EU 4 is one of my favorite games. I've been playing it since I was in middle school and I'm now about to graduate college. A seemingly endless amount of fun experiences and hours burned playing it. I absolutely love history almost solely because of EU 4 and have spent an absurd amount of hours learning as much as I can, all starting with EU 4. Easily one of the greatest games ever created.
When EU 5 was announced I was very excited. I couldn't wait for a modern remaster of the game set in an earlier time period. New map, new nations, new mechanics, new everything. I was absolutely ecstatic. This was Paradox's magnum opus. The ultimate strategy game. There's no way they could fail, especially after some of the previous disaster launches.
Unfortunately, that appears to not be the case. The game is very mid and feels extremely unfinished. It's probably the most mediocre game I've ever played. EU 4 was extremely fun because it was the perfect blend of arcadey gameplay and historical accuracy which created an addicting loop of gameplay that was super satisfying and fun. EU 5 takes the historical accuracy side way too far in my opinion, which while I understand a lot of people enjoy that and wanted it, I personally think its detrimental to the game. I'm not very interested in playing what feels like an economy builder similar to Vicky 3. I wanted to play a new version of EU 4 that still has the ridiculously fun strategies and is way more oriented around military conquest with the completely viable option of playing tall if you want. In EU 5, it feels like I'm spending the overwhelming majority of my time just sitting there building endlessly and watching the income meter move up and down, and I just don't want to do that. Trade is ridiculously complicated to the point where I still barely understand anything even after playing for about ~60 hours. There's about 500 automation toggles spread across the game which while kinda nice, don't even work correctly half the time. For example, I toggled the autobuild after a certain amount of money has been saved up and the AI builds absolutely nothing for me instead just letting the money sit there. In addition to this, if you feel the need to add that many automation meters then that probably means you made the game way too complex, which while appreciated by some people, is not appealing to more casual players and is reflected in the player count. There becomes a point where adding more systems becomes a negative to a game. I do not think a strategy game should have to open itself up by telling the player how to automate systems, that's bad game design in my opinion. The control system sucks and removes any real reason to expand outwards, especially if you are a big nation. You have to play for a ridiculous amount of time to get any value out of provinces on the edge of your empire and in many cases there's pretty much no reason to invest in them. If you can't get any value out of the provinces, what's the point of invading nations? Integration takes forever and if the area has the wrong culture and religion you gain absolutely nothing from it. Again, I understand that's realistic but realism isn't always fun.
I think the change I hated the most in EU 5 was the removal of mission trees. I personally enjoy having a set of goals for a nation that give you a soft guide on what to do, giving you bonuses when completing them. Missions added a ton of flavor to nations in EU 4 and were a lot of people's favorite concept in the game, reflected by the absurd amount of mission tree related mods. I don't understand why they decide to remove them outside of the "realism" factor but even then, wouldn't a historical mission tree help enforce realism? I saw a lot of people complaining that they railroad nations but there's absolutely nothing stopping Paradox from making an option to toggle missions on or off, similar to HOI's historical AI focus setting. Just seems stupid.
I don't like the levy system and the new military system where you can't recruit normal units until far later in the game with them being significantly more expensive. I much prefer the "just recruit infantry and cavalry" and go fight, instead of having to build a collection of buildings to provide equipment and then build a bunch of military buildings on top of that. I don't really want to do that, even if its significantly more realistic than EU 4 is. It is cool that there's a ton of different unit types that can be recruited and mix and match armies similar to Imperator: Rome and in my opinion they should've just applied that system which is an improvement to EU 4's system without being annoying. The wars are also just extremely dull, especially early in the game when the two sides just raise levies and one of them gets stackwiped ending the war instantly. I appreciate that they made battles count more, but I hate wars lasting like 3 seconds before they end. After playing this game, I booted up EU 4 and played Jianzhou vs Ming to compare and the difference is just staggering. The AI in this game is totally braindead and it feels like they do absolutely nothing both in wars and in the greater world at large. I've fought so many wars in EU 5 where I never even see the AI armies, so I just waltz in and occupy whatever unfortified capitals that exist. My AI allies just constantly suicide themselves or stack 80k troops on a tiny fort and starve to death. The AI is so passive in this game as well, basically just sitting around for ridiculously long stretches of time.
On top of all of this, the game is terribly optimized. Absolutely horrible. It lags endlessly and I have to turn so many settings down and use flat map to get normal FPS which is insane to me considering every other Paradox game has run completely fine for me. It's also a total disgrace that Paradox released their game in such a poor condition after already having disaster launches with Imperator Rome and a wide range of their EU 4 DLCs.
Not everything is bad about this game, and there are some things I really like and feel like they are a big improvement. The biggest change that I liked was the change to the technology tree. It is so much better in EU 5 with there being a wide range of technologies and almost all of them being useful. I love that different nations get unique technologies and in my opinion it works a lot better than the national ideas system used in EU 4. I feel like it adds a lot more depth to a nation and there's no limit on how many unique technologies a nation can get in comparison to the rather limited national ideas slate in EU 4. Great upgrade. I also really like the new situations system. It adds a ridiculous amount of flavor to the game and involves a lot more countries than events in EU 4 did. There's so many unique ones and it seems like it'll be the biggest thing Paradox focuses on in terms of flavor.
There's a lot of good and interesting ideas present in this game, but the core mechanics are just not appealing to me in the slightest. It feels more like a simulation than a wargame where economy takes precedence over war and that's not what I wanted from EU 5 at all. Unless they changed everything about the game which is something they obviously aren't gonna do, there's no reason for me to switch from EU 4 which to me is the perfect blend. People who love historical realism and overly complex economic systems will love this game and I highly recommend it for those people, but for someone who likes the arcadey wargame from EU 4 this game completely misses the mark. It's a shame because I was so excited to play this when it came out, but this game is just so boring I can't be bothered to play anymore.
