EU5: How to build up your economy and earn money
By Marco Wutz
Conquering the world or becoming a technological powerhouse are all viable goals in Europa Universalis 5, but they have one thing in common: You need money to complete them. EU5’s economy is one of the most complex systems in strategy game history, as the market is very closely intertwined with the population system and geopolitics — just like in real life.
Naturally, this makes it a little daunting to approach. But don’t worry: We’ll show you how you can get your economy on track in EU5 and start making money to fuel your other ambitions.
Cut unneeded spending
If you’re in immediate need of additional cash, it may be time to cut a few corners in order to make your budget more accommodating. Navigate to the Budget tab to find out where all the money for your treasury comes from and where it flows. You can use the sliders here to cut spending in many areas, such as the military, diplomacy, or culture.
If you’re at peace and in no danger of being drawn into a war any time soon, you can cut the maintenance of your armies, navies, and forts. If you’re not interested in diplomacy, decrease the budget in that area, and so on. While this is never a long-term solution and always comes with an associated cost, be it a reduced ability to keep your nation safe or to spy on neighbors, targeted cost cuts can provide you some much needed breathing room for other investments.
Increase Control
Control is an enormously vital metric that you can see in the overview screen for each province or through the associated map mode. Your Control is always going to be highest in your capital and settlements close to your capital, which includes those that are connected to it via harbors. Roads are another way to spread your Control over the country alongside an action from your Cabinet, which can directly increase the Control in a targeted province alongside buildings, technologies, and legal instruments.
Why is this important? Well, the higher your Control in a province is, the more revenue you get from its tax base. Even if a province makes, say, 100 Ducats per month in taxes on paper, if its Control is at 0% then you won’t see a single coin from that money. So increasing the Control in areas with a strong economy is a good way to increase your income.
Increase Estate Happiness
Much of this depends on your exact government type, but generally the taxes you get come from your Estates — the social classes in your country. Going back into the Budget tab, you once again have the ability to move the taxation sliders to control how much money you take. Naturally, paying taxes makes the Estates unhappy, so you’ll only want to take as much as they’ll tolerate without getting too grumpy, which can lead to rebellions and other unpleasant business. But by making the Estates happy through the grant of privileges or event decisions you can squeeze more tax money from them without endangering the stability of the country.
If you’re a beginner, I would advise you to simply automate Estate taxation: The automation generally does pretty well with this, always getting the maximum amount of tax revenue while preventing any undue hatred towards the ruler.
Some government types, laws, and privileges prevent certain Estates from being taxed entirely — removing those blockers is a great long-term goal to set for yourself.
Fulfill Population Needs
Most of the above measures are what you can change on short notice. But to really grow your economy over the long term, you’ll need to raise the prosperity of your people. A notification in the top bar will inform you about the current Population Needs in your country. This will be a list of resources currently not available in your market in the necessary quantity.
You can address these shortages by importing the needed resources through trade or producing them yourself, as far as that’s possible. If you produce these resources, increase your RGO Size by selecting the province and then clicking on the button next to its resource icon. This’ll expand the resource gathering operations in the area. Once enough Laborers have been employed, the production of that resource will go up.
If you don’t have access to certain resources, expansion may be an option — either through the colonization of unclaimed lands or conquest.
By fulfilling the Population Needs in your country, you lower the price of these resources, which will allow the people to produce goods more efficiently, earn more money, and invest it back into the economy — not to speak of their higher income yielding higher taxes as well.
In the long term, of course, growing your population is another major driver for your economy, as more people produce more stuff and consume more stuff.
Increase Production and Production Efficiency
The Population Needs give you an important hint for this section: If a good is in high demand, its price is likely soaring and therefore producing and selling said good is lucrative. You can either select one of your towns and click on the Burgher icon to see the production buildings you can currently construct, which will conveniently list their currently predicted profit, or go through the Markets tab to see the current supply and demand of all goods in your Markets. Keep in mind that you need to upgrade Rural Settlements to Towns to host advanced production and trade buildings.
Whether you construct buildings that address shortages in your country or chase demands in a neighboring country – a nearby war, for example, is a great opportunity to sell Weapons – make sure to keep an eye on the efficiency of the production chain. It’s always best if you can source the raw materials for more advanced goods for cheap in your own country, otherwise importing them not only incurs costs, but also blocks Trade Capacity for other uses.
Do make extensive use of the notifications on the top bar to kickstart your economy by finding out which goods and resources are in high demand or which buildings currently don’t make a profit — you might be able to fix their issues by expanding certain gathering operations.
There is also a separate Production Efficiency stat you can increase through research, laws, or government reforms. This stat is a universal modifier and therefore very desirable, just like Tax Efficiency.
Increase Trade Capacity and Advantage
Trade, of course, is a major part of the economy in the game — it helps you overcome resource shortages and earns you revenues through export. How much you can import and export in every Market depends on your regional Trade Capacity. It’s important to note that you’re not the only actor from your nation on the Market: Estates have their own Trade Capacity and partake in the business independently of you.
Whatever your trade strategy is – trading for profits, fulfilling Population Needs, or increasing your Production Efficiency – increasing your Trade Capacity is paramount. You can do so by constructing buildings such as Marketplaces and Wharfs in your own territory as well as Trade Offices on the territory of other nations, if you have a positive relationship of at least +100 with them.
Another important factor here is Trade Advantage, which determines whose merchants get the best access to deals. Say, you’re Japan and share a market with Goryeo and you both want to export weapons to Yuan China — who actually gets first dibs on that export deal and therefore the best price? It’s the nation with a higher Trade Advantage. You gain this through the same buildings as Trade Capacity for the most part.
I would advise beginners to automate trading and check what the AI is doing in this area from time to time to learn from its moves. If you want to get in on the action yourself, there is a neat feature to allow you to share the burden with the AI: You can split your Trade Capacity between an automated and a manual pool, enabling you to dip your toe into the depths with just a part of your trade power. The game also curates a list of suggested trades you can use to get started.
No economy is perfect: There will always be some shortages and inefficiencies. But let that not discourage you from engaging with the economy — at the end of the day it functions on similar principles to ours with supply and demand ruling prices.
There are some advanced techniques to make money as well, such as offering loans to other countries and profiting from the interest, but that’s unlikely to be an option when you’re fresh into a playthrough (unless you play as a bank, which is an option), so we’re leaving those aside for now.