Europa Universalis V

I have 1100+ hours in EU4, and warn all you reading not to buy future products from Paradox. We were all exited at the prospect of EU5 becoming a Voltaires nightmare 2 experience, with almost all previous EU4 DLCs squezed in to the new game. Its horrible execution is therefore all the more dissapointing. Poblems: 1. Playing tall and with a vassal swarm is essentialy the only way to play this game, as you will get punished for playing wide. 2. If you decide to play a small country you will get pummled not by your neighbours, but your own economy which is unable to sustain your self. No matter how much you fiddle with the estates and tax systems, you will cop out and collapse eventually. The province control system hampers any notion of a smooth start for anything bigger than 3 provinces. Pushing you to play bigger countries with all the flavour and gameplay mechanics. 3. There are several countries which dominate the game and will always without fail control a region almost fully without any chance of fighting back. Naples, Hungary and Poland tend to form a superblock via personal union and annex south and eastern Europe. Tough ♥♥♥♥ fighting them even as a great power. 4. Theres too much to micromanage esspecialy in the economy, and it feels more like a economic simulator rather than a nation building one. Even faith or culture conversion are punished sevearly, with recovery being expensive and at times unatainable. 5. The game tried to incorporate too many mechanics from previous paradox fames and is difficult to pick up, even for EU4 veterans. You get the general idea, but for it to be truly fun and immersive you need extensive additional playtime. 6. The game launched broken, gets updated and breaks regularly and already they are pushing for DLCs, which them self launch broken. There is a reason EU4 has more weekly players than its sucessor, and even if i was expecting this i still got dissapointed. Never giving them money again.

I refuse to play this game until the devs remove the insane levels of merc spam, which is still atrocious in 1.3 Having to kill literally HALF A MILLION mercenaries in every war in the 1500s (the AI just hires another 100k lmao). Hard pass. I really want to like this game but the devs just keep feeding me slop.

This game needs about a years worth of intensive development and patches before I'll consider spending another dime on it. I pre-ordered this game and did so with Victoria 3. The difference between the two is that in Victoria 3 version 1.0 there was a satisfying core game loop that drew me in and a creative vision I could believe in. Here, neither is present. I hate to say this, but this is the roughest paradox launch I've yet seen. Lastly, it was a very bad design decision to make ticks hourly instead of daily. The increase in ticks seems to have a large detrimental impact on performance. Caveat: This review is based on my impressions of the game at launch, so versions 1.0 and 1.1. I will need to hear about major positive changes to the game's core systems to consider returning to it

After the tenth patch where things are completely different than they were just a patch ago AND it broke things that were previously working, I can't in good faith recommend anyone new buy this. Especially when there's a perfectly fine game that actually works in EU4.

After the latest update, I can't even start a new game. The game crashes every time, and all I can do is send reports (I don't even know if they're needed; I don't think anyone processes them).

개벼ㅑㅇ신같은 좆고아 아스퍼거들이 만든 최악의 게임

Every patch is 1 step forward and 2 steps back

I'm on a machine with an i9-14900HX and a 5070 gpu. Yet the game is super laggy, even with settings set to low. Pretty disappointing for a modern game.

UI一坨，数值一坨，一个不可能模拟出来真实历史的历史模拟游戏，一个数值调整只会位移小数点的制作组，一个狂妄到自认为大战略游戏第一人的游戏制作人，最后结果就是活跃人数甚至不如前作，怎么不直接把报表上的游玩人数小数点后移两位？

I waited to make this review because I hoped they would be able to fix this game in the months following launch, but we're well over half a year into patches and things seem to be getting even worse rather than better. Bottom line: Do not buy this if you haven't already. Behind all of the fancy graphics and incredible promises, is a shallow game and a development team that does not respect the player base whatsoever. EU4 consistently reaches a far higher player count despite being nearly 15 years old. This is not something you see with any other Paradox game, Victoria 3 and CK3 both had no issue surpassing the previous game's player count on release and afterwards. EU5 is a unique failure in all the worst ways. Well, not really. The same lead developer, Johan, also fumbled another game called Imperator Rome years ago, and it appears that lessons were not learned. The only difference between then and now is that Imperator Rome was not a beloved franchise with other games in the series, and so Paradox was unable to get away with releasing utter slop without people abandoning the game entirely. People are so desperate for this game to work that they are willing to take being spat on and abused for far longer than before. But for just how long? Will they continue to buy each DLC and pray things get better? I sure won't be. I already bought the base game, so you could say I'm a sucker for that. All I can say is that I hope anybody on the fence and reading this doesn't make the same mistake. Please do not enable such greedy behavior, on behalf of both myself and the rest of the community. I regret my purchase immensely.