As I load Europa Universalis 5, Paradox’s latest and most ambitious strategy game, I’m reminded of a news report I once saw about a man who grew up in a tribal village who saw a plane for the first time. This can’t be true, right? This giant piece of metal can’t fly through the sky at hundreds of miles per hour? Trying to capture the 500-year period from 1337 to 1837 AD while modeling every single person in the world – yes, you heard that right – at a completely unprecedented level of detail seems incredible. But it really does it all. Overall, it’s quite engaging and enjoyable for a genre veteran like me. What about if it can ascend? Exactly. There’s a lot of turbulence and I wouldn’t risk my life to get to my destination without an accident.
First of all, let me point out that this review is based largely on the version I received on October 16, and to a lesser extent on the medium-sized patch that was released on October 22 and fixed many bugs that bothered me. There was an even bigger patch on the 29th, but I couldn’t do more than kick the tires on it before closing this review. One more major update is planned before the premiere. Overall, I think these tweaks have improved the balance, which I’ll talk about later, but I can’t say whether they’ll remove all the annoyances before you get your hands on them. I can only speak to what I’ve played.
From a systems standpoint, EU5 is an unequivocal miracle. Paradox continues to push the boundaries of what simulation can do down to the smallest detail, and I might even accuse this ridiculously huge historical epic of going too far. It is certainly unwieldy due to its weight and I am particularly concerned that it will make balance very challenging. Fix one little thing, and the ripples it sends through various interconnected mechanisms in economics, geography, demography, and politics could likely create 300 more. There’s a certain hubris in it, if I may be so dramatic, but I’ve seen some evidence of the problems it can cause.
But damn. CHOLERA! It’s amazing that an entire world is depicted in such detail in a video game. For every province in its predecessor, Europa Universalis 4, there are roughly seven distinct locations in Europa Universalis 5. And while each location on the map can only have a single, monolithic religion and culture in EU4, EU5’s population mechanics represent the culture, religion, and social class of every living person individually. Having to think about population creates a affluent relationship with each location in my country and allows me to balance many things in a naturalistic way, without abstract currencies like “administration points”. In EU4, terrain type was a single modifier. In the EU5, topography, climate and vegetation are distinct factors that can influence everything from agricultural production to combat.
It’s nirvana for history nerds to just scroll through the map and marvel at the amount of work that went into this game. It also looks quite elegant. I don’t think this is necessarily the prettiest Paradox map. You will see strange artifacts in areas with rugged terrain and sophisticated shorelines that are a bit unsightly. For my money, Crusader Kings 3 and Victoria 3 are slightly nicer. But it’s certainly the most detailed. And especially with the ability to render moving units with different cultures, social strata, levels of technology, and even degrees of professionalism based on their uniforms – up to 30 in one formation, depending on the number of soldiers – zooming in is never dull.
All of this means that EU5 is intended for certified grand strategy geeks – and aspiring grand strategy geeks – only. Not because of the lack of a tutorial. It’s here and it’s surprisingly good at getting you started at least walking. Automation allows you to hand things over to AI until you’re ready to micromanage them. Nested tooltips are also very helpful, at least until you discover one of the many edge cases where this is not the case. But I have over 2000 hours in EU4. This is my most played game on Steam of all time. And even then, it took me about an hour to even feel comfortable restarting EU5 – and dozens before I thought I knew what I was doing.
And for me that’s not a bad thing! I think learning through trial and error is part of the fun of this type of grand strategy game and part of developing a relationship with it. This requires a lot of patience, however, and I don’t think Paradox intends to expand its audience much with this. EU5 knows exactly who it’s intended for, and caters specifically to those people – people like me – without apology.
Delving into the topic of nation management can be incredibly engaging. Planning the location of a modern market town, how to connect it to the road network and how to employ local resources in my workshops to make a huge profit from trade is better than drugs. Control and proximity are brilliant modern mechanisms that show that you can’t necessarily control something just because you painted it your color. Combined with the overhauled estate system, there are an almost endless number of projects to complete and challenges to tackle without having to leave the boundaries. Geographic detail makes a huge contribution to nation management and warfare, which has evolved beautifully with modern terrain modifiers and logistics systems.
That is, when everything is working properly.
Serious bugs were occasional and generally didn’t ruin the game for me. Most of EU5’s current problems involve what I would call tuning. The numbers, balance and AI just aren’t quite there yet to deliver a satisfying or historic experience. I’ve seen strange things like the Czech Republic with one port on the Baltic Sea colonizing half of Canada. The Holy Roman Empire completely failed to consolidate. There was no clear winner in Turkey. Bordergore is everywhere. China is… terrifying. And the strangest thing is that Europeans colonized most of Australia, but for some reason they never even discovered India. It’s tough to say how typical this is, but I didn’t have thousands of hours to play a statistically significant number of campaigns.
This is the kind of atmosphere that exists all over the world. Nations will behave very strangely compared to what you might expect. The borders became too immobile after about 1500, even as the Protestant Reformation tried to mix things up. Historical states do not arise often. There are many fascinating situations and taste events, but they do not create a globe that reads as original. Also, despite efforts to leisurely colonization, I still saw things like all of South America filled with formal states by 1700 and the entire Congo Basin speaking Italian. Either they invented Duolingo much earlier or they cured malaria. I’m not sure which one. And this thing really worries me. I don’t need the story to play out exactly like it does in our world, but some of it is just plain stupid. I want it to look somewhat believable at the end. Historical.
I also encountered inconsistent crashes in one of my two full playthroughs. I only had four accidents in all 500 years when I played as the powerful Norse colony in Greenland in my first game. In my second start as Portugal, I sometimes managed to achieve more in one decade. After consulting with Paradox about this, I was able to find some workarounds so it was playable but very annoying. (Pro tip: turn off the buildings tab in the outline if this happens to you often. It’s worked wonders.) Paradox has a history of supporting their gigantic strategy games for many years after launch, with one recent exception (the tragic Emperor: Rome), so I have pretty good faith that these things will get sorted out. But I wouldn’t blame anyone for waiting six months for a little more polish before diving into the game. The sheer complexity of simulating EU5 makes me a little concerned about whether it’s even possible to get EU5 to behave nicely.
Fortunately, I didn’t have to worry about performance. For such a processor-intensive game, I had some concerns. But I tried it on three different processors: Ryzen 7 3700X, Ryzen 7 5800XT and a Core i7 13620H laptop. I played most of the time on the 3700X since it’s my main desktop computer, and I didn’t find slowdown to be much of an issue, even though the specs were below Paradox’s recommended ones. It was noticeably slower, especially than the i7, but I still found the speed to be very playable, only noticing significant slowdown when there was a massive war in the last 100 years.
On the 3700X, the days at the start of the run were less than a second, and at worst down to about two seconds in the 19th century, with a slight additional delay at the beginning of each month when there is more stuff to calculate. The entire gameplay took me about 60 hours, playing at top speed, including intentionally slowing down for most of the wars. The game never stops or turns into a slideshow like Victoria 3 or Hearts of Iron 4, sometimes delayed in the game, and the interface remains responsive even when the simulation drags on a bit, which psychologically makes a huge difference to me. Overall, I found the optimization quite astonishing considering the amount of things going on.
