ess1 wrote:I do not see why EPs should be spent in giving say, money or anything else. Anyone know the thinking behind this?
I've always regarded it as a sort of measure of policy capacity. So EPs are a way to indicate that the state (esp pre-modern but even in the Napoleonic era) was limited and could only do so much at a time. The games then have mechanisms to allow you to boost this scarce resource but at the cost of something else.
AJE is probably the clearest example of how this works and why at times you might prioritise EPs but at others its NM that has to be the focus and so on. Then the decision cards become the main tool for converting one type of resource to another.