Europa Universalis 5 sets a new bar for historical simulation complexity

Many games claim to be multi-layered simulations. Few properly achieve that, happy to focus on just one area while abstracting away others. But the grand strategy genre is always about expanding the view, incorporating into its wargame roots systems of politics, economics and culture. Europa Universalis 5 widens the frame again, adding a new wrinkle: People. It’s nothing less than an attempt at simulating the world for centuries with a fidelity beyond anything else in the genre.

You play as the controlling force behind a country over 500 years of history, 1337 to 1836, using the same mechanical simulation to present both the late medieval and the entirety of the early modern period.

Political systems start with decentralized vassal feudalism, steppe hordes, and administrative empires but end with constitutional states and enlightenment monarchs. Wars begin dominated by knights and peasant levies but end with cannons and musket-firing line infantry.

It simulates all the people on Earth at the time. Their culture, religion, migration, production, trade, and even participation in political systems. There are a truly shocking array of things on screen at any time, and dozens of map modes to show the ones that aren’t visible right now but that you might need.

Any given window is rich with text and statistics, studded with buttons and symbols—some of which you won’t even realize serve a crucial function until you’ve been playing for 12 hours. It has so many interacting systems that the developers have gone to considerable pains to include optional automation for nearly all of them.

I expect it’s enough to make even the most hardened genre veterans realize they’ll have to stop, take a moment, and start learning new things again. I certainly did, and I’m glad I spent over a hundred hours wading through the bugs and performance problems in the review build of EU5, because after all those hours I’m still excitedly learning how things work.

New era, new game

You are more than ever the spirit of the nation, a kind of abstract force behind the doings of various governments. EU5 takes the standpoint that the early modern period is when the very concept of a nation was forged, combining diverse peoples, cultures, and languages into larger polities based on shared history and the geographical vagaries of war and rulership.

To that end you choose your starting country, horde, trade league, empire, samurai clan, or the like, and manage its internal politics, wealth, diplomacy, and warfare in real time. Early parts of the game focus on centralization and control, building up the barest infrastructure that will let you enforce your laws and collect taxes in a way recognizable to modern people. As the game expands and time goes on new institutions appear and spread across the map, broadening your technology tree and your ability to develop and rule your country.

You’ll likely go from having just a few hundred professional soldiers to employing a huge full-time standing army—but that means you need to build up the infrastructure to arm and equip them, and the political will to tax your people to pay for it, along with the population and territorial base to even recruit them from.

Expect to spend much of your time balancing internal interests to get things done—the desires of the estates of society: government, nobles, clergy, burghers, and peasants. (Unless your society is one with unique estates… or with a sixth estate.) You distribute privileges and rights among them, and sometimes just bribes of cash or imported goods, to keep them happy and paying their taxes.

To amass a hoard of cash and goods, you need to build production and trade buildings, each of which naturally creates something like rice or salt or iron, and all the things these buildings produce go into a market which clothes and feeds your individual pops, supplies your buildings and armies or gets taken by traders to the next market over because they’ve got a shortage of weapons in war-wracked France and by God that’s going to make you rich, isn’t it?

Going deep

EU5’s true focus is on deep simulation of population and place. Every little person has their own religion and culture and class, and everything your country does takes people. It drives this home in the early game, when the Black Death inevitably rolls through and reminds you that, yes, people work in all those cloth workshops or weaponsmiths, and now that they’re dead it’ll take a while to make more people to do those jobs.

The game is littered with these little historical situations: pre-coded events that help create some interesting scenario like the fall of the Delhi Sultanate or the Wars of the Roses or the French Revolution. It’s an interesting step up from the hard-coded mission trees of other grand strategy games, and one that makes for a more interesting historical sandbox to play in.

It’s a deep simulation, then, but also a novel one, containing some really surprising and interesting ideas. Many resources, like a nation’s prestige, government strength, and internal stability, are both a meter that fills and a currency. Having a full meter gives important bonuses, like toward the happiness of your estate or toward your reputation with other nations, but various crises and powers will force you to spend that resource to avoid worse outcomes. Or choose not to and take some alternate punishment.

Playing as Castile, for example, I formed the nation of Spain by uniting Iberia under one crown through strategic marriages. My new nation was diverse with languages and cultures, though, and the game consistently served up choices between tolerance and forcing homogeny: Choosing more tolerant options meant instability, however, as we had to overhaul many medieval laws to allow for non-Christian subjects and spread greater acceptance of cultural and linguistic differences. That meant pouring money, and the valuable time of my cabinet members, into stability and increasing control. When states in Italy I wanted to protect came under attack I just wasn’t able to because my government was too fragile, and my resources too depleted, to do it.

Events consistently pop up that force you to make important choices about the state of your game. That’s on top of all the meaningful choices you need to make about diplomacy, and where you’re going to expand food production, and what you’ll do once the Black Death is done wiping out half of your country’s population.

Which is all good, but in practice can become overwhelming. Thank god for the automation features in EU5—being able to make the AI pick your trade goods is a relief when you want to focus on a war instead.

Because more so than many other grand strategy games, EU5 is simply very long. Just watching the game in observer mode, at max speed, takes something like 11 hours. A proper campaign can take upwards of 70 once you get into the gritty details of learning how to play and managing a large empire. It is in turns exhilarating, for its immersive length, and overwhelming, for the at times maddening number of things it asks you to do just to feel safe increasing the game speed again. It’s probably too long, in fact—the late medieval section of the game feels unnecessary to the experience as a whole. The first century of play is nice if what you want is a megacampaign, but that aside it’s an extended cold open to the meat of expansion, consolidation, and industrialization that makes up the bulk of EU5.

Good at being bad

This is Paradox’s best suite of interlocking, core game mechanics since Hearts of Iron 4. EU5 has mechanics so complex and multilayered that any attempt at a casual description or concise critical observation threatens to get lost in the weeds of exceptions when it comes to, for example, population dynamics versus taxation control. It’s definitively a new era of strategy game design, one where such detailed systems are in play that anything but an extensive discussion of each mechanic will miss some nuance, drawback, benefit, or connection to another part of the whole.

However, that means that in the places it fails to deliver, it does so noticeably and obnoxiously. EU5 is so complex that whatever its true bugs and issues are won’t emerge until it hits a huge player audience, but for now there are a few obvious problems.

The most significant one is that the game’s complexity appears to have outpaced the AI’s ability to play it in an interesting and dynamic fashion. It seems able to build its country, to manage its government, to maneuver its armies and even pull off clever invasions of your territory—including those pesky sea landings every once in a while—but it doesn’t have the same threatening posture that enemies had in prior games.

I don’t feel like rival countries in EU5 are ready to kick me while I’m down or abandon an alliance the moment we take out our mutual enemy. They’re just not planning ahead, trying to build a large and impressive empire, or attempting to form some new historical power in the same way that other grand strategy games have conditioned us to expect. They’re all too happy to make friends and sink into a peaceful status quo rather than take a 50/50 shot of beating you—or an alliance of other NPC nations—in a war.

In a way, the AI is almost too good at the geopolitics of EU5. Good enough to build strong alliances to protect itself if it’s too small a country, or to take just enough territory in a peace that it doesn’t start further wars against itself.

Which means the map can be pretty static. Historical nations don’t always emerge. The real offense is that it also means the map can be truly ugly, with absurdly ahistorical borders akin to a Jackson Pollock that are then locked in place for centuries. This is great in the Holy Roman Empire, where historical law and cultural status quo allowed the patchwork of small states to endure. It’s awful in India and China, where the inevitable collapse of the Delhi Sultanate and Yuan dynasty creates some truly ugly and silly looking states: ones shaped like snakes, or made up of a dozen unconnected provinces.

It’s a clear failure of game mechanics that these can endure as functional countries. None of this is to mention the colonization of the New World, which while more interesting, engaging, and in many ways realistic than ever results in a similar patchwork of absurdities.

Undiscovered country

The rest of the big issues are technical, with stuttering drops in frame rate and even complete hangups for a few seconds when too much is going on—particularly around the start of each month when a ton of game systems update. It also crashed fairly regularly, reliably every few hours, but sometimes in strings of two to four times an hour for entire evenings of playtime. This is annoying but tolerable, given that you can set your own autosave intervals.

Which is a shame, because it’s in many ways a beautifully made strategy game with a ton of attention to detail. The map is quite pretty, littered with little soldiers walking to and fro, with roads carrying trade goods, with convoys of ships heading to some far-off land to trade or settle.

It has audio and visual details that excel at drawing you into the world—like how windows close with the thump of a book cover or appear in a shuffle of parchment. You can use the wonderfully-made trade map to see goods flowing from one dynamic market to another, or the population map to see where and how people in your country are migrating. (Spoiler: They’re moving to the city to escape feudal serfdom.) The soundtrack is a treat: a flowing full-orchestral score of the sort we rarely get in games anymore.

Europa Universalis 5 is a charming game if you love this genre and want it to expand, doing more interesting things with a greater fidelity. It’s willing to dig in and try for honestly historical and alt-historical depictions of messy parts of history like the transatlantic slave trade, the Black Death, the horde wars on the Eurasian steppe, and the waves of early modern colonization that followed the European discovery of America.

At the same time, EU5 reaches too far and strains its muscles too hard in the process. What’s here in the release version is an interesting historical sandbox, but it’s not dynamic enough on its own. One can’t help but want it to present more of a challenge, a tougher game that tries harder to bend itself into the shape of real history against your wishes. To give you something other than its own sheer scale to fight against.