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.

still struggling to get into this but taking advantage of the teutons being broken to play on easy mode to try and learn more of the systems

i hope they fix the numerous flaws. this game has a lot of potential. paradox is 90% of my gaming. I have several thousands of hours in their games. EU5 is difficult to enjoy. a lot of systems just kind of don't interact like they should. slaves, long distance trade, african colonies, culture conversion, vassal scaling, papal colonies, wars of religion, HRE, etc.

So many things exist, but are either super strong or super weak. feels like a movie set where when you try to go in a house you realize it's just a sheet of plywood with nothing inside.

and the late game impact of some early game balancing is much worse, but few players go past 1600 because of so much little jank stacking up. things like a single province being > 100% warscore from the runaway +gooderer over centuries.

i think tinto will dial it in, but I don't know how they can be so far off when its the 5th game in a series. things like the new combat system are spiritual successors to ck, but they didn't even try to balance it like ck.

I have decided that this game is bad and you should not buy it. EU4 is better for war, HOI4 is better for logistics, V3 is better for economy, CK is better for dynasties. EU5 tries to be the everything game and sucks at the combination.

EU4 is maybe my favorite game of all time and definitely my favorite strategy game.

EU5 felt good at first but as you actually begin to understand the game, there are a lot of shortcomings and unsatisfying mechanics, not to mention all the bugs. The flavor is largely hard to access so different nations feel too similar flavor wise. Yet, it is probably one of the best Paradox launches, for what little that is worth.

My biggest issue is what they've shown of their post release support and development processes. I think they're cowboys without a solid plan, without a great understanding of their own systems, most definitely without the kind of manual and automated testing support this kind of game needs, too small a team for their ambition, and too much ego by Johan. At the state it was at during release, I thought it could be decent in six months. After observing how they operated post release, I think it will be two to three years, if ever.

Don't get me wrong, you can still mostly play campaigns, especially European ones, and do mostly okay. There is a lot of tedium and QoL and bugs to deal with and if you happen to get hit by a game breaking big, it's super deflating because It's easily double or triple the length of an EU4 campaign.

Imperator had immense potential and they just took it around back and put it down

This one ends up turning my laptop to shit, and its got irksome issues that dont ruin it but are enough in combo for me to shelf this for maybe another year. Im like 3k stellaris 5k eu4 etc but this guys gonna sit under 100. Feels bad. Im not sure how to pin it down, but it just needs a soul somehow.