13 Jul

Europa Universalis 3

Filed under: PC Games 3 Responses

Great Britain founded in the early 1400s, except for that pesky bit of Orkney owned by the Norwegians. Historically Great Britain was only united in 1707.

The Europa Universalis series is Paradox’s flagship game and arguably its most complex game in a ludotheque renowned for difficult to access games. Although I’ve heard plenty of stories about them, this is the first time I’ve ventured into the series. Plus I’ve been doing this all in too, with the base game plus all four released expansions to date. As with Hearts of Iron 3, this entailed reading read up on a ton of materials including the manuals for the game and each expansion, the general strategy guide and browsing the game’s wiki site. That’s easily several hundred pages of text, all told.

Even then, to play it safe, I picked Switzerland to start off with, but still got completely lost. How much inflation is considered tolerable? How am I supposed to do anything when all my neighbors all have so many more troops than me? When I became successful at trading, some big countries started to embargo me, locking me out of lucrative centers of trade. What am I supposed to do about that, given my pathetic army? Some of the missions I got seemed impossible to achieve. Get a bigger army than Austria? In your dreams, buddy.


While I didn’t have any problems surviving, it seemed impossible to actually accomplish anything. So I basically watched the years pass by, marking time only by the technological breakthroughs and every so often having to send off a merchant to a center of trade. In a nutshell, this sort of summarizes my gripes with this game. Yes, it’s great as a historical simulation but real-life history is just too boring to actually be fun as a game. In Switzerland’s case, its traditional neutrality and mountainous terrain makes it an oasis of calm and serenity even in the most troubled times. The game depicts this accurately but this ends up being a pretty boring experience.

For my next game, I went with my old stand-by, England. I admit it’s cheesy but I always gravitate to playing England eventually because it’s just so much easier to defend than a country on the continent. It starts with a big navy for its time, a standing army that would be useless against France but more than adequate to deal with the Scottish and the Irish and it’s rich enough that you can actually envision buying and building things without having to mint too much money.

England, due to its large population, is practically guaranteed to be the Papal Controller, at least at the beginning. I never quite figured out how to best make use of the position however.

After ditching my continental possessions, which were impossible to keep anyway against the monstrously powerful land armies the French can marshal, I had a grand old time conquering Ireland and subduing Scotland. This was helped by getting very useful missions that let me embark on wars of conquest without accruing too much infamy. In my meantime, my merchants were busy making me by far the richest country in Europe. In no time at all, I’d turned the entirety of Ireland red and made Scotland my vassal. I tried to impede France’s progress on the continent by sending in expeditionary forces to help Burgundy and Brittany but it was useless. The French leaders and their superior land army techs make them nigh invincible.

But all this fighting created a problem of its own. Playing the game in wartime just takes too much time. Between manually commanding armies, carefully watching my coasts so that my navy could intercept incoming invasion forces and making the usual decisions required in administering the country, I was lucky to be able to go through five years of history in about two hours or so of playing time. Since the game covers more than 400 years of history, I started to wonder how it would be possible to even come close to finishing a game.

Of course, you don’t fight wars all the time. I found that after annexing Scotland through diplomacy and turning the entire British Isles red, I had little to gain from joining in any wars. However, even in peacetime, the best I could cover was around ten to fifteen years of history in two hours of play. Better yes, but still intimidatingly slow and worse, peacetime is pretty boring. Send a merchant here, hire an adviser there, and hey look, I now have the money to construct a building. At the same time, if I wanted to play well, it behooved me to pay attention to what was going on in the rest of the world. Who’s fighting who and who are friends with who? Which countries are rising up in the income leagues? Which countries are building ships that could one day rival my fleet? All important but time consuming and none too exciting stuff.

Great Britain kicks off the slave exporting industry in 1497.

After I’d formed Great Britain, my next objective was to get Conquest of the New World and start exploring. This turns out to be pretty micro-management intensive as you need to watch carefully for the arrival dates of your fleets and ensure that your ships have enough health to survive the ocean crossings. Then when I started colonizing new areas, I discovered that it took a few years to develop one until it became self-sustaining and you can’t really afford to nurture more than two or three growing colonies at a time. But the real obstacle is colonial range. You can only colonize a province that is within a certain distance of one of your core provinces. While naval technology and advisers help to extend that range, it mostly comes down to waiting for a colony in a new area to become a core province so that you can use it as a base to set off for new areas. Since it takes 50 years to gain a core in a province, that’s a lot of waiting.

My England game continued until the early 1500s when the Reformation took effect. You see I had omitted to take a close look at the religious system in the game and had never sent a missionary off to do anything. I thought they were needed only to convert the native population of a province that I colonized but since my soldiers usually just kill off all the natives first before my colonists arrived, that didn’t seem to be necessary. At the same time, I was aware that many of my provinces were gradually converting to Protestantism but I ignored the events. After all, I know from history that Great Britain converted to Anglicanism eventually and the revolt risks seemed low, so why fight against the tide?

So I was totally caught by surprise when the Reformation kicked into high gear, causing provinces all across the realm, including even the colonies in the Americas, to go into revolt. I could have chosen to bite the bullet and embrace Protestantism as the state religion, but that would just have caused the still Catholic half of my country to go into revolt instead. So lesson learned, but it was hard to live with a severely weakened England this way while France was busy conquering half of the continent so I gave up on the game.

Religious riots can totally ruin your day as any country’s rulers can tell you.

What makes giving up on the game especially painful is that as far as I can tell, it is an excellently designed and well rounded simulation. Its mechanics are sound and polished, the Casus Belli system in particular being extremely flexible and powerful while maintaining realism, the immense amount of work put into its historical events are impressive and everything is pretty intuitive. But its scope is just so huge and it takes so long to properly play it through that you practically need to dedicate most of your life to it.

The other thing is that much of the time you have to resign yourself to having only limited control of your country. This is realistic. After all, a country can’t change longstanding policy on a whim and the weight of history matters, but the lack of control is still frustrating to me. Realism also dictates that your rulers may die at totally inopportune moments and you might end up with an incompetent heir or worse, a Regency Council, in the middle of a war. Combined with the random events, it sometimes feels like you spend all your time reacting to things happening rather planning out and executing a grand strategy. Furthermore, just like real history, most of the time nothing much of consequence happens to your country and administering it is just predictable tedium.

Sometime down the road I may find the time to revisit Europa Universalis 3 and give it all the care and attention that it deserves, but for now I come away with a newfound appreciation of how games like the Civilization series and even the Total War series strike a reasonable balance between historical fidelity and fun. They manage to extract out the fun part of managing a country while greatly abstracting or abbreviating the tedious parts and in doing so, make their games playable in a more reasonable amount of time. Europa Universalis 3 on the other hand may very well be an excellent game if you care to look deep enough, but its huge scope and soaring ambition calls for more dedication and patience than even a moderately hardcore gamer like me can muster.

Written on July 13 2011 and is filed under PC Games. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

3 Responses to “Europa Universalis 3”

frags

My favourite Paradox game. It’s more about the passage of time and history rather than the micro management of a nation. You can micro manage things but I think most people play the game on its fastest speed at peace time. It’s still a huge chunk of history, some 4 centuries which is much longer than any of Paradox’s other games. While playing a small nation may not be the best option if you want to ‘win’ the game, EU is more of a sandbox experience. I play small nations for the experience of it.

wankongyew

So do you play all 400 years of history or do you stop at some point? If so, how do you decide when to stop? The fastest speed is too fast for me I think, even in peacetime. I tend to play at the second fastest speed almost all the time, and drop down a notch if I need to micro-management unit movement.

frags

I’ve played up to the Napoleonic Era. I think most people stop when they feel the game gets less interesting(ie they’re winning and there is nothing interesting). It’s sort of like rolling a different class in RPG game. EU player basically pick a different country to change things up.

I know what you mean. The bane of all EU games. Message pop ups. I think they slow you down more than the actual game.

Still, there is no doubt EU players invests a lot of time into their games. Just read any of the AAR on the official forum. And you dont need to playthrough the whole game. Just pick a time you like and just play that. Many do that and just ignore the prestige point score needed for victory.

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