For over ten years, Paradox Interactive’s Europa Universalis 4 has been more than just a game; it’s been a digital institution, a sprawling, seemingly infinite canvas for historical what-ifs. Its successor had an almost impossible legacy to live up to. The question on every fan’s mind wasn’t just “will it be good?” but “how could it possibly be better?” After sinking more than a hundred hours into campaigns as a burgeoning Castille, a mercantile Holland, and even the landless Bank of Bardi, the answer is clear: Europa Universalis 5 isn’t just an iteration. It’s a revolution. It takes the core formula we know and love and injects it with a dose of brutal, beautiful realism, creating an experience that is at once familiar and terrifyingly new. While the ghosts of its predecessor occasionally flicker in recycled events and a user interface that can feel like wrestling with a medieval tapestry, Paradox has crafted what may well be the definitive grand strategy experience for the next decade.

A Bolder, Bleaker Beginning

The first and most striking change in Europa Universalis 5 is the clock. It’s been wound back from 1444 to the year 1337. This isn’t just a cosmetic shift to add more playtime; it’s a fundamental alteration of the game’s entire dynamic. You are thrust into the twilight of the High Middle Ages, a world on the precipice of cataclysm. The Hundred Years’ War is just igniting between England and France, the Italian city-states are a hornet’s nest of Guelph and Ghibelline intrigue, and the Holy Roman Empire is a fractured, chaotic mess of principalities. This earlier start throws you into a world that feels less certain, more feudal, and far more dangerous.

The Shadow of the Plague

Starting in 1337 comes with a terrifying, non-negotiable price: the Black Death. A few years into any campaign, the pandemic begins its inexorable march across the known world. In past Paradox titles, a plague was an abstraction—a temporary debuff, a loss of tax income, a minor inconvenience. In EU5, it is a world-altering apocalypse. This is thanks to the game’s new, deeply simulated population system. Every province, every city, and every village is now populated by actual, countable people. These pops are your nation’s lifeblood. They are your farmers, your artisans, your sailors, and your soldiers. And the plague kills them by the million.

In my campaign as Castille, I watched in horror as the population of Seville, my richest port, was halved in less than five years. The production of wine and wool collapsed. My tax base evaporated. My ability to raise armies was crippled not by a lack of money, but by a literal lack of able-bodied men. This is the single greatest change to the series. Your country is no longer a set of statistics on a spreadsheet; it’s a living, breathing, and tragically fragile collection of human beings. Every decision, from raising taxes to going to war, is now weighed against its human cost. This shift from abstract modifiers to a tangible, vulnerable population is the genius at the heart of EU5.

Building from the Ashes

Surviving the plague is your first great challenge, and it shapes the rest of the game. Nations that manage the crisis well—investing in sanitation, closing borders, or simply being lucky—emerge into the 15th century with a significant advantage. This period of rebuilding is where you first grapple with the game’s incredibly deep economic and development systems. Each location within a province can be specialized, with individual buildings now appearing on the map as you construct them. Zooming in, you can see the new textile mill you commissioned or the shipyard humming with activity. Managing your Resource Gathering Operations (RGOs) to extract iron, grain, or salt is a constant, engaging puzzle that feels far more intuitive than the abstract development-clicking of EU4.

The Soul of a Nation

Paradox has fundamentally re-evaluated how a player shapes their country’s destiny. Gone are the days of spending abstract “monarch points” to achieve your goals. In their place are far more organic and immersive systems that make you feel like a true statesman.

A New Age of Discovery

The technology system has been completely overhauled, shedding its linear, EU4-style progression for a sprawling tech tree that would feel right at home in a Civilization game. Each of the game’s ages presents a web of over a hundred interconnected technologies. This allows for incredible specialization. As Holland, I focused heavily on a maritime and economic path, unlocking advanced shipbuilding, new trade ideas like the joint-stock company, and banking reforms long before my neighbours. Meanwhile, a militaristic France might beeline for advancements in siege artillery and pike-and-shot tactics. At the dawn of each new age—the Age of Discovery, the Age of Reformation, and so on—you select a national focus, unlocking unique branches of this tech tree and setting your nation’s priorities for the next century. It’s a flexible and deeply satisfying system that rewards long-term planning.

Forging Your State’s Identity

Perhaps even more impressive is the abolition of the rigid national mission trees that could often railroad your campaign in EU4. Instead, EU5 introduces a dynamic system of government reforms and national ethos. Your nation is defined along several axes:

• Centralization vs. Decentralization: Will you be a unified, absolute monarchy or a loose confederation of powerful nobles?
• Aristocracy vs. Plutocracy: Does power lie with the landed nobility or the wealthy merchant class?
• Tradition vs. Innovation: Does your society value the old ways, or does it embrace new, potentially heretical ideas?

These are not static choices. You can assign your cabinet members to slowly push your nation along these spectrums, unlocking powerful new laws and government types as you do. This system allows you to organically shape your nation’s character. My Castilian campaign saw a gradual shift from a decentralized feudal monarchy to a highly centralized colonial empire, a process that felt earned and logical. This is role-playing on a national scale, and it’s magnificent.

The Art of War, Reimagined

Carl von Clausewitz’s famous axiom that “war is the continuation of policy with other means” has never felt more true than in Europa Universalis 5. Warfare has been completely re-engineered to be more deliberate, costly, and consequential. The days of sending a massive “doomstack” to carpet-siege an enemy are over, replaced by a system that prizes logistics, planning, and professionalism.

Every Soldier is a Soul

The most profound change to warfare is its direct link to your population. When you raise levies, you are literally pulling farmers from their fields and artisans from their workshops. You can see the population of their home provinces dip in real-time. This has immediate economic consequences: food production drops, workshops go idle. More importantly, every soldier who dies in battle or from attrition is a permanent loss to your nation’s population. A pyrrhic victory can be more devastating than a clean defeat, leaving you with a hollowed-out country that will take a generation to recover. This creates an incredible tension. You are no longer throwing around abstract manpower points; you are sending your people to die, and you feel the cost of every single loss.

The Sinews of War

To mitigate this, you must invest in a professional, standing army. These soldiers are not drawn from your general populace, but their upkeep is astronomical. This creates a fascinating strategic choice: do you rely on cheap but fragile levies that drain your country’s lifeblood, or do you bear the immense financial burden of a professional force that preserves your population? Furthermore, armies now require food, a new resource you must manage. An army marching through barren enemy territory without a proper supply train will melt away from starvation, a lesson I learned the hard way in the mountains of Aragon. Sieges are now multi-stage affairs, and capturing key fortresses establishes a zone of control, making strategic positioning more important than ever. War is no longer a simple matter of having the bigger army; it’s a complex logistical puzzle where a well-supplied smaller force can triumph over a starving horde.

A Living, Breathing Tapestry

The world of EU5 is a work of art. The new engine renders a map that is both beautiful and informative. Zooming out, you see the grand sweep of empires. Zooming in, you can see individual buildings, forests swaying in the wind, and trade ships plying their routes. It’s a staggering achievement in world-building.

The World in Miniature

The level of detail is astonishing. The Holy Roman Empire is a glorious, tangled mess of hundreds of minor states, making diplomacy there more intricate and volatile than ever. Nations are no longer monolithic entities; they are composed of multiple distinct locations, allowing smaller countries to develop with greater nuance. But perhaps the most exciting innovation is the ability to play as landless nations. In one experimental playthrough, I took control of the Bank of Peruzzi, a Florentine banking house. I owned no land directly, but through strategic loans, economic influence, and funding proxy wars, I became one of the most powerful entities in Italy, a kingmaker who never wore a crown. The options for landless factions are still a bit sparse at launch, but the potential for this style of play—from the Hanseatic League to the Knights Templar—is immense.

Room for Growth

For all its triumphs, the simulation isn’t perfect. The most noticeable blind spot, as with many historical titles at launch, is the representation of indigenous peoples, particularly in the Americas. While the major Mesoamerican and Andean civilizations are present, much of North America feels sparsely populated and underdeveloped. It’s a missed opportunity to model the rich and complex societies that existed there, and one can only hope that future expansions will address this with the depth and respect it deserves. The AI also exhibits a newfound aggression that can be jarring. France, in particular, seems hard-coded to be an expansionist behemoth, and in multiple campaigns, I watched it relentlessly devour its neighbours. While this presents a compelling challenge, it can sometimes feel a bit predictable.

The Learning Cliff and Lingering Ghosts

No Paradox game would be complete without its infamous “learning cliff,” and EU5 is no exception. While the new automation features and an improved tutorial make it more approachable than its predecessors, this is still a dizzyingly complex game. The tutorial teaches you the basics, but it doesn’t teach you strategy. It points you to the ocean but doesn’t teach you how to swim. Expect your first few campaigns to be learning experiences, filled with catastrophic mistakes and glorious failures. The user interface, while cleaner in some respects, still buries crucial information under layers of menus. Figuring out exactly how to optimize your RGOs or manage your army’s supply lines can be a frustrating exercise in trial and error.

There’s also a faint but noticeable sense of déjà vu for veterans of EU4. A number of events, from the dreaded “Comet Sighted” to dilemmas involving local nobles, have been carried over wholesale. While their effects are different in the context of EU5’s new mechanics, seeing the same pop-up windows can momentarily break the spell of this being a brand-new experience. It’s a minor nitpick in a sea of innovation, but it’s a reminder that even in this revolutionary new title, some ghosts of the past remain.

Ultimately, Europa Universalis 5 is a monumental achievement. It is a demanding, uncompromising, and deeply rewarding strategy game that sets a new standard for the genre. It respects the player’s intelligence, asking them to engage with complex, interconnected systems and rewarding them with a sense of accomplishment that few other games can match. It successfully translates abstract concepts like population, economy, and national will into tangible, interactive mechanics. It’s a game of staggering ambition that, despite a few rough edges, largely succeeds in everything it sets out to do. For anyone with a passion for history, a love of deep strategy, and the patience to learn, this is not just another game; it’s a world waiting to be conquered, a history waiting to be written.

Source: https://www.techradar.com