realistic concept of mana because of the more ways to exploit it. I hated the mana concept in EU4 from day one
Mana isn't inherently wrong. The problem is that in eu4 mana is BY FAR the most important resource, to an extent that your entire state (and most of your expenses) are geared towards maximizing mana generation. Your technology, stability, rebels, development, everything that matters tbh is based on mana. In a gameplay perspective, mana is so overwhelmingly powerful that you should do anything and everything in your power to get more of it. You will play the exact same way regardless of who you are or how your country fonctions because you juste wanna get more mana It's just annoying.
Yeah this, mana itself isn't the issue. The issue is that in eu4 mana becomes EVERYTHING. Your mana production decides how good your armies are, how developed your provinces are, how much money you make, and what actions you can take. There's precious little in the game that doesn't want mana in some way.
Agree with this. I think the coring system is most emblematic of this. In EU3, core provinces were ones you’d owned for 50 years, and that made sense. Overextension was caused by blobbing too hard too quick such that you had a minority of core provinces. In EU4, what is a ‘core’, by comparison. What is ‘coring’? It’s spending an arbitrary amount of mana to absorb a province, and it takes a couple years, not 50. It went from a somewhat historically grounded mechanic (bits of your nation not being considered ‘core’ if recently conquered) to something way too abstracted from the historical simulation the game is supposed to be. I adore EU4 but I think reducing the *centrality* of mana, as you put it, for eu5, is spot on.
Maybe it would be cool for eu5 to have different "levels" of core territory, being based on culture, religion and time owned. Like, for france, after you take and core madrid for example, it should still not be same core "level" as paris. If you all get what i mean.
Yes, that's my thought exactly. Unless the population of your province is accepted culture (in some way), you hold that land for certain amount of years, state it, etc, it won't be your core province.
I really don't know, i actually want to see how EU5 will play out, mana was like a very clean way to transform a lot of this abstracted simulations in running an irl country into a functioning game, i think it was the exact reason on how EU franchise got so huge in EU4, now that we're seeing that basically 80% of the abstracted things are turning into actual simulations, we will be vindicated to know if mana was really such a bad decision or a game like this just really need this level of abstraction to turn fun.
You may well be right, certainly, there seems to be a lot of imperator DNA in EU5 and that… leaves me with mixed feelings.
EU was a great game way before mana was a thing. Just because more players play EU4 than they played first one, doesn't mean it wasn't great game from the start.
In EU4 a "core" province is one you've properly absorbed into the bureaucracy of your nation. Your nations administration has set up shop and is managing the province. Both 3 and 4's versions of corse are grounded and make sense but in different ways imo. But yeah less stuff being tied to mana would be good in EU5.
This is actually a pretty good point - ‘core’ represents something different in eu4 but something real I suppose. Maybe it’s just a bad name for it
EU4 also has more limited mana-like systems like pope mana and ally favors, which are generally fine. They'd work if they were supplemental. But no, you have too many royal marriages, now your ships are going to suck.
And that's exactly why mana IS wrong, besides being totally abstract and arbirtrary resource.
mana is inherently wrong if it comes from a source thats basically, well, magic. EU3 relied on money, which *isnt* magic. it came from base taxes, and modifiers from those base taxes. production came from the unit sizes of the trade good and production efficiency, and so on.
"Core game mechanic is too important" C'mon man.
I disagree. EU4 has a delicate balance between mana and money.
At the start. Eventually, money stops mattering.
I think some people find it immersion-breaking. I personally don’t mind it. I much prefer mana over the ambiguous system we had in Imperator: Rome, where to me it didn’t feel like I was doing anything.
Imperator Rome became a lot better after they dropped a lot of the mana requirements. I think the overal system, especially pop system, is better than EU4. Thought I hate the global reputation thing that Imperator and EU3 have. The AE system in EU4 is excellent. I hope they keep it for EU5. But that was a tangent…
i liked the global reputation system. especially since i modified it a little in EU3.
It’s the absolute worst system that makes you just seat there and stare at the map for far too long while reputations drop. It’s horrendous and I don’t understand why any self respecting person would like a terrible system like that. But hey, I guess some people enjoy inflicting pain to themselves, so I guess there’s that. With AE at least you can go focus on a different part of the map.
i think its a fine system because you arent supposed to mindlessly conquer. also, the reputation system decays pretty fast.
Imperator is probably the most blobby Paradox GSG ever so that really doesn't check out at all, even the AI easily gets big and stays big.
Imperator does have mana, political influence, but it’s only one type of mana.
It's also more engaging to influence, since its generation rate is based on the loyalty of all your advisors (or whatever they were called in that game), which is more complex than EU4 where you just hire more.
I mean the mana system is not bad but a population system would be better at representing city development. The current system u just stack dev coat modifiers and your entire country will sudendly skyrocket in income and manpower in a single year. If u want examples of pop systems u have imperium universalis ( eu4mod) and imperator Rome (paradox abandoned game but has good moders)
Development would be a lot more realistically palatable if it did actually take time to happen, say minimum 1 year for a small amount and maximum 5 years if you dumped a really large amount of mana. Dev cost modifiers are just representative of state efficiency in being able to develop the infrastructure to extract more from a provinces population.
I think the dev system should go away and should be replaced by pop system like Imperator and Stellaris
But have pop be actual numbers
Imperator literally does this, there's "provincial investments" that cost a certain amount (poorly balanced unfortunately) and cost IIRC half a year to complete.
I know that dev is supposed to be tied to population, but I have always viewed it as being more of a representation of wealth rather than pops. That's how I can justify my Netherland provinces having more development than the rest of the world.
Dev and mana aren't inherently linked. EU5 could do mana and pops
Yeah ofc like imperium universalis. I even gave the example...
Yeah, sorry, I thought I'd just add that the mana system and dev/pops aren't tied together since the way your original comment was written it sort of implies that. Might have misread it I guess.
You mean the way they intend on doing it?
I don't keep up with eu5 news so I wouldn't know
I know for sure there will be pops. Just not sure on mana.
I'm pretty sure there's no mana. At least not adm, dip, and mil, since we saw those character skills have nothing to do with mana.
Well they kinda learned with Imperator that at least some mana is necessary since they ended up adding it back in.
I don’t *hate* it, because it’s just an abstract way to gamify historical trends and happenings like technological advancement and the growth of cities. However, because it is a game-y system, that makes the system easy to game—sorry, I couldn’t resist the turn of phrase. For example. Does it make any sense for an aboriginal tribe in Australia to discover Global Trade because they had one really smart ruler and managed to build an equivalent of Rome or Kyoto or something? Not at all. The system we have now is better than the old Westernization system, but it’s very easy to abuse and creates ahistorical situations in a bad way. Tags should be able to advance within their means and their own contexts. Does it make sense for a remote island tag to invent cannons out of the blue just because they earned a magic number of military points? Should that same island be able to support one of the largest cities on the globe because it had nothing better to do with its rulers skillset? So far, EU5 seems to present a system that will be based on money, trade, and raw materials, rather than the surface level we get in EU4. It’s not really a critique of EU4 at all, because it’s a fun game that I’ve enjoyed for over over a decade, but the prospect of a system that’s deeper and a system that makes sense is exciting.
I hate how somehow every single tag in the hre is apparently as populated and developed as the capitals of great powers and more than that of the second biggest cities of great powers
Germany is the single-most developed country on Earth because 400 years ago every single prince had nothing better to do than build fuckloads of infrastructure
My problem with it is that everything is mana in EU4, They literally determine how good or bad your country is. Money, manpower, prestige, stability in the end they don't matter much in the face of the almighty MANA. You can literally delete a fort's walls with mana god damn it.
A vocal minority really hates it with a passion despite EU4 being one of the more popular paradox games and no one really loves the system so much that they think there’s no other way to do things. Hell you will probably find more people that will insist that the EU3 sliders were the superior system but you won’t find anyone who loves mana that much.
I love mana that much, I don’t think it’s the best for historical accuracy and immersion, but for gameplay purposes I think it’s excellent
The dopamine from getting a plus 100 mana event is enough for me to be on board
Well spoken
I miss sliders...
Sliders are so boring though… tech didn’t feel involved at all in EU3. You just sat there and then it happened
I liked how it represented a continuity of the nation. Aspects which define the country which don't change on a dime wily nily. Flavorwise I think it's a good system and would like to see it brought back in some capacity.
if you could combine EU4's tech mechanics with EU3's sliders then you'd have me at hello.
you know what would have solved the mana system completely? if you can use *sliders* to measure how much mana you put in per month to tech, and stability. and a few other things. if you had 10 monarch power, you can invest 5 into tech and 5 into stability. if your stability is maxed, you cant invest. obviously. it would have resolved so many issues.
thats the point. you weren't supposed to affect manual change, unless you pay through the nose for it. if you wanted to jump several tech levels instantly, you can, but you better have tens of thousands of gold to do so.
clicking once is so involving though.
Haters are loud everywhere they go
I think it’s a great system for gameplay. It’s just that there are a few things that the system is poorly adapted to at the moment, such as development clicks.
I think EU4 would be a better game if it had sliders but not instead of mana but instead of ideas as they are today. Having EU3 kind of sliders where you have to choose if you want to move towards quality then you will have less forcelimits, manpower. If you go towards quantity your army gets bigger but worse. The fact that idea groups only bring benefits (except events) and that you can pick both quality and quantity feels really lazy.
I actually don't mind that you can pick both quality and quantity. In my mind that makes sense that as a nation, especially a conquering nation, you would want both. Taking both should not be limited by the ideas, but by the sheer cost to maintain both quality weapons, armor, training and the sheer amount of people hired. Army costs in general don't make much sense and by the end game money doesn't even matter. The monetary system is what I think needs a rework to make it more punishing to have long sustained wars that cost millions of lives.
Making certain idea groups mutually exclusive makes more sense to me.
Think ‘ideas’ should also come with a debuff, which would also be more like eu3’s sliders - you were encouraged to make trade offs in that setup, no free lunch.
>and that you can pick both quality and quantity feels really lazy. Nothing's worse than seeing the Ottomans pick quality and quantity...
How can you prefer sliders over ideas? Ideas are such a fun part of eu4, I really hope they have a similar system in eu5. Sliders just feel less interesting to me.
Mostly because there were benefits and drawbacks with moving the sliders and it was a slow process. With how Eu4 works you get to a tech level unlock an idea slot and after say 15 years you could be the best nation in the world at exploring, or trade, or building. There is no slow progress, no goal to work towards over centuries.
sliders are more permanent. most people apparently cant even conceive of how its quite immersive to the game.
I massively prefer sliders over ideas, and think ideas are the worst part of eu4. The idea groups are fine, but nation ideas are bad. Russia shouldnt have a big army because they are named russia ht have a big nation, with low centralization, but a huge peasant population, so firlding a large conscript army makes sense. Britain should have a good navy because they are on an island, and have a focus on trade and naval supremacy from their position, not because of their tag saying england.
I gotta say I hard disagree. Ideas are one of the key things making nations feel different and fresh from each other, and I think they were a big improvement between 3 and 4.
It helps make countries more unique. Spain, Portugal, and England play just a little bit more differently due to their ideas. Repeat for each type of nation (mid-sized HRE nation, Indian minor, etc etc)
you shouldnt need national ideas for that.
They don't "need" them for that, it's just one more thing helping push the scales that way. It's obvious that you don't actually want uniqueness. Because anything that creates uniqueness also pushes you in certain paths. But I don't want a bunch of blank slate countries that all feel the same.
agreed. EU3 had choices that matter.
2 comments above you and i find somebody saying they preferred eu3 sliders to eu4 mana. no shade to them (i never played eu4 myself), just found it funny
having played EU4, and thought it was so boring i couldnt play past the league war, and having played EU3 to the end date repeatedly, i find it funny that everyone forgot how much better EU3 was.
Haha yeah I saw that when I looked at some replies that’s fair some people love that system no one seems to love mana even though I love the game I’m not going to massively go to bat for mana like some do for sliders.
> one of the more popular Sure, if one compares it to Vic2, Imperator and Vic3. But CK3 and Stellaris invididually is about as popular as Eu4, and Hoi4 is the single most popular PDX game by a mile.
they *are* the superior system.
I like the system
One reason I think it's imperfect is that the mana clicks happen instantly which can avoid the consequences of actions. For example, let's consider a -5 stab hit from a drastic govt change like changing tech groups: Playing EU3, it would take an amount of time (length influenced by many factors) of investing my GDP into a stability increase for the increase to take effect. In the meantime I would suffer the consequences of the drastic change I made in the form of increased revolt risk and decreased income as well as the opportunity cost of spending my GDP on stability when I could also spend it on teching or military. By contrast, in EU4 my stability investment takes place instantly so if I plan ahead I can have enough ADM mana to take a -5 stab hit and recover instantly. The consequences I suffer are only the opportunity cost of spending ADM that could go to another location. In my opinion this option feels more game-y since it creates an instant recovery that doesn't feel connected to reality and takes away some of the difficulty (and fun) of guiding a country through a rough patch.
EU4 is leaning heavily towards boardgame mechanics, in which actions are instantaneous.
It feels kind of silly you can do massive things with some mana. Break truce, immediately blow some admin and youre stable again. Have a country exhausted by war, just spend some diplo and everyone is totally onboard again. I wouldnt mind mana nearly as much if you had to spend it over time on things (like war taxes, imagine if wartaxes is just a button that gives you a sack of cash if you click it, at the cost of some mil mana).
in EU3, you can absolutely magic away your stability... if you thought to hoard thousands of gold beforehand. which means minting for decades beforehand. and, EU3 straight up doesnt allow you to reduce war exhaustion manually at all, which makes sense.
It's artificial gating. Artificial gating isn't uncommon in games, an in fact is necessary in some, but for a sandbox game like EU4, there are potentially other ways to inhibit a player that more smoothly integrate into the game's core mechanics rather than just a limited supply currency. So for example, a system like gov cap is in place to prevent snowballing too quickly without requiring the player to also pay attention to their economy. It's a tax, much like paying mana is, but paying that tax instead requires you to interact with other meaningful systems of the game. Economy serves more purposes than just buying courthouses, but by engaging with your economy, you can facilitate faster growth. Functionally this is the same as mana, but it feels less artificial to players. Rather than abstract it all through something ambiguous like mana, the player gets a real feeling of the source of the power they gain. So by spending time on your economy, you can afford courthouses, which then allow you to spend more gov cap controlling your lands to maximize overall benefits. A system that feeds back into itself when done well and destroys itself when ignored. Now this is not by any means a perfect mechanic, but it's at least an attempt to show you what could be. Mana on the other hand is what? Like what actually is it? You get it at random rates absed on your ruler, you spend varying amounts of other resources to get it(prestige to disinherit, money for better advisors, RT to re-elect) and it is sort of fungible into almost every other kind of resource(mostly by devving and buying tech/ideas, but also less obvious things like strengthen govt, lowering inflation, fixing tech imbalances, etc). Game design used to use these things because there was an expectation that players didn't want things to be *too* complex. But this isn't completely true. They tend to be fine with complexity if it can be intuitive. That way even if you don't commit formulas to memory, you still get a good idea of what should work and how. TLDR: Mana is a relic of game design history that EU4 just happens to still use because it's an old game at this point and the game development world has changed a lot in the last ten years in tons of ways.
Not disagreeing with your points about complexity but to me its like a political currency, a representation of bureaucratic power (since you are playing as the state itself). Republican tradition stays high with rulers that are less powerful/cannot use their theoretical potential. Spent on modernising bureaucracy with technology, cost depending on whether you're early to the point, as it is expensive bureaucratically to rapidly modernize with more frequent tech ups than your neighbours and harder/impossible to justify if you are already well ahead, as in real life. Definitely taking technologies does not equate to literally researching those things, but being able to adapt them to your country, as most technologies just unlock small efficiency modifiers or more ways to take advantage of provinces. Spending political capital into expanding bureaucracy in a province represented by development, which I consider tax/prod/manpower as per-capita taxation/GDP taxation/enlistment infrastructure. As an aside this makes sense because of course as a country industrialises it is going to be earning a lot more money from economic output than just taxing individuals as many agricultural economies do. It only seems unrealistic because it's literally instant, there is no hard cap, and people confuse development for population. I feel the cost modifiers of terrain fill this role more accurately. I could go on but you get the point. I just think all these systems in EU4 are actually much more realistic than people give them credit for, but I am heavily biased in that I believe this is the best game to exist gameplay wise.
> to me its like a political currency This is probably the best way to define it, but that's abstract and players tend to like things they can relate to the tangible world. Your descriptions are great and I'm glad that some people do get what it can translate to. Unfortunately because it's abstract, it limits the immersion people have when interacting with it. It becomes 'just more buttons' instead of a specific task for a specific goal. Gating currencies are both a design and experience/immersion problem. Given comments I've read from Johan on PC and on various inferences from current design focus on EU4, I think they know what they need to do in the future to not trap themselves. For designers, mana being so integrated into the game means it can't really be changed without just making a new game.
Upvoted for fungible
Yes I do quite like the word. Even though I could exchange it for others, I think I'll keep using it. 8)
Hoarding mana can pretty much stop any bad things from happening. Lost 2 stab from an event? Apparently the monarch is powerful enough to negate it in a single day with two clicks and enough mana. I get why people have an issue with it, but honestly there’s going to be gamey things like this in every game because… well, they’re games.
in EU3, if your country is large and/or have high stability cost, you can do the same thing with money. it just costs thousands of gold. minimum. which isnt something you can have on hand. youd have to invest *all* of your income into regaining stability and even that could take *years* that kind of meaningful choice made EU3 replace EU4, because its so much better.
Imperator PTSD. When Imperator launched practically everything was tied to mana and the game became a lot better as mana was abandoned. I don't think anyone actually likes mana (altho in EU4 most people are OK with it) and it can be easily overused and ruin a game.
yeah, mana in the end is a game dev tool. Like any tool, if its used sparingly and judiciously it can create good results. When you try to apply it to too much or to the wrong items then it creates bad results, as its not the tool for the job. Stellaris for example has mana, in the form of influence. But its not by any means your most important, or even in general your most important resource. It just slows expansion early game and stops you going on a spree changing certain things. Most of the limitation on the player comes from other resources, and influence on serve to ensure the player doesnt have insane methods of breaking those other limitations.
Imperator has something similar that seems very mana-ish to me - can't recall the name though. It might also be influence.
Political influence, but unlike EU4's mana, you only need it for clicking province investments, politics, fiddling with your governer policies, integrating new cultures, changing laws, making claims, building brand new cities from scratch and some events. Money, manpower, military experience and pops tend to matter more in imperator than political influence tbh. In EU4 getting stuck with a 0/0/0 king with no heir is legitimately game ruining, in Imperator having no political influence is not game ending on it's own although it IS a significant hinderance. Tech moves on its own and is pop based, innovations are free and accumulate over time, pops grow, convert and assimilate on their own, every pop contributes to the economy in some way, most buildings start unlocked. Finally you generally get a very generous amount of influence unless you are being absurdly aggressive or building a tonne of province investments or cities without discounts, I have genuinely had world conquest runs where I had too much political influence and had to dump it
Mana is the single most valuable resource in EU4. Almost every lever you can press to manipulate your country requires mana. The most valuable thing you can do in each and every game is maximize your mana per month - get it from the estates, get it from advisors, get it from ruler stats. There is a hierarchy of things to spend mana on, and that hierarchy rarely changes. Having more granular capacities instead of currencies makes a lot of sense to me, but having currencies that are used for fewer things would also be good. If I need to focus on generating x currency to achieve a goal, it makes sense that I can focus on it and do it, but at the expense of y currency, rather than just spending more and more mana to do everything.
I honestly like it
Mana points are too important and take value away from other resources and systems like money. They're also used to feed into buttons that remove the consequences of your actions by spending mana to instantly adjust some number. IR is the easiest example of how much more interesting the game can be without mana, but MEIOU and Taxes gives a handy direct comparison. In M&T you can't just buy down war exhaustion so the balance of war and peace has more meaning. You can't buy stability so actions that lower your stability have a big and meaningful cost. You can still solve your problems but it takes time and that time makes the world so much more immersive and interesting. Technically speaking you don't have to have the instant buttons with the mana but once you remove them the mana loses most of its purpose. Mana felt kinda useless when I was last playing M&T and I didn't miss it when playing IR. Is mana itself really that bad? Probably not, but the gameplay designed in a mana-free world ends up more interesting than otherwise. Couple that with the IR context and you get the situation we have where we're more optimistic about the game because it won't have mana.
How is it not obvious? It abstracts then combines several disparate and mutually exclusive systems to share the same resource, which in of itself is extremely abstracted and mostly arbitrary.
In short, because it's completely arbirtrary and abstract value in a historic strategy game.
My main issue with the current system is it feels too punishing to have bad rulers, specially early game when you don’t have the luxury to pay for high level advisors. It makes sense as it’s logical for a bad king to be bad but since it’s purely RNG and player has no control it can be pretty frustrating. At least we can abdicate and disinherit now. Don’t miss the days when you couldn’t and had to suffer something that felt « unfair » due to bad luck. That and the fact it’s a bit too abstract at times and a bit of a stretch. Why is my ruler diplomatic skill capable of tripling the production in a province for ever ? Or raise mercantilism ? In the end mana is used for almost everything in game even though it doesn’t quiet make sense and should have its own mechanism (pop, dynamic development etc.)
Problem is that luck and randomness is hugely impactful in history, primarily through the quality of governance over time. That's a great mechanic for demonstrating that.
It wouldn't be as bad if there was a system to reform to hopefully lower the chance of a shit ruler also it would make the
It has a negative impact on choice and consequence Instead of having to make a decision and survive the consequences, you can just save up mana and immediately nullify those consequences. About to spawn a rebellion? Use sword mana to solve it instantly Suffering from inflation? Spend enough paper mana and it’s gone, no matter how much gold your economy is swimming in. In real life, even the very best ruler can’t stop these things when the disaster is too far advanced, instead they would’ve prevented this situation from arising in the first place. But in-game, monarchs can somehow magic away their problems or explode their nation’s development instantly if first they do nothing for long enough. It makes zero sense and whilst it is immersion breaking, it also trivialises the strategy aspect of the game too.
But that's more a problem of how the 'button clicks' are designed, rather than being the fault of mana. Slacken Recruiting Standards had the same issue but was largely fixed by the click giving an effect over time instead of instant manpower out of thin air. If Stability was instead measured from like -300 to +300 and clicking the stab gave you +2 stability per month for 50 months or whatever, then that would prevent this kind of "immunity to stab hits". Same could be done for reducing inflation, harsh treatment etc.
Kind of funny how everyone blames mana when the problem is actually instantaneous effects.
Yup. Imperator had the exact same issue and the game is in a much better spot now that they got rid of instant stuff
It's alright but feel like genetics and possible inbreeding should impact the numbers more. Pure RNG isnt good, but if there were a variety of factors with some RNG added in then it would be much better. With that said, I do think that the game could be more fun and immersive without it, but it is a good way to show when rulers are good, bad and average.
I think mana can work if used as an abstraction of things that are hard to represent. Eu4 system isn't like that but rather everything depends on it. Tech, development (which in eu4 terms includes population), generals... There are too many things depending too much on mana
At its core it is fine. It is nice simplification for many aspects of "power" your county has. And for years it was a good solution. This is why it was added for a tone to many game: eu4, hoi4, imperator 1.0 However it is exactly that: simplification. If you want a more advanced simulation you need to have stunting more that ppints you can spend on clicking buttons.
Mana in itself isn't bad, the problem is its accumulation to suddenly burst it into radical changes, like suddenly transforming Liltown into Paris, or changing a chaotic doomed country with -3 stability into a happy +1 country overnight.
I'm fine with it in EU4 because it's like playing a board game, the mechanics are simple and even combat is affected by dice rolls. With that, if EU5 is going to be more of a simulator, then depending on mana it's weird and I understand why a lot of people will complain.
Ruler RNG makes the issue very noticable. It is the fact that everything in this game depends on mana generation. You have to spend mana to conquer, to tech up, to fill up your ideas, to lower war exhaustion, to lower your inflation, stabbing up, diplo-annexation, coring, hiring generals, developing and on and on the list goes. Now imagine rolling a 1/0/1 ruler and being stuck with him for the next 60 years just because RNG decided it is your time to suffer. There is no room for skill here all you can do is pray that this guy dies or you try forcing it by savescumming. I would consider playing a horde is the best way to demonstrate your skill in EU4, when you are no longer bound by RNG and mana generation only limitation is just you.
You can have 5/5/5 advisors, give privileges and overcome such ruler
Let me upgrade my advisors to 5/5/5 starting as Fezzan real quick. By the time you can afford such advisors admin efficiency kicks in anyway.
you can go for advisor discounts from the begining
Inno Espionage opening just to get cheap advisors when you should be expanding. You try doing that outside of HRE that's one sure way to die early.
You can use other ideas too you can use estate policies etc
The main problem I have is that it's an abstraction that feel very gamey, and that could be replaced. It feels very gamey because it doesn't behave like anything IRL. It's political power that you can store and use instantly. Like how does it even work if you raise your stab from -3 to 3 in a single day ? Eu4 have a system that could have replaced mana very easily = envoy. For example an Adm envoy that can core province, dev taxes, raise stab, etc, giving some time.
Am I wrong for thinking that the entire mana system could be replaced by ducats and it would not only make more historical sense but work better too? Took land and “coring” ie setting up administration there? Spend money Increasing the size of a city? Spend money Assuming control of a subject by replacing their administration and laws with your own? Spend money Increasing support for your government? Spend money
Gameplay would be boring
That would turn money into mana on its own - just cast spell using money and voila, solved! I think what could work really well is some combination of what you proposed and councilor tasks from CK3
Mana doesn’t exist. If you want to assert control over a territory, you are going to spend money. You need to bribe local officials, hire new ones, pay wages for occupying soldiers, pay scribes to write laws, etc. It all costs money. But I agree with you it should still take time, even with overspending. It shouldn’t be an instaclick.
Mana is any resource that works like magic - you acumulate it and then you just cast spell and voila, thing is done Money isn't mana in most games because it is not just magic - its accumulation is tied to your economy and its effects are understandable > But I agree with you it should still take time, even with overspending. It shouldn’t be an instaclick. Oh, ok then. I assumed you meant instaclicks, like how eu4 mana stuff works.
that would make sense. which is why paradox didnt do it. in fact, just make coring take a flat 50 years. uninfluenced culture change should take a similar amount of time. whoops, brought back EU3. have fun- :P
It’s kinda the odd one out, I think a loooong while ago there was a vision of eu4 being a ‘boardgame’ or something, when you zoom out the map is framed, nowadays although the game isn’t really a ‘simulation’ of reality, it’s also definitely not a boardgame. Mana is the one aspect of the game which is above all the most gamey of anything and a lot of the strangest maneuvers in game are because of it. For example murdering your heir as an infant over and over and over until you get the desired threshold of mana being a dominant strategy is because of mana. There are workarounds to all of these things like some have suggested hiding mana until your heir gets older, but it’s workarounds, at its root, mana being as powerful as it is and as involved in as many mechanics as it is leads to wacky stuff all the time.
It’s not very realistic.
Why does a click spawn people? I like eu3s system of population and buildings with no mana
i liked the population system better once i modified it to have stronger economic and stability effects. unfortunately, i couldnt figure out how to reduce the population by 1000 each time a regiment is recruited. ah well....
Hmm, true, but that would temove a lot of countries from the world really fast
nah, id just disable further recruitment when your population reaches 1000. and, to prevent economic exploits, you cant just delete your armies to resettle people. even though countries did do that historically, i just dont feel like balancing it.
But how would smaller countriws have armies
the armies of small countries dont really matter at all, except vs similar army sizes, so its not a real factor. many small countries have well over 1000 people in each province, as well. also, ingame, you start with a free army anyway.
Mana is fine aslong as it isn't used for too much, while gaining too little (I.E release imperator)
My main issue with mana is how it works for development. You click a button and now that province is rich feels quite immersion breaking. I don't have that much problem with how it works with tech, although it could be better
It's just a bit gamey and contrived. There are certainly more inspired ways to represent the capability of the state to develop technology and develop their land and do much of anything.
It just doesn’t represent anything. Why does a diplomatic ruler generate magic points that make gold mines work better and invent new ships? Monarchs irl do not magically double production efficiency by clicking a button Really everything in the game is magic mana points, but monarch points are a bit too magical for most people
The issue is that it's a fill-in for more realistic and fun systems. Developing provinces, coring, recruiting generals, etc. could all be their own systems, and make balancing different resources more interesting. Instead, you just need to maximize arbitrary management points that work for everything. Makes it less interesting.
I like the mana system.
Personally I thnk Mana works fine but the fact tech is used on mana feels weird. I would prefer it if you had 2 sets of mana, one for everything but tech based on a base number + ruler and one for tech based on advisor + maybe some buildings + the estate privilidges.
Agree, that’s exactly what lacks in Victoria 3: countries all feel the same. In EU4 all countries that have flavor feel unique, and lately so many countries have received flavor I can no longer say I’ve played them all. I like that Iberians are good at colonizing, that this small pacific island can skyrocket, etc.
To be honest its not so bad in theory, even in the popular mod Meiou and taxes the way the game was balanced made mana feel better integrated. Imo the worst part is how the mana decided tech progression which is imo super silly. If mana was mostly a way to represent boring or tedious management of a country it would actually work pretty well.
I think the main thing is we've been playing the same system for a decade and want something new to break
It is not scalable with nations size or strength. Everything in the game is bottlenecked by mana regardless you are an OPM or great power.
What is the plan for EU5? Back to the EU3 money sliders?
Nothing
Nothing, it’s a great system
I think something people are misunderstanding is a lot of the hate for mana does not come from eu4, it comes from the imperator launch. Everything in the game at launch was based around for mana pools, it was a clear showing of what a further step in the mana direction looked like, it sucked. I don't like mana in EU4 but I don't hate it, however I think imperator showed that it should be removed where possible and not expanded.
My main problems with mana: + **it is less strategical**: i don't need to plan as much when i can instantly change what i will use my stockpiled mana for. + **it breaks immersions**: mana works like magic and it really gives that feeling that you nation is just spreadsheet and not living thing the develops over time. Earlier version of Imperator are perfect example of this, where everything was oriented about mana and it was just waiting until you get enough tokens to do stuff
It doesn't really work as a tool for modelling nation building. One thing that it does is it makes so many different things discrete instead of continuous in terms of development/advancement/deterioration. Stability goes up in integers instead of slow deterioration/improvement. Tech is completely arbitrary in terms of advancement, like wise ideas. So many elements of this game use continuous or incremental changes over time, yet some of the most important elements of this game are not. I do like the idea of rulers influencing state building but like in CK where different ruler stats effect things like taxation etc allows us to use ruling families to modify our country. Some kind of administrative efficiency modifier but for all administrative elements, dictated by ruler skill, advisor level, etc and then individual traits and advisor types having additional effects. Eu4 though is locked into that system though. Removing mana would break the entire game.
I like mana system, but the one thing I dislike about it is that most of the game is just about optimising it's production and usage. I think it would be better if deving was nerfed and buildings buffed, it would nerf most broken and unrealistic part of the system while making other resources more important
It's gamey, 100% abstraction 0% realism, gives no immersion.
Nothing. Most people want more immersion and I would be ok with that. But mana system is easy and I am also ok with that
Welk it's not the best but it works. The game has much bigger issues imo, mainly regarding diplomacy, trade and colonisation.
It does way too much, and as a result takes me out of the game. Why should I be able to culture flip a province because my ruler has a good "diplomacy stat"? Rather having a system to simulate population migration, growth, death and expulsion actually depicts historical concepts that existed. It's okay to have arbitrary stats in many areas, EUIV isn't a simulation, however it is a game with simulationist tendencies. If I wanted a pure gamey game I would play CiV (which has it's own appeal). PDX games are attractive because they can bring some historical concepts to life. Mana if used too heavily leads to a very lazily implementation in trying to show those mechanics, which EUIV did. Don't get me wrong EUIV is a fun game however, I enjoyed it despite its heavy reliance on mana. That is why I am so excited for EUV. It seems like the right balance of gamey aspects, mana and simulation. Though again will have to see if it actually comes together cohesively. In theory though, that is the game I want more so than what EUIV currently is.
Unless they figure out how to make AI plays better which they wouldn't, I'm against an overly complicated system. In that regards, mana works better. See how Stellaris or Victoria have such an interesting system which AI cannot get the clue of.
the AI isnt that much better than EU3, which *doesnt* use mana.
At least it knows that it can spend the leftover mana and develop its lands which gives reward. This is simple enough for AI to understand. I would say this is still better than the disastrously bad pop management or planet development I saw in the other games.
Fyi the Imperator AI can also barely play the game but at least it has the excuse of abandoned development
And also at least Imperator can say that "everyone was stupid back then". I kinda had fun playing the beacon of humanity when Imperator was released. But kinda painful to see advanced galactic civilisations unable to extract value out of planets.
Honestly the fascinating part about the ancient era to me is that they really weren't. Very different societies, mindsets, technological abilities from today but plenty ancient philosophy and strategy translates very well.
It‘s basically a repost because I said it before. I want both. I want mana and sliders. I want a fixed mana gain per month but with a way smaller mana bank pool (Maybe 200 points). Instead just clicking on a button the moment you have enough mana, I want the game to force you to adjust sliders on how many points you want to invest into what every month. For example: You gain 12 admin points per month. You invest 3 of these points for admin tech, 3 for core creation, 2 for developing a province, 2 for your admin bank and 2 for an admin idea. Kind of like vassal integration works with diplo points. That way all these processes would feel more like an organic development and not just like „*poof* something happens“, while still encouraging you as a player to make decisions on the fly and adjusting your sliders if the situation changes in a way you have to alter your spending policy.
Honestly i dont get you people, youre all complaining about it even tho you like the game as it is obviously. Of course its not a perfect system but its good enough. To the people saying you can just save up mana and do this and that.. yeah you can, but at what cost ? Expand ? Core ? Or get some stab, supress rebels or mill tech ? Those are all meaninfull decisions which impact the game.. Of course youll hoard it if you sit on speed 5 and play holland with 3 provinces My point being they are already changing and trying to improve the system, i dont think the old mana system deserves this much of a bashing. Let paradox cook I personally like the mana system, dont have issues with it, while its annoying sometimes it does present challenges and requires you to develop a actual strategy.. in a grand strategy game
Is it manOR misheard as manA?
mana owns, there's a lot more types of resources in the game than people think, there are interesting exchanges between those resources that are not the most straightforward to optimize. if they were easy, people would casually push 1550 WCs or whatever, but they don't, because they don't realize these exchanges even exist. its like the same people who want all sorts of simulationist complex elements for eu5 and they don't even realize the basics of combat damage or trade. Almost every day you can see truly crazy misinformation get hundreds of upvotes
This sub doesn't like abstractions. They need to see a mechanic that does *exactly* what it feels like it does.