Europa Universalis 5 review: A beautiful storm of possibility and overstimulation

If you’ve ever played a racing sim as a casual player, you’ll know that finding just the right mix of difficulty options and assists is the key to enjoyment — otherwise it's either way too easy to win or you spend most of your time in the barriers. Europa Universalis 5, although far off being a racing sim (though there is the race to the New World), is a little bit like that.

Playing Paradox Tinto’s complex grand strategy game without any assistance is a daunting task, even if successfully doing so is incredibly satisfying. What did old Tiberius say? Governing is like holding a ferocious wolf by the ears. EU5 wants you to wear many hats, a number of its systems being deep enough that you could probably make entire games with them as cores and come up with something engaging. Wrangling all of them at the same time is challenging.

Where its predecessor simplified important concepts such as population and trade, EU5 went all in to represent them in all their glory, creating an interconnected web of mechanics that’s able to simulate complex economic and geopolitical processes, putting them into the player’s hands — sometimes, anyway. Other times, you are no more than a passenger, swimming against the tide along with everyone else.

Population is the most valuable commodity in EU5, so much so that I’ve been using it as the main metric of how well I’m currently doing. You need a population to work farms, mines, and lumberyards, to preach the word of the divine – whichever flavor they may subscribe to – or defend the realm against invaders. But not everyone does every job. There are social classes. A peasant can’t be expected to work on producing books in a scriptorium. That’s for clerics. The game counts every single member of your population, regardless of class, religion, or culture. All pops are simulated and have their own agendas and budgets, acting as groups. They construct buildings, export and import goods, and demand political influence. Every country has them and is alive that way.

That’s a tough experience to dive into at first, because the usual mindset going into a Paradox game is that it’s an unbridled power fantasy in which you are the main character and should be able to do as you please with your country as if it was your personal property. It can feel like the estates are all out to get you — and they are. But they’re also rivals with each other.

At the start of the game, nobles will usually hold the majority of the power in most countries, but you can change that — not with a single decree, but gradually, over generations, by playing the estates against each other. You start favoring the burghers by giving them an extra privilege and changing some laws around to lower the value the aristocracy holds in your society. Slowly, this will erode the nobles’ political power and open a vacuum, which you can try and fill yourself or leave to the rising estate. Once they are sufficiently weakened, you can rescind privileges and show an estate who’s the boss, but that’s always a delicate matter. Tank your stability and the country might suffer from a variety of issues. Rebellions, chiefly, but also economic troubles. If your estates are unhappy as it is, you’ll need to lower their taxes to recover their happiness. A loss of control further decreases your ability to extract revenues from your territories.

I’ve found loans to be utterly useless in EU5, as they are usually far too small in volume to help you through a crisis. So you take on more loans, interest crippling your income, leading you into a death spiral. Going bankrupt is not game over, but obviously stifles your development and may well provide a cause for regime change or a foreign invasion.

In politics, subtlety is usually the name of the game. Thinking long-term is a fundamental skill to play EU5 in every regard.

Take fishing villages, for example. Playing as the Ashikaga Shogunate, fish is already plentiful and you won’t struggle for food (which, yes, is needed to feed those pops and your armies and your fleets), so building fishing villages is not a profitable venture. However, they also generate sailors, which are needed to build and maintain ships as well as man exploration missions. The game is smart enough not to waste manpower on buildings that operate at a loss, but you only get those sailors when the fishing village is actively working, so you can’t just build and forget about them. What you can do, though, is subsidize them. You pay for their losses, keeping them running and benefitting from their sailor generation. It’s not the most economical thing to do, but a country is not a business and such strategic concerns are exactly your job to figure out as a ruler.

Want to know why I put a whole lot of money into colonizing Hokkaido as quickly as possible? It’s not for glory and painting the map my color — okay, the latter did play a role. No, it’s mainly because Japan does not have a single source of sturdy grains at the start of the game. But in Hokkaido, there are several provinces boasting this resource. Sturdy grains are a resource your peasants need in abundance and these guys make up about 90% of your population. So you can tell them to suck it up, stifling their happiness and prosperity, or you can import the stuff en masse, using capital and valuable trade capacity. Or you can play the long game and acquire it for yourself. Once the sturdy grains started flowing, the market price steadily went down. This, in turn, allowed peasants to produce their own goods more efficiently and put more money into their pockets, enabling investments and lifting up the entire economy, but also bolstering their political power compared to the other estates, which in turn helped with my goal to undermine the samurai class.

When the Red Turban Rebellions tore apart Yuan China, my neighbors suddenly had a hunger for weapons and other goods needed to raise and maintain troops. I invested heavily into the arms industry, boosting a strategically important sector while making bank. Checking trades, even my burghers got in on the action and exported weapons on their own accord. War is great for business if it’s fought somewhere else and by other people. If it’s your own people who are dying (be it to battles, starvation, or disease), you can say goodbye to your stellar economy.

Of course, China breaking apart had other economic effects: Provinces were devastated and looted, leading to certain products being rarer and their prices soaring. Merchants had to find different ways to get the goods they needed when their country fell apart and brothers fought brothers, so I suddenly saw my merchants import spices and resell them for a profit.

Constructing buildings or raising and maintaining armies likewise requires resources like it would in any ordinary city-builder, influencing demand and therefore prices. Why is my fleet repair not working? Oh, I have a crippling liquor shortage in the country and sailors simply can’t function without the stuff. Logistics matter. How great is that?

All of these scenarios are examples of EU5’s interconnected systems working with each other to create authentic dynamics between the economy and politics. Throw culture and religion into the equation and let your imagination run wild.

As indicated at the beginning, you can manage all of these fronts manually, or get assistance via EU5’s automation system. It’s a powerful tool that can pretty much play the game for you, if you simply want to watch and learn. But its true beauty lies in the fact that you can use it to delegate tasks, like a real ruler. All that trading I mentioned above? I ran that on automation. If I really wanted to, say, keep an import order for sturdy grains running and not have the AI touch it, I could lock that in. You can also divide up the trade capacity you have between an automated portion and one to handle manually, which is another fantastic way to get a hold on the system.

EU5’s complexity is overwhelming and will make you feel stupid at times (and like a genius at other times for the same reason), but it provides tools to manage that — like those racing sims. It’s just a matter of finding the right mix of settings and finding out what you actually want to do with your time in the game.

Even if you don’t know what you’re doing, the usual Paradox recipe of pinning important stuff at a bar at the top of the screen helps you decide on your agenda (including a summary of what’s currently going on whenever you load into a save). This is important, because EU5 feels more like a sandbox than EU4. There are no missions for each country to give you specific goals — and sometimes that feels a bit frustrating, because it increases that feeling of drifting along the current of (alternative) history without direction or control.

Tinto’s replacement for missions – political situations and international organizations – have my opinion split. On the one hand they do provide some of that needed direction. Japan has to deal with two rival imperial courts in the country, for example, and the whole affair comes with special interactions that even feed into the religion mechanics. On the other hand the game seems utterly incapable to actually tell me what to do to solve this situation. None of the buttons ever become available because I’m the shogun. But how can I be someone other than the shogun? Why can’t I just get rid of the imperial contenders? I can declare war on them, but I can’t actually fulfill any war goals due to them not having armies or territories and so the conflicts always end in a white peace. Oh, also a hundred years or so later the Sengoku Jidai breaks out no matter how well you’ve ruled the country, so have fun having a third of your territory stolen by small fiefdoms you now have to unite somehow. A goal to work towards? Sure. Does it feel great to basically lose your entire progress without any input whatsoever? Not one bit.

So, again: It’s a big shift from the previous power fantasy. To enjoy EU5, you need to adjust your attitude a bit and be open to letting go of the wheel from time to time.

Case in point: natural disasters. If you have your army in the wrong place at the wrong time, an earthquake could be a cataclysmic event for your current run. Annoyingly, the game also fails to inform you about which buildings exactly were destroyed in affected regions — having damage reports would be great. That’s one of many smaller issues with the UI and general information management, although I have to say that the game does a robust job of feeding you with what you need most of the time or letting you customize things according to your needs. The nested tooltips are an absolute lifesaver and you can always click on key words to get into the deeper encyclopedia for more information on them. For most core concepts, this works great. For the historical situations, on the other hand, that’s not enough.

As a player, I want to engage with these. They give me an overall objective. But I need a little help to make me understand what exactly I can do with them. Having bespoke interactions and outcomes for these scenarios is really cool and flavorful, be it the 100 Years War or the Sengoku Jidai, but most of the time it’s difficult for me to know how to engage with these systems or what concrete steps I need to take to reach my desired goal. The almost mathematical requirement equations currently attempting to tell me what to do are simply not doing the trick for me — so I do miss how the old mission trees broke these processes down step by step.

I have not encountered any stability issues personally, but I know others have. Performance and loading times were quite impressive on my high-end system (i9-14900KF CPU with a RTX 4080 Super GPU and 32 GB RAM, game running on SSD), as I would expect. Are there bugs? Certainly. Balance issues? Without a doubt — history, after all, is extremely unfair, and it would not be a Paradox grand strategy game if you couldn’t take on some hardcore challenges or lost your country to random hogwash two hundred years down the line. This is the most complex strategy game I’ve ever encountered, so I honestly don’t expect it to ever be free of some issues.

EU5 is keeping me in its grip so far, despite a few frustrations and the occasional bursts of anger when stuff just won’t go my way because I don’t control everything. Its complexity, depth, and historical flavor are a beautiful combination. As odd as it sounds, my personal quest to lower the price of sturdy grains in Japan was more satisfying than conquering another country. There’s just something fascinating about turning a notch here and moving a slider there and the effects rippling across countries and EU5 is really good at creating these long-term dynamics.

The “Be ambitious” tagline isn’t just a declaration of intent by the developers or a marketing slogan, it’s an actual appeal to players, because I think you’ll need a certain ambition to get the most out of this game. You need to be willing to engage and learn and create your own goals.

Europa Universalis 5 feels like the culmination of everything Paradox has done over the last two decades and if there’s ever been a game worthy of being called a grand strategy title, this is it.