Europa Universalis V

Nirgon said:

Legend of TW (who reminds me of Jimmy from South Park a bit when he does his intro) is all over this EU5 business

Dude's got it dialed up for sure

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The same guy who spent 27 hours maneuvering his archers to fire in a WH2 siege so he would take no losses (that would be healed in the next turn.)

Shocked

I tried this for a few hours over the weekend. As a total n00b to the series I think my biggest point of confusion is that I have no reference point or other clear indication as to whether I'm actually doing well or not. I've been playing as Naples and after restarting a handful of times I thought I was starting to grasp some of the essentials. Money starts flowing in, I'm able to fund new/expanded production, roads, and advancements, and I manage to balance all four Estates and keep them hovering around 50% or higher. Then after a while things inevitably start going to shit. Three out of four Estates spiral into the red one-by-one, then the plague rolls in, then the Ducats dry up and I'm drawing chain loans, then finally all four Estates hate me, the Papal states constantly work to usurp my throne, and everything seems out of control. Is that simply an inevitability of the time period and I just need to dig my way out of the shit pile, or am I doing 75 different things wrong? Maybe it's both?

In any case, as a history dork, the insane depth of the game is impressive.

I've very much been enjoying the game so far. As someone who had over 2k hours in EU4 that's certainly helped as far as knowing what to do, but this game is so much more in depth than EU4 it's pretty wild. Feels like they mashed up the EU and Victoria franchises and added a light sprinkling of CK on top. The game is also probably in the best shape performance / bug wise of any Paradox grand strategy game I've ever played at release.

After a couple of tries to get familiar with the game I've got a good run going now, trying to form Switzerland starting as two location Canton of Bern (where I live). First try I managed to unknowingly declare war on Bohemia who was emporer of the HRE at the time, that did not end well for me. Second time, Austria decided my land looked nice and took three quarters of it. This time I made nice with Austria from the start and things are going really well, I need one more location to have 32 required in the Swiss region to actually form Switzerland. The only issue is, Bohemia or Austria or their vassals own every single one I don't have. Trying to build up a big regular army to try and take Austria on, up to 5700 regulars now. Also saving some money to maybe hire some mercs.

All in all I'm having a blast.

I have thousands of hours in Eu4 but I keep getting paralysed and overwhelmed when I load this one up.
Every quick start guide seems to be an hour long or longer. Need to find one that details what to be doing before unpausing and how to handle the first 20 or 50 years until I can get a handle on all the different systems

Like someone said before, don't be afraid to use the automation. Especially when to comes to things like trading its really a godsend. I have it handle trading, opening/closing buildings based on if they become unprofitable, assigning generals to my army, taxes on my estates, and a couple other things I'm probably forgetting. I've tried to figure out the trading but like any EU game it seems to be the most complicated part. I'm pretty confident I'm getting about 80% of what I could get out of my trading income by using the automation, but I need to really sit down and look into it one day.

Alright, I spun up another new game last night (still Naples) and am doing vastly better now. Despite the suggestions to fully automate trade, I found that ducking in and out to make certain import/export tweaks helped. I also have a much better understanding of building and pop interactions now, so I was able to improve production efficiency dramatically. Telling the Pope to go fuck himself whenever the opportunity arises seems to be helpful as well. I made it through the entirely of the plague and most things are well into the green and climbing. I wonder how many players will get jammed up with the black death when it hits early on and permanently rage quit the game. It's a big punch to the dick that comes along right when you think you have your country on a decent path, especially if you don't know what the fuck you're doing to begin with.

zignor 4 said:

Alright, I spun up another new game last night (still Naples) and am doing vastly better now. Despite the suggestions to fully automate trade, I found that ducking in and out to make certain import/export tweaks helped. I also have a much better understanding of building and pop interactions now, so I was able to improve production efficiency dramatically. Telling the Pope to go fuck himself whenever the opportunity arises seems to be helpful as well. I made it through the entirely of the plague and most things are well into the green and climbing. I wonder how many players will get jammed up with the black death when it hits early on and permanently rage quit the game. It's a big punch to the dick that comes along right when you think you have your country on a decent path, especially if you don't know what the fuck you're doing to begin with.

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At the beginning when you dont have much trade capacity and youre only active in one market I did trade manually as well. However, once you start building foreign trade offices and that kind of thing it just gets tedious. At this point in my game I have capacity in ten different markets from the trade offices I have built in foreign lands and while I could manage all of that manually, I think I would rather hit myself in the balls with a hammer.



At the start of the game when I was making 0.3 ducats per month profit in my entire country I was doing all the trade manually to squeeze every last bit out of it that I could. Now though, with my trade income over 300 ducats per month its just not worth the time. Like many things about the EU series of games, the answer to most questions is "it depends".

Glad to hear youre doing better this time around, this is the kind of game where if you can get through the initial learning cliff, it really is rewarding and fun.

Sorry to post back to back, but things are going really well in my game. Managed to form Switzerland and took a good chunk of northern Italy as well. Starting to think it might be time to start another game, I really struggle to play my games of EU through to the end of the timeline, but maybe I'll stick it out and see if I can't beat France or something. After some more play time there are some things I'd like to see changed about the game, mainly regarding trade, but all in all it's a really solid game right now.