Europa Universalis 5 preview: Exploring the beauty of complexity through trade

Even as a Paradox veteran, I found Europa Universalis 5 borderline overwhelming when I got to try it out earlier this year, though the game’s excellent automation functions saved the day. In the time I played the game, I specifically avoided dealing with anything related to trade manually, as it seemed like too dry an element to get into — who wants to be an accountant when you could colonize new lands instead, right? 

However, when I had the opportunity to play EU5 at Gamescom 2025 with a member of the dev team at my side, I thought it’d be a great idea to have him guide me through this aspect in a bit more detail. After all, EU5 is so complex and deep that it’d be impossible to go over everything even on a surface level, so why not focus on one element I haven’t really touched?

As with all things about EU5, trade is strongly rooted in the game’s all-encompassing population system, which simulates… well, the entire world’s inhabitants. While you can’t exactly track each and every individual in your empire by name, the game keeps tabs on them. Your provinces are home to people with different social classes, cultures, and religions, which all form groups based on these factors. That’s not unlike previous games, but things go a little deeper this time around, because all of these groups have their own agencies.

Your Portuguese Catholic Nobles in Lisbon will have their own incomes and can construct their own buildings in your provinces. Thanks to the parliament, they have political power and might force you to give them additional privileges or finance some of their construction plans in return for their votes. And if they have too much power and hate you, they might well start a civil war to replace you with one of their own. The same goes for their peers with other cultures or religions, for the Clerics and Burghers of all stripes, and so forth.

With such diverse populations and agendas come needs that want to be fulfilled, somewhat like in a city-builder. There are complex production chains you can build, including selectable in and outputs for many buildings (for example, you can use bronze or stone to produce tools instead of iron, albeit less efficiently). Raising armies and navies requires actual resources and not just money. Most importantly, the people serving in them are these Portuguese Catholic Nobles and Andalusian Catholic Peasants. If they die in battle or by starvation, it’s not just some aloof Manpower stat that’s suffering, but your actual economy, as a loss in battle means that you’re suddenly short on workers.

Because you have this complex simulation of pops, trade is equally dynamic. You can import or export resources to or from your Market – that’s an area in which you have lands – based on a variety of factors you can grow throughout the game, such as available fleet power. In general, the developer by my side told me, there are three ways to go about trading: You can trade to net profits, to fulfill the needs of your population, making it happier and more productive, or trade for goods to complete your own goals, such as stockpiling more weapons ahead of a planned war. Paradox built some helpful UI sections to highlight these possibilities, listing especially lucrative or useful trade options you can execute in two clicks or customize a bit to better fit your needs. You can even decide to automate only certain parts of trading, allowing you to take control over the mechanic in babysteps.

The team has already reacted to some of the feedback gathered from testers when it comes to the UI and its problems with delivering information to the player, so you can actually look up any resource, building, or concept in the game with a Shift-click and its help page will present you with all the options on how to engage with it, which is neat. For example, clicking your negative gold balance will bring up ways to make money. Missions chosen by the player during a game function as onboarding tools, teaching them about various concepts and mechanics along the way based on what interests them. “It’s a tool for us to deal with the complexity of the game and teach the player how to navigate that,” the developer said.

I was discouraged in my initial playthrough when I realized that I couldn’t possibly fulfill all my population’s needs through trading (making me think I did something wrong), which is one of the reasons why I turned to automation, but the developer emphasized that this was completely normal. You also don’t need to pay attention to your ongoing trades all the time – although you can – unlike I originally believed. While the market being dynamic might make some trades less profitable over time, the pendulum can swing back around easily. Also, other players might react to your moves, creating economic dependencies linking different countries.

You can specialize your economy into being a raw resource exporter for other countries or build a flourishing production sector and import raw resources to pump out advanced goods for profit. You may even be able to make a neighboring country dependent on your food exports, which is a completely new dynamic for the series and has massive implications for diplomacy. 

Heck, in EU5 you can sell the services of your standing army to another country as mercenaries, which helps the army pay for itself and provides it with valuable experience. Of course, there is now the caveat mentioned earlier: Your people dying in some far-off conflict will actually have an impact on your situation at home. But if you’re ruling a country with a lot of peasants and not much else, this might be a valid business model to kickstart its economic development.

While I’m still a little afraid of trade and the massive list of numbers that comes with it, realizing its connection to the political sphere and getting a step-by-step rundown of it from a developer really motivated me to engage with it further, once I get my hands on the game again. Primarily, though, it gave me yet another glimpse into EU5’s beautiful complexity and how much agency players have within this framework, even if millions of pops – a couple of popes – in the world all have their own plans.

“It is very complex, it is very detailed, but that’s what we specifically aimed for: A game with many different opportunities for players to explore and engage with that complexity,” Paradox stated. It’s just as the game’s tagline says: Be ambitious.

Europa Universalis 5 will be released for PC on November 4, 2025.

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