Could you give a refresher? I thought that was mostly opinion based with a bare bones narrative structure built based upon reality.
Sure.
@MTB that's pretty much right. Here is my take on them.
Caveat: This is to the extent of my knowledge alone and I am kinda tired. Get secondary confirmation.
What
@ctulhuslp said. Here is my understanding as well to compound/accent.
Diplomacy: Luxuries and ties to other nations, usually marriages in trader families. We can spend this to close trade ties, like we did when the HK and TS got into a brawl like 30 updates ago and we stopped trading with both of them.
Economy: A representation of manpower and manhours we can divert from subsistence farming without people dying, with food surplus being a big part of this as well.
Expansion: The space we have. To gain Econ value, we spend this. I call this "space" because a lot of this is adding new fields in places they were not before and improving what we already have.
Martial: A representation of the amount of people we can send away to fight without collapsing our food intake. Made up of professional warriors, yeomen (warrior farmers), and specialists. Really it's how big a military we have and how experienced it is.
Stability: How happy everyone is in our civ. Health of current society and how close it is to fracturing. Other civs will die (i.e fracture into successors) if they end a turn at -4, we die if we even brush -4 due to the Symphony trait line. We use this to gain Econ from Cosmopolitan Acceptance.
Legitimacy: The belief of the populace that the rightful rulers are in place and have the people's best interests at heart. Useful for the painful decisions.
Centralization: Is how much power the King directly has. How much information flows through them, how fast it flows back and forth, and how much the provinces bow to their authority. This does cover disaster resistance but also means we can do stupid things very efficiently with a bad admin leader.
Hierarchy: Level of complexity in our bureaucracy. How many levels between peasant and king. I'm not actually all that sure what it does. It's changed all of once since I have been in the quest and that was to decrease by 1 point. (And note I have been active since page 700 so yeah...)
Religious Authority: Big new one, showed up after the Temple and Pilgrimage was added as a "Trade Good: Cultural". Not sure what it does, but
I think it has to do with making our Pilgrimage trade power greater. Makes us more attractive to come too.
Art: Our quality of art, a representation of the amount of free artists in our civ, the amount of general art we have. Kinda similar to Econ and Martial in this respect.
Mysticism: Free time of priests and shamans, availability for projects, how fast and how much new ones are being trained, as well as a measure of straight up mystical knowledge. There was speculation way back that having this high can mitigate things like Comet panic, which I don't think was ever verified.
Prestige: How worthy of awe we are to other civs, as well in part how rich we look to them. It ties into Pilgrimage and Diplomacy a bit. Thinking about it as how awesome the other civs think we are is a good way to do it, though do keep in mind that due to our refugee sucking behavior the other civs in the Lowlands at least have some grudges.
Our various actions all spend them, and there is this thing called the admin roll which decides the order with which we do our actions in and how they match with the timing of resource payouts and the like.