So this is a big topic that I’ve thought about a lot but I’m going to break it down into little pieces to try to get something written on paper.

I don’t like the introduction of Mana in EU4. If you’ve played EU4, you know this is a well-worn topic, but for the others, here goes.

In EU4, most every action in the game will cost one of 3 resources. These resources are called “monarch points” but the community calls them “mana.” Your admin mana mostly deals with stability and integrating conquered provinces into your realm. Diplo mana mostly deals with peace treaties, trade, and the navy. Military mana mostly deals with the military and rebels. The problems with this system start right off the bat with how one imaginary resource is performing multiple completely unrelated tasks. Why will signing a big peace treaty prevent me from hiring a new admiral? And furthermore, why do most actions happen instantly once I save up enough mana, shouldn’t technology be something you research over time? Instead here you just save up your mana and at the click of a button all your soldiers are better.

The unrealistic game-y-ness is the origin of the (originally derogatory) term “mana,” as the system makes your king seem like a wizard casting spells rather than a monarch ruling the country. “I was casting a spell to summon a general, but now I can’t cast cannon spells!” <- I spent my military mana on generals and now can’t afford technology. Diplo mana is the worst by far with how game-y and spell-like it is. Peace treaties, trade powers, naval leaders, espionage ideas, diplo is just the dumping ground for anything and everything that doesn’t neatly fit into either admin or military.

Another big downside with the mana is how it is earned. Every country gets 3 points of each, but the lion’s share of your mana will come from your ruler, who can add up to 6 points in each category. You can also get up to 3 points of each type from advisors, but in the base EU4 game half or more of your country’s total mana comes solely from their king. This brings EU4 back into the “Great Man” theory of history, in that the country of your ruler doesn’t matter a bit. It is your ruler himself who is solely responsible for researching tech, maintaining stability, summoning generals, reducing war exhaustion, and everything else. There are a lot of questions about why some countries succeed and others fail. EU4’s answer is that successful countries just had a powerful wizard as ruler who generated enough mana to research all the tech.

And in a way it’s downright racist to present history this way. Countries don’t just succeed because of their ruler, European rulers weren’t smarter than their counterparts in the rest of the world, making every single action a country takes or can take come down to how much mana their ruler generates just makes it seem like you read Edward Gibbon once and then slept through all your history classes.

This isn’t just ahistorical but it’s bad gameplay too. You don’t have any control over who you get as ruler, so your game will largely be determined by how lucky you get with this. Making pretty much every action a player can take come down to the luck of how much mana they can afford (because of how good of a ruler they got) is just bad gameplay design. Oddly enough it’s pretty clear Paradox even agrees with me, because while they haven’t abandoned mana in EU4, they did mostly abandon it in Imperator:Rome, and in EU4 they have added a number of systems to address the luck-based irregularity of mana.

Pretty much every DLC Paradox puts out mostly revolves around new ways to let the player generate mana. Getting advisors up to level 5, estates, razing enemy territory as a horde, disinheriting bad rulers or heirs, it’s clear that Paradox knows that the mana system is unfun and too luck based. So every DLC lets players pay for the privilege of ignoring it more and more. But it’s too much work to change EU4 now, and Johan is too stubborn to admit that he’s wrong, so mana is going to see out the remainder of Paradox’s EU4. Fans should hope they see the light and remove it for EU5.