EU5: How to upgrade towns

While Rural Settlements provide vital food production in Europa Universalis 5, the true engine of a flourishing economy are bustling Towns and Cities, which can refine raw resources into goods and provide the infrastructure to trade them with the world. Founding Cities is actually relatively easy in EU5, but the game’s dense user interface is making the “how” a little difficult to spot at a glance.

How to upgrade towns in EU5

You can upgrade a Rural Settlement to a Town if it has at least 5,000 inhabitants. You’ll also need the necessary resources to pay for the upgrade, so make sure that your regional Market is able to provide those goods.

If those requirements are fulfilled, select the settlement from the map and then click the star icon next to its name in the top left of the settlement overview, above the imagery showing the town.

As touched upon above, Rural Settlements are vital for food production and also have a higher maximum RGO size, so they are more efficient at extracting resources from their province. In addition, they provide a bonus to population growth. However, they primarily support Peasants and Laborers living in them, so you can’t construct many advanced buildings requiring employed Nobles, Clerics, or Burghers.

That’s exactly the kind of buildings you need to get things moving in your country, though, and so it’s vital that you upgrade some of your Rural Settlements into Towns. These support people from higher social classes, enable higher building levels, and have a higher Control level, which in turn means that you can extract more taxes from them — another major advantage. The big drawback is that they have decreased food production, so it’s not the greatest idea to transform all of your breadbasket provinces into bustling Towns, since that might cause the entire country to starve. You’ll need to find a balance.

Towns can be upgraded one more time, becoming Cities. These support even greater numbers of the higher classes, further raise the maximum building levels, and have even higher Control. Cities also accelerate the population promotion speed and can accommodate more people in general, becoming true centers of commercial, industrial, and cultural development.

The upgrade from Town to City is initiated the same way as the one from Rural Settlement to Town, only it has higher requirements in terms of population and resources.