I thinkit’s important to preface this preview with some clarity around the performance of the build I was given. I experienced multiple crashes, sometimes while just loading the game, which made completing a full playthrough of Europa Universalis 5 almost impossible. The auto-save function didn’t work reliably, which means even when the game did really get going, it would often crash, losing any gameplay that I’d managed to actually play through. I was told that this is a very, very early build of the game, with some known bugs and crashes.
It has been 12 years since the release of Europa Universalis 4. When I first heard of the upcoming game code-named ‘Project Caesar’, I thought it might be Paradox’s second attempt at a Roman-based Grand Strategy game after the lukewarm reception to Imperator: Rome and its eventual death, with a discontinuation of support from the studio. However, Paradox Tinto, a studio formed in Barcelona a few years ago, has been posting regular developer updates called ‘Tinto Talks’ about the next game in the series, Europa Universalis 5.
Developed over the course of five years by Paradox Tinto, EU5 is a fresh slate, with a larger map and more detail than its predecessor. The game begins in 1337 (nice one), which is the year that the Hundred Years’ War begins, a conflict that spanned multiple generations of kings from England and France. It’s a suitably epic starting point for a story that spans well into the Enlightenment period, and beyond.
Ever a contrarian, I decided to start as the Cocom people in the Mayan empire. Centered around the city of Maayaapan in a state with almost 100,000 people, this ability to focus on the slightly underappreciated areas of medieval history is why I’ve always loved Europa Universalis. While epic wars raged in Europe, the Mayan people slowly developed their lands and religion, expanding their cultural influence over northern Mesoamerica.
The new population system provides an entirely new way to manage your empire. While in EU4 your empire is divided into provinces with their wants and needs, you will need to manage several population groups in EU5. These are divided into estates, made up of religious, ethnic and class groups. This is very similar to the way Pops works in Victoria 3. The granularity here is enough to make any Grand Strategy fan rejoice. I spent far too long just fiddling around in the menus, trying to figure out the best way to appease the commoners in my Sicilian playthrough.
The ultimate idea is to subjugate the estates to the point that you maintain ultimate crown power, to form a modern country in a tumultuous time. That is much easier said than done. Whether it be opposing forces on your borders, disease, strife within your kingdom or empire, religious intolerance, or general unease within your population, EU5 is all about managing the minutiae of your empire to slowly bring peace and prosperity, or warfare and profit.
The new Societal Value system reintroduces the political value sliders from the original three EU games. This provides a lot of fluidity about how you want to run your nation, using your cabinet members to complete actions that slide you between extreme political views - whether that be favoring the clergy, venturing down a more secular path, leaning into centralization, or focusing on military production. There are so many choices here to build exactly the sort of nation you want to lead, and completely alter the path of history.
There’s also a new sort of “points-less” system that removes the arbitrary numbers of the previous game. Rather than a sort of mana system that dictates what you can and can’t do in EU4, and in games like Crusader King’s 3, EU5 instead branches out into a system that bases your capability on some of the key stats of your ruler and your cabinet, like military, diplomatic, and administrative traits. These will determine how quickly, and how well, actions are performed. The game’s nested tooltips are excellent at portraying complex information about player choices quickly.
Thanks to the help of AI automation, you can just focus on very specific parts of the gameplay if you want. The system just uses the same AI that controls the non-player nations in the game. To try and get to grips with the new trading system, I turned military expansion to AI mode, so I could just focus on developing my provinces and building up my trade network. This is going to be a massive help for new players to the series, because if there’s one thing EU5 definitely is, it’s completely daunting. The sort of game you play for 500 hours and barely scratch the surface.
I’m always concerned about new Paradox games. Mostly because the previous titles in their generally long-running franchises have fully cemented themselves in people’s consciousness. The idea of moving on from EU4, a game that has received updates and patches for over a decade, has always felt sort of absurd. But Paradox Tinto has worked ceaselessly alongside the community during the development cycle for EU5, and I’m intrigued to see how the game lives up to players’ expectations.
And remember: there’s no need to switch from EU4 when the new game comes out, or ever, for that matter. Both games will likely be good in their own way. As far as I can see, EU5 is taking the franchise into an even more detailed and granular route, the sort of game that demands invested thought (and possibly spreadsheets, yes, of course), rather than the ever-so-slightly more board-gamey approach of EU4. This will please some and upset others. Paradox knows better than anyone that you simplycannotplease them all, but I am excited by their focus on innovating and changing their years-old formula, even if it doesn’t always work out.
