Europa Universalis 4

[Pike]

IS COMING OUT TOMORROW :hyper: :squee:

Discuss this glorious strategy game by lovely Swedish developers Paradox Interactive!

[Spuuky]

I've never played a EU game. I've never seen anything that compelled me to do so when I can play Civilization, Total War, and a wide array of other strategy games already.

[Pike]

Well, EU is a completely different subgenre than the aforementioned games and all of them play very differently to each other. EU tends to be more complex and less board-gamey (although it's certainly the most board-gamey of all of Paradox's titles) and I :heart: it a great deal. (That's not to say that Civ and Total War aren't great games, but the gameplay mechanics are very dissimilar.)

Speaking of which I put a few hours into EU4 and it's fan-friggin-tastic thus far.

[Madame Adequate]

But EU is a completely different game from Civ or TW or any number of other GSGs? You might as well say "I don't see the point playing Monkey Island, I can play Red Alert if I want to play a game that requires a mouse".

[Spuuky]

But EU is a completely different game from Civ or TW or any number of other GSGs? You might as well say "I don't see the point playing Monkey Island, I can play Red Alert if I want to play a game that requires a mouse".Except that Monkey Island and Red Alert are visibly, obviously different from each other. At the cursory glances I have given EU's screenshots, it looks reasonably similar to Civilization. Also, Total War is a lot like Civilization, but on a much smaller scale and with a different battle system.

EDIT: By the way, feel free to convince me why I'm wrong. I'm interested to know how and why it is sufficiently unique and compelling.

[Bolivar]

"I don't see the point playing Monkey Island, I can play Red Alert if I want to play a game that requires a mouse".

To be fair, I don't see the point in many games knowing that I could just play Red Alert :squee:

I kinda wanna check it out. I only got into Paradox last year with CKII and haven't tried the other games I got in the bundle I bought. But Europa Universalis is their flagship from what I've heard, their founders favorite game, and I have faith that it's probably awesome. I heard there's an official CKII conversion tool, but I don't think I could ever make it to the end date anyway...

[Madame Adequate]

I don't see how you can think EU looks at all like Civ. It's a radically different game and the similarities are essentially that you're building an empire and you do so with a top-down view. EU is a much more strategically-oriented game. You need to worry about relations with other powers, not just alliance/peace/war, but trade embargoes, royal marriages, forming coalitions, stirring up rebellions, and so on. You can't just flood the enemy with more Axemen to win a war. Or rather, you can, but you'll cripple your economy and overextend your empire, so you won't hold onto your conquests. You've got to be sneakier, use allies, pounce when the enemy is distracted or weakened, pick your battles carefully, probe, attack and retreat. Use a general's skills and the terrain to your advantage to overcome overwhelming odds. You can scorch your own earth to make enemy armies starve to death in your lands. You can blockade the enemy to deprive them of trade income and drive up war exhaustion. Crush them enough and you probably still can't annex them outright, but you can balkanize them directly or just let rebels do it for you.

Speaking of the economy, you've got to worry about not just taxation but production, trade, efficiency, loans and interest. You've got to keep your trade lanes clear and under your control. You can become a Netherlands-esque trading superpower, or neglect trade in favor of colonial exploitation, or build up your empire's core home provinces for direct tax improvements.

You also need to worry about things like religion and culture. Not in the very superficial sense of a Civ game, though not a million miles from TW. If your empire is half Catholic and half Reformed you're going to have a bad time, and if you've got a lot of a minority you don't accept the same is true. Huge, mighty empires can collapse in a matter of months because of things like that.

EU (like other Paradox Grand Strats) is a huge, deep, complex game that dwarfs pretty much any other contemporary game in the genre, excepting Aurora. I didn't liken Monkey Island to Red Alert for no reason - aside from genre there's very little in common between Civ/TW and EU.

e; Don't worry Bolivar, you can use the CK2>EU4 converted at any time with your CK2 game, you don't need to reach the end date.

[Pike]

The biggest difference is that Civilization is turn-based and Europa Universalis is not, which in and of itself changes the nature of much of the gameplay and strategy going on. Civ is a 4X and plays very similarly to other 4X games - SMAC, Master of Orion, GalCiv, Endless Space, Space Empires and so forth - the core of the game is working your way up a tech tree and building an empire from scratch which will outclass other empires either through culture, technology, sheer power or whatnot.

Europa Universalis lacks a classic "tech tree" and does not start you out from scratch. This is an empire management game, not an empire building game. Things like trading, economy and resource management, family management (you don't get one overriding "leader" to play through the entire game as you would in a 4X game) and so forth are given much, much more emphasis in a grand strategy than in a 4X.

Empires can and will crumble. Your empire can and will be cut in halves or thirds, not just by external sources but by internal ones as well. A multitude of different factions from within your empire will fight themselves and each other for power. In the case of Victoria II, politics, political parties and elections play a major role.

It's rather difficult to explain but really it comes down to it a.) not being turn-based, b.) not being tech-tree based, and c.) being much more about management.

Edit: Hux did a better job explaining :jess:

[Madame Adequate]

I dunno, you did mention the whole "real time" bit that I managed to completely omit. Still I think between us we've probably covered the salient points :p

[Pike]

It's truly difficult to explain unless you have played both several 4X games and several grand strategy games at which point you'll soon discover that the playstyle is monumentally different. You can jump from Civ to any other 4X and you'll be golden, but if you jump from Civ to a grand strategy - or vice versa - you're going to have a rough time because they do not play the same at all.

Honestly I'd almost argue that grand strategy is more closely related to SimCity than to Civ.

[Spuuky]

I don't really see that SimCity is fundamentally different that Civilization, except with less war. Nor do I really see the fundamental difference here between Civilization and EU - simply a difference of depth. And yes, I can see the appeal of more depth, because obviously things like trade are incredibly simplistic in Civilization.

At any rate, I'm not really interested in strategy games that aren't turn-based. If I want to test any real-time skills I'll play a non-strategic game, thanks. A tactical real-time game is one thing, but managing large-scale strategies or anything deep and complex in real-time seems like a turn-off. I'll play League of Legends or Tribes, but I wouldn't play Civ or XCOM if they were real-time. Actually I guess I just hate real-time games in which I control more than one "thing."

[Del Murder]

Is this why the forum was all in Swedish yesterday?

[Madame Adequate]

It's real-time with pause really* so whenever anything happens you can just pause and sort things out if you want. But once you get good, playing unpaused on a low speed is an interesting way of adding challenge. It's certainly not a game that requires twitch or anything though. Also your reductionism is pretty weird and I'm not sure if you want to play more than one game in any given genre?

*Technically speaking it is actually turn-based but the turns are very quick and progress automatically, but the distinction is one only a sperg would care about.

And yes the forums were Svenska because Paradox were the ones who bought Slutlig Fantasi :love:

[Spuuky]

Of course I want to play more than one game of any genre; but strategy games are a genre which, in general, requires immense commitment. And I already have several of those. I can play 3-5 RPGs in the time one strategy game takes to really "complete." Or basically an arbitrarily large number of platformers.

[Bolivar]

Man some of these games are so cheap I'd advise checking one out and just poking around in it for a while and see the kind of crazy events that come out of it.