When I load up Europa Universalis 5, Paradox’s latest and most ambitious grand strategy game, I am reminded of a news report I once saw about a man who grew up in a tribal village seeing an airplane for the first time. This can’t possibly be real, right? This giant piece of metal can’t fly through the sky at hundreds of miles an hour? Attempting to conquer the 500-year period from 1337 to 1837 CE while modeling every single individual person in the world – yes, you heard that right – at a level of detail that’s completely unprecedented, seems unbelievable. But it really does all of that. And it’s generally quite engaging and enjoyable for a genre veteran like me. As for whether it can soar? Only just. There is a lot of turbulence, and I wouldn’t stake my life on it getting me to my destination without crashing.
First, let me say that this review is mostly based on a version I received on October 16th, and to a lesser extent on a medium-sized patch that came out on the 22nd and fixed a lot of bugs that were bothering me. There was an even larger patch on the 29th, but I was not able to do more than kick the tires on that before I locked in this review. And there’s even one more big patch scheduled before launch. Overall, I think these patches have been improving the balance situation I’m going to talk about later, but there’s no way I can say if they will have cleaned up all of the annoyances by the time you get your hands on it. I can only speak to what I played.
From a systems perspective, EU5 is an unambiguous wonder. Paradox keeps pushing the envelope on how much they can simulate in fine-grain detail, and I could even accuse this absurdly huge historical epic of taking things too far. It’s certainly unwieldy in its bulk, and I fear especially that this will make it very difficult to balance. Fix one small thing and the ripples it sends out through the various interlocking mechanisms for economics, geography, demographics, and politics could possibly create 300 more. There’s a certain hubris to it, if I might be so dramatic, and I’ve already seen some evidence of the problems it can cause.
But damn. DAMN! It is incredible to have the entire world depicted in this level of detail in a video game. For every one province in its predecessor, Europa Universalis 4, there are roughly seven individual locations in Europa Universalis 5. And while each space on the map could only have a single, monolithic religion and culture in EU4, EU5’s population mechanics represent the culture, religion, and social class of every living human individually. Having to think about population creates a rich relationship with each location in my country, and acts to balance so many things in a naturalistic way, without abstract currencies like “Administration Points.” In EU4, terrain type was a single modifier. In EU5, topography, climate, and vegetation are all separate factors that can affect everything from agricultural output to combat.
It is history nerd nirvana to simply scroll around the map and marvel at the amount of work that went into this. It’s pretty slick-looking, too. I don’t think it’s necessarily Paradox’s prettiest map. You will see some weird artifacts around areas of rough terrain and intricate coastlines that are a bit unsightly. For my money, Crusader Kings 3 and Victoria 3 are a bit nicer to look at. But it is certainly the most detailed. And especially with the ability to render units moving around with varying cultures, social strata, tech levels, and even degrees of professionalism modeled in their uniforms – up to 30 in one formation depending on the number of troops – it’s never boring to zoom in on.
This does all mean that EU5 is for certified grand strategy sickos – and aspiring grand strategy sickos – only. Not for lack of providing a tutorial. That’s here, and it’s actually surprisingly good at getting you off to at least a walking start. Automation lets you hand off certain things to the AI until you’re ready to micromanage them. The nested tooltips are very helpful, too, at least until you discover one of the many edge cases where they aren’t. But I have over 2000 hours in EU4. It’s my most-played game on Steam of all time. And even then, it took about an hour before I even felt comfortable unpausing EU5 – and dozens before I thought I knew what I was doing.
And for me, that’s not a bad thing! I think that trial-and-error learning period is part of the fun of this type of grand strategy game, and part of developing a relationship with it. But it takes a lot of patience, and I don’t think Paradox is going to be expanding its audience much with this one. EU5 knows exactly who it’s for, and it caters specifically to those people – people like me – very unapologetically.
Getting into the groove of managing a nation can be incredibly engrossing. Planning out the site of a new market town, how it’s going to connect up to my road network, and how I’m going to exploit the local resources in my workshops to turn a huge trade profit, is better than drugs. Control and proximity are brilliant new mechanics that model how you can’t necessarily govern something just because you painted it your color. And combined with a reworked estates system, there is an almost endless number of projects to do and challenges to face without ever leaving your borders. The geographic granularity here adds so much to nation management and warfare, which has evolved excellently with the new terrain modifiers and logistics systems.
That is, when everything is working correctly.
Major bugs were infrequent and generally not game-ruining for me. Most of EU5’s current problems are in what I’d call tuning. The numbers, the balance, and the AI simply aren’t quite dialed in yet to provide a satisfying or historical-feeling experience. I saw weird stuff like Bohemia with one port on the Baltic colonizing half of Canada. The Holy Roman Empire entirely failed to consolidate. There was no clear victor in Turkey. Bordergore is everywhere. China is… horrifying. And weirdest of all, the Europeans colonized most of Australia, but never even discovered India for some reason. It’s hard to say how much of this is typical, but I didn’t have thousands of hours to play a statistically significant number of campaigns.
This is kind of the vibe across the board. Nations will behave very strangely compared to what you’d expect. Borders become way too static after about 1500, even with the Protestant Reformation trying to mix things up. Historical countries don’t often form. There are a lot of interesting situations and flavor events, but they don’t result in a globe that reads as authentic. Also, despite efforts to slow down colonization, I still saw stuff like all of South America filled in with formal states by 1700, and the entire Kongo Basin speaking Italian. Either they invented Duolingo way early or cured malaria. Not sure which. And that stuff really bothers me. I don’t need history to play out exactly as it did in our world, but some of this is just silly. I want it to look kind of plausible by the end. Historical-ish.
I did also run into inconsistent crashes on one of my two full playthroughs. I had only four crashes across the entire 500 years I played as the mighty Norse colony of Greenland in my first run. My second run, as Portugal, I would sometimes get more than that in a single decade. I was able to find some workarounds after consulting Paradox about the issue, so it was playable, but very annoying. (Pro tip: turn off the buildings tab in the outliner if this is happening to you a lot. Worked wonders.) Paradox has a history of supporting their grand strategy games for many years after launch, with one recent exception (the tragic Imperator: Rome), so I do have a pretty good amount of faith that this stuff will get worked out. But I wouldn’t blame anyone for waiting six months for a little more polish before diving in. And the sheer complexity of EU5’s simulation does stoke some fears in me about if it’s even possible to get it to behave nicely at all.
What I didn’t really have to worry about was performance, thankfully. For such a CPU-intensive game, I was apprehensive about that. But I tried it out on three different processors: A Ryzen 7 3700X, a Ryzen 7 5800XT, and a Core i7 13620H laptop. Most of my playtime was on the 3700X, because that’s my main desktop, and I didn’t find slowdown to be much of an issue, despite being below Paradox’s recommended specs. It was measurably slower than the i7 especially, but I still found the speed to be very playable, only seeing significant sluggishness if there was a massive war going on in the last 100 years or so.
Days at the start of a run took less than a second to tick by on the 3700X, and it only got up to maybe around two seconds at worst by the 1800s, with a bit of extra lag at the start of each month when there are more things to calculate. An entire playthrough took me about 60 hours while playing at the fastest speed, including slowing down on purpose for most wars. It never ground to a halt or turned into a slideshow like Victoria 3 or Hearts of Iron 4 sometimes can in the late game, and the interface remains sharply responsive even when the simulation is chugging a little, which makes such a massive difference to me psychologically. Overall, I found the optimization to be almost astounding for the number of things going on.
