Europa Universalis V

Patch 1.3 is a giant step in a great direction. The game is stable and the world feels much more active than in previous patches. I think the current state of the game is positive and I encourage former players to return to the game and new players to give it a try.

Unnecessarily complicated. It feels like the developers made the game artificially complex just to make it feel like a grand strategy game. Instead of adding meaningful depth, they buried everything under endless menus and submenus. There are simply too many buttons hidden behind too many layers. Half the time you don't even know certain features exist because they're so difficult to find. I don't feel like I'm playing a strategy game. I feel like I'm solving a puzzle just trying to locate the correct menu or button. The economy also feels completely unbalanced. The game constantly throws random events at you that exist only to destroy your budget rather than create interesting decisions. For example, raising an army and hiring a doctor to save your child can cost almost the same amount. In what world does that make sense? Building a hospital can cost the equivalent of ten years of your country's income. It's not challenging, it's just absurd. Complexity doesn't automatically make a game deep. Good strategy games are easy to understand but difficult to master. Here, the complexity mostly comes from confusing UI design, hidden mechanics, and unrealistic costs, which ends up making the experience more frustrating than enjoyable.

Not a single positive thing to say about this game it lacks content, too expensive, extremely boring, improves on barely anything, lacks any form of replayability, runs horribly and lacks any form of satisfaction of achieving/doing something if i hadn't bought this in December and already put a few hours in it I would love my money back. Save your money and just buy eu4.

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.

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.

EU5 is not a sequel to EU4 in any meaningful sense of the word. The two games cover *almost* the same time period, but they are as different-mechanically-as night and day. EU4 was a classic, 4X grand-strategy game with enough abstraction for casual play but enough intuitiveness to still feel high-stakes and competitive. EU5, by contrast, is something more akin to an "everything simulator" as I'd call it. The game itself is highly ambitious, attempting to seamlessly incorporate virtually every complex simulation mechanic paradox has attempted in the past; however, by attempting to merge everything from CK3's RPG aspects to imperator's politics to Victoria 3's trade system and economic micro-management, EU5 developers have effectively made the game "homeless" in the sense that none of its core systems feel adequately integrated or otherwise "fleshed out." Moreover, the overlap of all these added layers of complexity gives the game a steep learning curve and forces casual players to rely on clunky automation mechanics that deprive them of agency. The AI itself has also become a massive issue in EU5's development as the devs struggle to produce a map capable of the same dynamic empire-building and history-simulation we've seen in previous titles like EU4 or CK3. Overall, I would not recommend this title to casual paradox fans, at least not in its current state. It's somehow both needlessly complicated and far too lacking in depth. While I appreciate Paradox's attempts to hear player concerns, it's also their responsibility to temper expectations with real development constraints in mind.

Combat sucks. 12k professional army lose against 8k light cavalry levies. Marocco was at war with Spain and me in two different wars and beat Spain. I quit after losing the battle. Makes no sense that a ♥♥♥♥ unit like this should be that good.

Stick to EU4 for the time being This game tries to be everything but fails at being at least something. Half the features can be automated for some reason, why bother with the markets and economy when you can just press one button and the game will do it for you? Exploration is lazier than the previous installment, you have more regions to explore sure, but you once again press one button, send a random character out and in a few months' time terra incognita will be lifted. There's also no limit to colonies, which is kinda good but also bad, as literally anyone with enough cash inflow can colonize anything within their colonial range. Even restricting colonisation through settings you still end up with Papal Brasil and English Archangelsk for god knows what reason Nations do not form, the map remains very static. I played at least 3 campaigns and I had to manually "inject some juice" into the game by forming countries through console commands, because Britain doesn't form by 17th century, Poland is annexed by Lithuania but PLC doesn't form either, Russia never materialises, the damn Ottomans, the entire reasoning behind the discovery of the new world never forms, they just stick as a beylik somewhere in Anatolia. Byzantium never falls, France never repels the English, the 100 Years' war lasts for fall too long, in one campaign I had the maximum of 7 stages different 100 Years' war CB wars on France, and neither England nor France duked it out by the end. Situations make no incentive to pay attention to them, they just progress and then... Nothing happens? The protestant reformation never triggers the 30 years' war, Lutherans never spread that far either Government mechanics are absolute abysmal ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ as well, what do you mean it takes me, Novgorod, to core Pskov, which has the same culture and religion as me, which has my claims over it, up to several years? In EU4 this system worked better, sure mana is bad and all but I much rather wait 24 months than 24 years for my advisors to do anything of value. EU5 promotes a completely different style of gameplay - where you spam vassals and integrate them later, rather than conquering provinces directly, which is kinda cool but I would prefer to actually do some conquering from time to time. Parliament, why the ♥♥♥♥ does it even exist as a MANDATORY mechanic for all nations? Even if you're an absolutist monarchy - you still have a damn parliament, even if you abolish all councils and have estates under your boot - you STILL have a damn parliament. It also doesn't work, you use it to generate CBs and ask for levies, that's kind of it, there's no option to disable it and no option to either not use it or make it more useful, you have to use it or suffer a stability hit The main issue with this game overall is that it tries too hard to be a sandbox, there's barely any interesting events and the AI is so dumbfounded that it can't do anything. The only driving force in this game is the player, which wasn't like that in EU4 - surely the player had a large effect on the world, but you still competed against other powers and had to plan tactifully to avoid unwinnable situations. EU5? Just paint the map lmao, then wait for the coalition to dissipate, rinse and repeat while other powers struggle to keep themselves afloat Also the UI is genuenly terrible and looks like a mobile game got ported over to a PC, EU4 was much cleaner, stylized and you intuituvely know where and what is located. Here it's a whole garbled mess of buttons, character portraits and vital information hidden behind 10 layers of nested tooltips. If I want to count my enemy's forces in EU4 - I'll just open the diplo view, see their current army strength and reserves, compare to mine's and that's just it, now I have the info I can use to plan my next steps. Here I genuienly don't even remember how can you compare your forces other than the arbitrary meter telling you "You are much weaker" or "They are no match for us" or whatever, that tells me nothing, I want the damn numbers One final note is optimization, it is absolute abysmall ass. At first the game runs normally, but by the end of the game it becomes absolutely unbearable, which is kind of a classic Paradox moment but I can't remember EU4 lagging THIS badly and becoming unplayable. I had to abandon my first two campaigns in 1600s, while I usually play the majority of my EU4 campaigns to the end, or at the very least to late 1700s. The change of the start date doesn't help much, in fact it makes things worse by adding 100 extra years of nothing happening. Sure there's black death, but it only sets you back in development. Just what do you do with this extra time? Siege a couple more forts? 1444 start date was perfect with Ottomans on the rise and the first explorations occuring shortly, you have the time to set up your nation in the first few years, then do whatever you desire, with mission trees guiding you and giving you pretty good buffs. Here you're just dropped with nothing to do, I guess that's fine - you set up your own goals, but cutting out mission trees and adding 100 years extra for no particular reason is not fun or engaging in my opinion Overall, just stick to EU4, even after countless updates and years post-release - this game is still barebones and not worth the time, despite being Paradox's magnum opus Oh and also yeah pay for like 50 DLCs for extra content that should've been a part of the game, if not at launch then at least much later