Imagine playing a racing game where you can tweak all the settings – difficulty, assists, and more – to get just the right experience. Too easy, and it’s boring; too hard, and you’re always crashing. Europa Universalis 5, while not a racing game, shares a similar idea. It’s a complex strategy game where finding the right balance of control and assistance is key to enjoying it.
Jumping into Paradox Tinto’s grand strategy game without any help can be a tough challenge, but it’s also very rewarding when you succeed. As the saying goes, governing is like holding a wild wolf by the ears. EU5 asks you to manage many different things, with systems so deep they could be entire games on their own. Trying to handle all of them at once is quite difficult.
While its previous version made things like population and trade simpler, EU5 dives deep into representing them fully. This creates a connected web of game mechanics that can show how economies and countries work, putting a lot of power in your hands. However, sometimes you might feel like you’re just going with the flow, like everyone else.
In EU5, your people are the most important thing. They are needed to work farms, mines, and forests, to spread your religion, or to protect your land. But not everyone does the same job. There are different social groups. A farmer can’t be expected to make books; that’s for educated people. The game counts every single person, no matter their group, beliefs, or background. All these groups are simulated and have their own goals and needs, acting like communities. They build things, trade goods, and want a say in how the country is run. Every country has these groups, making them feel alive.
This can be hard to get into at first. Usually, when playing a Paradox game, you expect to feel like a powerful ruler doing whatever you want. But in EU5, it can feel like different groups in your country are working against you – and they are. Yet, they also have their own disagreements with each other.
At the start, nobles usually have the most power. But you can change this over time, not with one command, but by carefully playing these groups against each other. You might start by giving more rights to merchants, changing laws to weaken the nobles’ influence. Slowly, this will reduce their power, creating an opening for you or another group to gain influence. Once they are weak enough, you can take away their special rights, but this is always tricky. If your country’s stability drops, you could face problems like rebellions or money troubles. If your groups are unhappy, you might need to lower their taxes to make them happier. Losing control also makes it harder to get money from your lands.
I found taking out loans in EU5 to be mostly useless. They are usually too small to help you get through tough times. This often leads to taking more loans, with interest payments hurting your income and creating a downward spiral. Going broke doesn’t end the game, but it slows down your progress and can lead to a change in leadership or an invasion.
In politics, being clever and thinking ahead is very important in EU5. You need to plan for the long term in all aspects of the game.
Consider fishing villages, for example. If you play as Japan’s Ashikaga Shogunate, fish is already plentiful, so building more fishing villages might not be very profitable. However, they also produce sailors, which are needed for ships and exploration. The game won’t waste people on buildings that don’t make money, but you only get sailors when the village is active. You can choose to give them money to keep them running and get sailors, even if it’s not the most profitable. A country isn’t just a business; these kinds of strategic choices are part of being a ruler.
Why did I spend a lot of money to quickly colonize Hokkaido? It wasn’t just for fame or to make the map my color, though that played a part. The main reason is that Japan doesn’t have a good
When rebellions shook China, my neighbors suddenly needed weapons and supplies for their armies. I invested heavily in making weapons, boosting a key industry and making a good profit. Even my own merchants started exporting weapons. War can be good for business if it’s happening elsewhere. But if your own people are suffering from battles, hunger, or disease, your economy will suffer too.
China falling apart also had other effects on the economy. Areas were destroyed, making some goods rare and expensive. Merchants had to find new ways to get what they needed when their country was in chaos. This is how I saw my merchants start importing spices and selling them for a profit.
Building structures or raising armies requires resources, just like in any city-building game, which affects demand and prices. Why isn’t my fleet repair working? Oh, there’s a severe shortage of alcohol in the country, and sailors can’t work without it. Logistics are important. Isn’t that great?
These situations show how EU5’s systems work together to create realistic connections between the economy and politics. Add in culture and religion, and your imagination can run wild.
As mentioned before, you can manage all these aspects yourself, or use EU5’s automatic systems for help. This is a powerful tool that can essentially play the game for you if you just want to watch and learn. But its real value is in letting you assign tasks, like a real leader. All the trading I talked about? I used the automation for that. If I wanted to make sure a specific import order for grains stayed active and the computer didn’t change it, I could set that. You can also split your trade capacity between automated tasks and ones you handle yourself, which is another great way to get a handle on the system.
EU5’s complexity can be overwhelming and make you feel lost at times, but also brilliant at others. It provides tools to help manage this, much like those racing games. It’s all about finding the right settings and deciding what you want to do with your time in the game.
Even if you’re not sure what you’re doing, the usual Paradox approach of keeping important information at the top of the screen helps you decide your goals. This is important because EU5 feels more like a sandbox than EU4. There are no specific missions for each country to guide you, and sometimes that can be frustrating, making you feel like you’re just drifting through history without a clear direction.
Tinto’s replacement for missions – political situations and international groups – is a mixed bag for me. On one hand, they do offer some needed direction. For example, Japan has to deal with two rival royal courts, and this situation has special interactions that even affect the religion mechanics. On the other hand, the game doesn’t clearly tell me how to solve these situations. The options to act often don’t become available because I’m the shogun. But how can I be anyone other than the shogun? Why can’t I just get rid of the imperial rivals? I can declare war on them, but I can’t actually win because they don’t have armies or land, so the wars always end in a draw. Also, about a hundred years later, the Sengoku Jidai period starts no matter how well you’ve ruled, leading to a third of your land being taken by small groups you then have to unite. It’s a goal, sure, but it’s not fun to lose all your progress without any input from your actions.
So, again, it’s a big change from the previous feeling of total control. To enjoy EU5, you need to adjust your mindset and be willing to let go of the reins sometimes.
For instance, natural disasters. If your army is in the wrong place at the wrong time, an earthquake can be devastating. It’s also annoying that the game doesn’t clearly tell you which buildings were destroyed in affected areas. Having damage reports would be helpful. This is one of many small issues with how information is presented, although the game generally does a good job of giving you what you need or letting you customize things. The detailed tooltips are a lifesaver, and you can always click on keywords to get more information from the encyclopedia. This works well for most basic concepts. However, for historical situations, it’s not always enough.
As a player, I want to engage with these situations. They give me a main objective. But I need a little help to understand exactly what I can do. Having unique interactions and outcomes for these scenarios is really interesting and adds flavor, whether it’s the 100 Years War or the Sengoku Jidai. But most of the time, it’s hard for me to know how to get involved or what specific steps to take to reach my goal. The complex requirement equations that try to tell me what to do aren’t very helpful – I do miss how the old mission trees broke down these processes step by step.
I haven’t personally experienced any stability problems, but I know others have. Performance and loading times were quite good on my high-end computer (i9-14900KF CPU with an RTX 4080 Super GPU and 32 GB RAM, game running on SSD), as expected. Are there bugs? Certainly. Balance issues? Without a doubt – history is unfair, and it wouldn’t be a Paradox grand strategy game if you couldn’t face tough challenges or lose your country to random events two hundred years later. This is the most complex strategy game I’ve ever played, so I don’t expect it to ever be completely free of issues.
EU5 has kept me hooked so far, despite some frustrations and moments of anger when things don’t go my way because I can’t control everything. Its complexity, depth, and historical detail are a beautiful combination. As strange as it sounds, my personal goal to lower the price of grains in Japan was more satisfying than conquering another country. There’s something fascinating about making small adjustments and seeing the effects spread across countries, and EU5 is very good at creating these long-term dynamics.
The slogan “Be ambitious” isn’t just a developer’s promise or a marketing phrase; it’s a real call to players. I think you’ll need a certain level of ambition to get the most out of this game. You need to be willing to get involved, learn, and set your own goals.
Europa Universalis 5 feels like the peak of everything Paradox has achieved over the last twenty years, and if any game deserves to be called a grand strategy title, this is it.
