Europa Universalis 5 is a forever game. Insofar as you might be able to play this grand historical strategy forever, but also because – my god – it takes forever to play. After a mere 45 hours of conniving, trading, battling, and scratching my head at menus, I have just about scraped my way through 150 years of Neapolitan history. I have yet to come across a single pizza with buffalo mozzarella on it, but there are approximately 250 years left to find one. This is the blessing and curse of a typically dense playthrough of Europa Universalis. Paradox’s trademark blend of intricate geopolitical clockwork, hands-tied confusion, and “one more year” compulsion is all here. You just need to set aside a few centuries to enjoy it.
For anyone who’s never indulged in these hypercolonial map scramblers, Europa Universalis 5 is a grand strategy where you pilot a nation through the ages, starting in the year 1337. I picked Naples – one of the recommended starter countries – but you could just as easily puppet the Shogunate of Japan, the Ottoman Empire, Zimbabwe, China, Dehli, or one of dozens of Mayan nations. Each country has its intricacies and quirks. If, say, Naples loses all its land to hungry neighbours, that’s game over. But other countries like the Golden Horde are “army-based”, and can only be destroyed if their military is wiped out. Islamic countries do not buy or sell alcohol. Irish tribes raise 10% more cows, presumably because there would be nothing to raid if they did not.
Your goal is simply to keep your country going. You may naturally want to expand your nation’s borders and gobble up smaller countries. That’s what war is for, and it has its own tempo, full of little toy men to move around on the map and battles to watch with an expression of mild concern as your 30,000 peasants are steadily butchered on a Sicilian mountain by Moroccan men-at-arms. Raising and moving troops is not hard to figure out, but the precise rules of battle can be tough to discern, buried as they are in heaps of stats and diagrams and tiny buttons that do important things. I have the benefit of years of Paradox strategy games, and even I do not fully comprehend exactly how victors are determined in these fights. I usually just make sure I have more troops than my foe, alongside a few of the shiniest new units from the tech tree.
In any case, I find rampant militarism one of the least interesting styles of playing the sim, even if it helps colour the map my specific shade of Italian blue. More inviting are home affairs. I proudly built roads across my entire country (it helps with trade and tax collecting) and made my capital city a book-printing, fabric-weaving powerhouse by building lots of dye factories, scriptoriums, and the like. The people who would come to love me most are the burghers: the growing population of city-dwelling merchants who love a bargain. Unfortunately, they’re not the only ones I need to please.
I’m talking about the “estates”. This is the game’s big balancing act, and anyone who’s played the Tinder-like kingdom management game Reigns will be instinctively familiar with the idea. There are five groups with power: the crown (that’s you), the nobility, the clergy, the burghers, and the commoners. Each estate has a little meter at the top of the screen at all times, showing their satisfaction level. If any meter gets too low, rebels will start to gather unseen in your country.
This is where the game’s many pop-up events come in, allowing you to side with one estate over another. The clergy don’t like this fancy new “university” idea, but the burgers love it – what do you do? The commoners want a holiday but the nobles think they ought to work harder – who do you favour? These meters will shift from red to green and back again as you try to balance out public opinion.
Sometimes you’ll grant a group special privileges, just to get them to shut up. For instance, I gave the nobles unreserved leadership of the navy (rich people love boats) and I granted the commoners their own representatives in parliament (poor people love universal suffrage). But each privilege granted gives more power to that group, and revoking these fancy rights is horrendously difficult by design. You can do it, but your country will be instantly destabilised. You could have a civil war by the end of the year.
It’s just one of the new plates to spin in this rich circus of history. I haven’t mentioned all the trade outposts I’ve seeded in other countries, or the sneaky way I’m annexing half of Greece, or how I’m pushing this new-fangled idea called “literacy” to the masses (it ramps up your research speed). The benefit of a historical sim of such terrifying scope is that you have access to an intense ahistorical anecdote generator, something you could probably play for the rest of your natural life. The trade-off is that you must face down an intimidating cavalcade of menus and buttons and keywords highlighted in bold.
It’s like waking up in front of a submarine’s control panel: an exciting and paralysing array of buttons to push, not always tidily arranged. You can study the manual closely (it has a sometimes-patchy encyclopedia of hints, and tooltips appear when you hover over a keyword). Or you can just dive in and start pulling levers until something expensive breaks. Either way, it can be an overwhelming start, even with the text-heavy tutorials doing their best to guide you.
This tutorial tries to quickly cover as many gritty systems as possible. Here’s the finance screen! Here’s how to build roads! Here are the different map modes! It seems to constantly say: “Oh, just one more thing” because, good heavens, there is always one more thing. This is a giant, intense sim, more granular than finely ground espresso and ten times as overstimulating. It might take days just to get familiar with its maddeningly labyrinthine user interface, although for seasoned EUIV veterans, much will be familiar.
The game’s language sometimes doesn’t help. A foreign country has an “opinion” of you, but also a “trust” level and a little currency called “favours”. All of these differ in minute ways but they all contribute to the same thing – your relationship with a foreign power. Many keywords are nearly synonymous. A “rival” is not quite the same as an “enemy”. One tab is called “diplomacy” and another “geopolitics” (the latter might have been more accurately titled “colonialism” – but we’ll get to that). The only way to learn the intended meaning of the designers is to painstakingly hover over the tooltips, as whole minutes of the game are spent frozen, a brow-furrowed expression of pure conceptualisation on your face. What is the difference between “food” and “food raw materials”?
I’m not going to explain all that. Partly because I already did and partly because it’s kinda dull to read about. Why spend time explaining the overelaborate markets menu, or telling you how the research tree is split into six distinct “ages” when I can instead tell you about the time 1.1 million people in my country died from the bubonic plague. It swept through the nation like a fart in a lift: immediately noticeable. The population numbers dropped massively. Events triggered every month or so, in which I had to make finicky decisions over who to infuriate and who to simply disappoint.
It was one of the first big dramatic changes to my nation. And yet, it remains a machine-like tale. I do not so much get the sense that a million people have perished. I get the sense that a big invisible hand has come along and shoved my numbers into a meat grinder to make the simulation a little more spicy. This is fine – EUV is a machine. But this was also the moment when I knew it would not supplant my beloved Crusader Kings 3, which is more focused on humanity and the characters of history, as opposed to the drier graphs and charts of history. Crusader Kings is for history graduates who watch Vikings and have a subscription to Ancestry.com. Europa Universalis is for statisticians who read books on military history and have watched every episode of Map Men. (I’m sure some of you freaks fit both descriptions.)
Here, a dry inaccessibility is aided by new “automation” gizmos. Basically, you can hand over whole systems to the computer. Don’t want to manage all the goods in your kingdom? Click a little cogwheel to automate those. Don’t fancy having to manage taxes? Fork it over to the blessed machine. You can cognitively offload the hiring of admirals, the construction of buildings, the next items on the research tree – almost everything – to the AI.
But such automation is a double-edged halberd. There are moments when something under the hood suddenly slurps 50 proto-euros from the treasury, and you’ll have no idea why. I wanted to build an Entrepôt in my capital (a big market dock for all my scumbag businessgoons). It cost 320 ducats. But every time my income neared 300, a chunk of change would disappear, the game’s gremlins deciding I don’t need all that surplus cash. I have no idea what caused this or where the money went. It stopped when I temporarily de-automated trade and production methods.
The automated navy and army commands are not always reliable either. More than once I ordered my forces to “hunt enemy navies” or “blockade ports” or focus on sieges, only to see them idle around doing nothing, even as defeatable enemies sauntered by or castles sat unconquered. The computer probably has some internal reasoning for this, but damned if I can figure it out. After that, I just clicked armies around by myself. Artificial intelligence once again bested by a single human finger.
All these overlapping systems and sneaky auto-tweaks and baroque menus create an intriguing monster. When the game is understandable, it is hugely gratifying. But it also feels a bit “you cannot press this button until you press that other button”. And that other button is obscured in a warren of menus you must spend nights coming to understand. It’s a hugely deep pool of wonderful tricks to get lost in, but a pool still sweaty from all the confused forum posters who dived in before you.
For example, France is forcing countless other nations to embargo me. For the longest time, I had no idea how they were doing that, what to do to alleviate it, nor exactly what effect it was having on my trade income and economy. There’s so much going on underneath this hood, and much is not cogently explained within the game itself. This process of coming to learn how to tackle your nation’s problems is itself part of the charm, but it nonetheless demands patience and time – two things you may not have in abundance.
You will also learn a lot of history. Yet just like my history class from an angry priest in an Irish Catholic boy’s school, certain political narratives come baked into the lesson. For instance, when you hover over a province in Africa during the “Age of Discovery”, looking for foreign shores to send your exploration ships, a tooltip will read: “This province is not owned by any country”. The 26,000 tribespeople who live in the Kru province are not a “nation” as the game (and perhaps some historians) would define it. They do not “own” that land, the game therefore decides. Which is a debatable technicality of language exploited to ensure the feature about planting colonies works like it’s supposed to. This is intentional. Europa Universalis 5 is all about managing a kingdom during centuries of often brutal and inhumane policies. You can build slave centers, you can commission conquistadors, you can establish missionaries, you set government policies that see people suffer.
You can opt to play as a non-expansionist power, of course. But I find that building an empire is very much the meat of this simulation, and since empires are built to extract riches from the periphery and pull them to the centre at the expense of those conquered, this is generally what the game is all about. I don’t say this in a fit of judgement – it is how history actually passed, and developers shouldn’t be afraid to build systems that simulate these things. I only mention it because players may want to know that EUV is determined to be blunt about the reality of these centuries. Colonialism happened, it seems to say, and this is how. You are not getting a sanitised version of history.
Neither are you getting a humanised version of it. Aside from intermittent pop-ups with flavour events about people you’ve often not met, Europa Universalis 5 still largely abstracts its horrors out to a numbers game, and in this sense its attitude to colonialism remains dressed in the dispassionate fabric of colourful maps and statistics. It is a top-down atlas of a world ready to carve up, and in this core respect it is mostly designed and expected to be played as a coloniser, even if other options are open. You have to be okay with roleplaying a jackass in a crown, is what I’m saying. Historical simulations can encourage thoughtfulness as much as they can reinforce sticky notions about our globe’s history. And Europa Universalis as a series at least has some experience in this regard. It’s a complex subject in a complex game. My 150 years on this earth have not granted me wisdom enough to address it.
But I can tell you that this is a moreish, deep, and long-lasting piece of work. My biggest complaint is that it could offer better instruction. Stellaris and Crusader Kings 3 have, for my ducats, been the most approachable Paradox strategy games for newcomers. Aside from not being so dry, their tutorials do decent jobs of introducing you bit-by-bit to the bitty machinery of ruling dynasties and star systems. Europa Universalis 5 has a more complicated task. The ambition of its simulation is so vast that it’s hard to simplify and teach. The common advice is to bathe in that sense of overwhelm and learn to accept disaster and confusion as part of the fun. Everyone in Sweden will die because of a button you forgot to press twenty years ago. And that’s fine. Italian kings do it all the time.
Part of me yearned to finish this playthrough before giving my final verdict, but considering it took Naples a full century just to discover there is a “south” of the globe (omg), I’ll just tell you now: it’s confusing as heck and I like it. Even though I’m playing at the second-fastest speed with judicious pausing, I would likely need to play for another 40-50 hours to make it through the full span of history. This statement is both horrifying and exciting – a game that disrespects my time? Disrespect me more, my huge messy map monster.