Europa Universalis V starts as it means to go on, dropping you into its recreation of the late Middle Ages just as England and France embark on their Hundred Years’ War and then as the Black Death washes through Europe. To that backdrop, whatever nation you choose to play as is going to have a pretty rough time of it early on, but that just breeds opportunity through the 500 years of human history this ambitious game looks to portray.
But who do you choose to play as? If you’re coming from EU4, chances are you’ve already got a good idea, but for new players (or for the terminally indecisive) Paradox has a few handy suggestions, leaning into particular playstyles, such as the initially more expansionist tone of Hungary, the political focus of Norway, or the burgeoning trading nation of Holland. Unless you click it away, you’ll find yourself in a tailored opening experience with guiding tutorials through some of the key pillars and concepts within the game, and building certain mission paths.
There’s no getting away from just how dense Europa Universalis V remains, and it doesn’t help that some of the suggestions in the tutorial and the rigidity of the subsequent missions feel like they’re actively hindering your potential. That’s especially true of goals that target improvements, such as adding four buildings to your capital or increasing Control through a region – if you’ve already pushed those metrics quite high, it makes that mission tree more arduous than it should be. You can’t do multiple mission trees at once, and you lose progress if you switch to another.
Thankfully, the foundational work that Paradox has put in with the nested tooltips, the in-game search, and encyclopaedia all go a long way to helping pick up the slack… mostly. There’s still plenty of times where it won’t be quite clear why you can’t build that particular building just yet, or there’s a new term that your Renaissance Googling won’t quite dredge up, or maybe you’ve just found a search bar in the wrong section… But you’re in this for the long haul, and like a spotty 16-year old who’s been hurriedly handed a crown and told to go make an heir, you’ll figure it out – OK, that’s a bit more Crusader Kings than Europa Universalis, but you know what I mean.
Even as a series veteran, there’s plenty of new, returning, and modified concepts to get to grips with. Trade, for example, now hinges on a system of established markets to funnel all of a region’s imports, exports, resources, and production through – this isn’t based on nations, but literally the proximity and influence of the markets themselves. You can happily use the established flow of trade through the world to flog your wares and feed your economy, but there’s also benefits to being in control, and so you can make the investment to found a market of your own to try and grow your stature.
All of that trade is, of course, built off the backs of your people, your “pops”, and the provinces they inhabit. This is the real lifeblood of your nation, with each province (and there’s so many more vs. EU4) having a key resource assigned that can be gathered, mined, hunted, and farmed through an RGO (the very technically correct Resource Gathering Operation), alongside whatever buildings you’re able to construct for your town, city, or countryside. Pops are your units, each with their key culture, religion, and social position, needs, and preferences. Peasants are at the bottom rung, below Labourers, the increasingly wealthy Burghers, then the Nobility and the Aristocracy, with religious leaders having their own special place alongside, each represented by an Estate in your government. You need people of the right class to work the specific jobs, and so there’s some social mobility here even early on, but as you progress through the ages, that grows and shifts.
You are, in some ways, as much at the whims of the pops, as they are to your desires to reshape your nation along twelve Societal Values scales. You might want to build up the cities with tons of growing industries and technological advances, but people really don’t like change, whether that’s the nobility wanting to maintain all their power and serfs, or country folk not wanting everything to be so centralised around stinky towns. There’s a constant push and pull to societal change, as you need to appease each Estate by giving them privileges to give nuggets of power and influence in exchange for enabling your Reforms. On a smaller scale, individual pops can be dissatisfied, and you need to maintain stability, using this as a currency to enact change. Some of that can come from buildings, but there’s also tasking your Cabinet with tipping the balance in a particular category, making choices at key junctures, and enacting laws as their concepts become available. It’s always handy to have a fair amount of Crown Power to push this through.
Another key metric is Control, an indication of how “close” your provinces are to your centre of power – a bit like those mud farmers in Monty Python not knowing who their king is. It’s vital for you to be able to dredge up taxes and manpower for your military, as lower control drops your reach in a province. It’s simple, and it’s clear, and the two simplest ways to improve it are to build roads and use your Cabinet to increase control in a region, but there’s other ways to boost it as well.
Given the 500 year span of the campaign, there’s an awful lot of development of cultures, ideas and technology, and this is broken down into six distinct ages. Each of these has three core concepts that need to reach your borders, slowly spreading across the world from their point of origin, and then needing you to invest in that category before you can start to research – this costs more, the lower nascent awareness your pops have. The tech trees are big and broad, branching out from an initial innovation to a bunch of Advances, and the UI for this is a massively zoomed out sideways scrolling mess, but it’s conceptually a good way to gate and reveal each age’s advances. The sticking plaster is that there’s also a list of available Advances, that you can search for a particular thing you need and queue up the whole chain, and just offload to an AI manager.
And you can do that a lot in this game. AI has been laced into so many aspects of Europa Universalis V that you can almost put the game in autopilot to run itself but, really, I appreciate that this is present, it feels like it does a competent job, and I can always dive in and tinker as well. It allows trading to be massively granular, making deals with two decimal points for market needs while I just pop in to maybe set out some bigger ones. It’s a great tool both for beginners and for removing some of the busywork, and it can be applied as specifically or as broadly as you like.
With such an early start date to EU5, this really pushes the colonialist expansion side of a campaign much further. Depending on the nation that you choose to play as – I went with Holland for an economic play mainly – this can be your opportunity to really spread your wings when you’ve got major powers like France and England greedily gobbling up territory and vassals right next to you. The thing it, this is now tens of hours into the game, and if you’re a bit pigeonholed that can lead to long stretches of waiting.
So what to do but to lash out with some good old fashioned wars? I like the way that wars and combat are balanced in EU5. The tangle of alliances and defensive pacts can keep a lot of excessive aggression in check, and when fighting does break out, the AI is fairly smart in how it attacks you and uses multiple armies – though you can still outwit them if they get hung up on long sieges. Armies are arranged into three channels – a centre and two flanks – and you can toy with this a little to gain an advantage before combat begins.
All of this review, and I’ve barely scratched the surface of many of EU5’s depths and breadths. There’s an impressive amount in this game – the number of nations, cultural tweaks and world events are huge – and the core workings are very capable to encapsulating so much of this. I’ve no doubt that there’s balancing and tweaking that will occur once the game is in the hands of the masses, and the more overpowered and underpowered nations and playstyles will be brought into line.
But a final, special note for the presentation of this game. Visually, this is a nice evolution of Paradox’s Clausewitz Engine: there’s the pleasing way that towns and cities sprawl, how the overlay flattens the map and recedes, and the UI is pleasingly textured and thematic… but it’s Håkan Glänte’s soundtrack that will burrow its way into your mind. It certainly leans toward the breadth of later classical music eras, but folds earlier instrumentation and styles into the mix, and recalls motifs from previous games as well. Overture II: The Odyssey swells with optimism, Pain Is Salvation boasts rich and dramatic choral work, and Battle of Lützen is a suitably epic accompaniment to wartime, and on and on. For music that will join you for tens and hundreds of hours, I’m definitely not sick of it yet.
