Europa Universalis 5 hands-on preview: Any more intricate and you’d need a cabinet to help you play

My first run in Europa Universalis 5 ended like any first run in a Paradox grand strategy game usually does: in disaster. Starting you off in 1337, the game very quickly throws a challenge at you that’s impossible to overcome without damage. Sure, you can decide to invest money into storing up medicaments early or isolate your country from trade, but the Black Death will come no matter how well you prepare. It will ravage your country, depopulating it. You won’t have the manpower to fight wars or maintain your fleet. Your production of food and goods will go down. The very fabric of your country will show tears, finally ripping when the nobles have had it and decide to depose you in a civil war.

Mind you, things are still dicey even once you have the concept of a plan for the game. You can survive the Black Death without the country coming for your head, but the staggering losses of population will still take you more than a hundred years to recover. It’s actually quite impressive how well the game manages to simulate the catastrophic amount of damage the plague did.

All images in this article are from a work-in-progress build of the game and do not represent the final product.

Simulation is the key word for describing EU5. Sure, EU4 is an intricate game as well. It has a ton of systems to interact with. But at the end of the day you’re the one in the driver’s seat. It’s your power fantasy. Your map to paint. EU5 feels totally different, because it’s not entirely your world to play with. You can steer it your way slowly and steadily, but there are other forces with their own will and there are obstacles that will inevitably set you off course or set you back. All you can sometimes do is manage instead of command.

That’s because at the most basic level, EU5’s countries are made up from people — pops, for short. You may know pops from Victoria 3 and Stellaris. Divided by culture, religion, and class, these pops have their own interests. They siphon money from the economy to build their own buildings and expand their power. They throw hissy-fits about the decisions you make. They force you to make compromises for their support in parliament. In EU5, your population isn’t simply a resource to be used up on the world’s battlefields. It’s a wolf you hold by the ears.

Pops work in your buildings and serve in your armies and they have needs, so you need to ensure that the goods and resources to meet those requirements flow their way. Trade is a completely different beast from EU4. You can now actively buy and sell dozens of goods to supply your people or make a profit. You need to bring in enough food to keep people from starving. Building ships and cannons requires the necessary materials. More than ever in a Paradox game, logistics are king in EU5.

If the prospect of managing the daily affairs of trade and construction in an empire as massive as China is daunting to you, I won’t blame you for it. It’s daunting to me, too, and I’ve played grand strategy games for close to two decades. You can get tangled up in micromanagement without end in this game, which is great if you enjoy it. If you want to be a broker, playing the resource market to make a profit, you can do that full time here. If you don’t want to engage with that, you can do that as well.

EU5 boasts an impressive automation system that allows you to delegate tasks to the AI. So if you don’t want to deal with markets, trade, and building management, you can let the AI do that for you. Frankly, I’ve not played enough to judge how competent the AI is at everything — naturally, it’s going to fare much better than a complete beginner.

While I generally dislike it when games play themselves, the automation in EU5 has been very helpful to keep me from being overwhelmed. Since no tutorial has been available in the preview build, watching the AI do things was the best way for me to learn the game and I found that I’ve been able to gradually pick things up by observing and losing myself in the wonderful nested tooltip system on offer, which greatly assisted me in getting to know the mechanics.

As I learned more, I created goals for myself. Once I had goals, I had to organically take over duties from the AI to progress towards them. So from simply having control over the country’s finances and foreign policy, I learned how to manage the estates, make laws, use my cabinet, and call parliament. Towards the end of my time with the preview build, I found myself being more and more hands-on with construction to solve some logistical problems the AI ignored and I began influencing the social values of the population to mold them into what I wanted over the long term in order to enact specific policies.

The automation may tempt you into sitting back and not doing anything, but it’s been super rewarding for me to learn and gradually take control of the reins. That said, I’m still leaving trades and production largely to the AI — I’m completely fine with EU5 not being a power fantasy, but that doesn’t mean I want to be an accountant either.

Paradox Tinto has poured a generous dose of Victoria 3, Crusader Kings 3, and Stellaris into EU5, from the way pops and trade work to the way armies need food and consist of levies as well as regular troops. But it’s still Europa Universalis in there. It’s still about going out into the world and exploring it. It’s still about planting your flag in as many places as possible without everyone else – including your own people – wanting to put your head on a spike. It’s still a game about balancing social and technological progress with personal power.

There are some new features that should be highlighted as well, since they have a great deal of potential. Entities like the Holy Roman Empire, the Catholic Church, and the Chinese Empire are now classified as International Organizations. They each have their own bespoke mechanics, which help make playthroughs with countries belonging to them different and involve you in various shenanigans. For example, relatively early on Catholic countries will be affected by the Western Schism between Rome and France. You can decide not to get involved, but negative events resulting from the divide will still affect you all the same. Or you try and resolve it, which may take some resources and ruffle some feathers, but save yourself a lot of internal trouble.

All this, mind you, now functions without EU4’s “mana” — the administrative, diplomatic, and military powers of your monarch. There are resources and currencies to be spent, of course, such as money, manpower, and stability, but it no longer feels like you can kick a campaign down the drain after playing two hundred years because your current ruler is an imbecile.

I won’t spend much time on the technical side, because a preview build far ahead of release is not very indicative of how things will be at launch, but the loading times could certainly be a bit improved for my taste. Visually, the game is great. It has a pretty map (and tons of map modes) and lots of cool artwork, though the characters still look a little silly at times. I’ve had some three-year-old princesses in my family whose portraits made them look 15. The music goes surprisingly hard, the classic tunes of symphony orchestras or monastic choirs being a wonderful accompaniment to conquering the world.

Of course, there are some things I didn’t enjoy as much. Storms, for example, feel overly punishing at the moment. My fleets spent so much time repairing weather damage that they completely drained my sailor reserves all the time, preventing me from starting expeditions — and they would not stop: Sometimes they got smashed by bad weather even while at port, resetting all the progress to repairs.

The biggest issues for me were UI-related. It’s extremely difficult to find what you’re looking for sometimes. It took an embarrassing amount of time for me to notice that the Roman numeral that appears above the settlement artwork when you check out its overview is not only a visual representation of its current level, but is in fact the button to upgrade it. Navigating the trade and resource overviews is incredibly daunting, despite the very useful search function they include, because there are so many different screens with different functions. I couldn’t remember half the time how I got to screens for certain actions in the first place when I wanted to repeat them.

Simplifying the ways for players to navigate the intricate systems would do a lot for the game’s approachability, as would adding better explanations for why you can’t do certain things or the consequences of certain actions. Again, this may partly be due to us not having a tutorial in the preview build — hopefully, players will get all of that explained to them at launch, which might well be enough to master the menus.

EU5 is very much putting the “grand” into grand strategy game — it’s so full of mechanics and content that it threatens to drown you in them. However, it does a good job of providing tools to prevent that from happening, giving you the time and space to appreciate its beauty and surf on the waves. Suffice to say, I'm looking forward to dig even more into this one.

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