Europa Universalis V

This game is unplayable if you're coming from EU4. They've taken the fun out of any sort of millitary campaign for some hippie population mechanics that make no sense. It takes decades to integrate provinces in a game where time moves arguably slower than in EU 4. Playing in India is awful and not historically accurate. The kingdoms all feel the same and they're waiting to loot us in a DLC for any historical flavour. They have a Fall of Delhi event which lets you take advantage of an imploding empire but guess what ? If you play as Dhundhar or Mewar for example and take back even just your own provinces, you have to integrate / core them again. That takes decades for EACH province. Say you take 5 provinces, a modest tidy little war in EU4, you're dead. You'll spend the next 30 years weeping while watching your estates become disloyal, your economy tank, stability tank, revolts every year or so and no way out except INTEGRATION !! Which takes upto......50 f****** years ! Why have militaries and wars at all ? Don't have it. We'll play a city builder and wear little daisies in our hair instead. I am telling my group of 8 intense EU4 gamers not to buy this trash. Paradox is treating its player base like the peasants in the game. Keep showing up when there's trouble, have a terrible time of life, weep through it all and pay through your nose for a game nerfed based on ideologies nobody told you they were pushing.

Every patch is 1 step forward and 2 steps back

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？

Johans vision for this game forgot one critical element: Making it actually fun to play, and somehow it gets worse with every patch, most recently the pop growth/disease balancing nightmare but many other extremely questionable decisions that in the end just make the game less fun, maybe in a few years with masive overhauls to many of this games core systems it can surpass eu4, but for now Id avoid this game, who knows if they'll pull another imperator or not.

This is a game that fundamentally does not respect your time. I am saying this as someone who has over a 1000 hours in EU4, Vic3, CK3, and CK2 each (so 5k total). All grand strategy games will naturally have slower sections, but this game takes ages to complete even the most basic tasks. I have waited 15-30 minutes for my first buildings to complete. I play all other Paradox games on max speed without issue, though usually need to tick those down to 4 speed, so I can process events. There is nothing in this game that you'd want to run at less than maximum speed,except for troop movement. I've only played one game into 1500s, and that was a slog. Adding an extra 100 years of gameplay to the game has made this issue even worse, as you need to sit around and wait 100 years for the game mechanics to come online. I just don't see any reason to play this game over EU4, when I can complete and entire megacampaign in the other games in the same time it'd take me to finish one single campaign of this game. If they compress down the timeline, or speed up the gameplay flow then I might try coming back to this in the future. Just play Victoria 3 or EU4 instead.

Don't buy this if you don't have good enough CPU or RAM, although I don't think that matters much since: THIS GAME CRASHED FREQUENTLY WHEN CLICKING NEW GAME EVEN WHEN NO MODS ARE LOADED! I don't want to gamble if my PC will crash and need restart every time I have to start or load a game! FIX IT! At first I had hope since the dev updated it frequently a month after release date, but then they only focus on features, "balances", and didn't fixed the crashing issues at all... Some of the updates were sometimes so flip-floppy that it changed the feel of the game (They turned it down but still not that sandboxy as EU4)

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.

TL;DR: EUV released as a potentially worthy heir to EUIV, but like any good heir it has suffered a tragic hunting accident since launch. Upon release EUV was a rough cut gem; a fascinating simulation of the demographics, economics and war of the world's modern era. There were issues, omissions and flaws, but overall it yielded a fun game that told interesting stories and seemed to striving for (if not quite reaching) a coherent vision. Since release, however, the game has suffered a series of heel turns in vision, overcorrections in game balance and incoherent updates that have shattered the original flawed simulation. Being a fan of EUV is now an exercise in trying to ride a unicycle while someone is trying to keep you balanced by adding huge weights to one side, then the other, then the one side again. The balancing veers so vastly between updates that it's become incredibly difficult to stay aware of what how it *actually* works at any given time. Despite the constant updates, many core systems that seemed "lacking but with potential" on release still haven't been fixed. EUIV was one of my favourite games of all time. EUV was on track to become a worthy successor upon release, but now it seems further from getting there than it was before. It's a shame, because Tinto seems to have a clear vision and a dedicated team. I wish them all the best in getting this vision translated to their game and look forward to revisiting it when they do.