The Game Where You Carve Up The World
My Europa Universalis 4 Review
The five years stretching from 2012 to 2017 were the golden age of Paradox Interactive.
Starting with Crusader Kings 2: my first Paradox game and concluding with Hearts of Iron 4, this period saw them release a procession of genre defining, titanic games and acclaimed expansions that would cement the company’s iron grip on the strategy genre; games like Stellaris, CK2’s Monks and Mystics DLC, Cities: Skylines and of course Europa Universalis 4 was 2013’s title. It was also during this time: specifically in 2016, that I became a Paradox fan, so I hope you’ll permit me the spot of nostalgia; I was only 16 at the time.
I was something of a late comer to Europa Universalis 4. I’d always wanted to play this game but when it came out my crappy teenage laptop didn’t stand a chance and then my later hand-me-down 2012-era PC I had before 2020 also just didn’t have the chops to run the game; while its graphics are spartan and its audio noticeably compressed, Europa Universalis 4 is no slouch when it comes to the CPU and RAM needed. Even then, when I finally could play, I struggled to learn the game a few times, bouncing off over and over before finally, in 2021 it all clicked and I made EU4 part of my Paradox game rotation… just in time for Leviathan!
I wanted to review Europa Universalis 4 first and foremost because my Paradox reviews have been received on a level I hadn’t anticipated; when most of your posts average between 100-300 reads but when you write about one series that shoots up to 800-1000+? The choice about what to publish next becomes easy. More than that though, with the announcement of Europa Universalis 5… this feels like the end of an era. Hearts of Iron 3, Crusader Kings 2, Victoria 2, all of those classic-era Paradox games using the older version of the Clausewitz engine have all been replaced leaving 2013’s Europa Universalis 4 as the last man standing: the Ozymandias statue to a time now gone.
But is the 12 year old Europa Universalis 4 still worth playing? Or should you wait for the sequel? And how does it stack up against its more modern contemporaries? Let’s find out.
Mundus Novus
More than any other Paradox game, Europa Universalis 4 absolutely nails its presentation and atmosphere.
The moment you start you’re bombarded with artwork of historical figures: of everyone from Peter the Great to Isabella of Spain and Napoleon; this is a game that spans just under 400 years of history and simulates the entire world, so expect to see rulers centuries apart. The fantastic Europa Universalis 4 Theme gradually builds to a crescendo and then we have the big reveal. The world: Mundus 1444 with the title screen firmly affixed to Europe: the cockpit of history in this period. It was a time of fledgling nations, of the dying medieval epoch and of a new world on the distant horizon. It’s difficult to get the player excited about playing a game when they’ve already put several hundred hours into it but EU4 manages it for me.
So far in my Paradox reviews I’ve barely ever mentioned the soundtracks, this is because for the most part they tend to be forgettable background noise that (if you’re anything like me) gets muted 100 hours in so I can hear whatever music I’m playing on the Steam overlay instead… but this isn’t the case with Europa Universalis 4, this is an epic and varied score well worth listening to.
Europa Universalis 4 is a game that couldn’t have been made in 2025, especially with its handling of colonialism and the prevailing tone. In 2013 Paradox Interactive wasn’t quite the juggernaut developer/publisher it is today, this relative anonymity (and their place as game-makers in the pre-Hearts of Iron 4 obscure Grand Strategy genre) provided a degree of shielding from controversy, furthermore, at least to my memory, the ‘Culture War’ that has defined a lot of pop-culture and media discourse since hadn’t fully taken off yet, so the mandatory “Tut-tut-tut.” And finger wagging a developer might put in a modern title so the player knows that they also know colonialism was bad doesn’t appear in Europa Universalis 4.
The adventurous tone combined with this lack of moralising will certainly make some players uncomfortable I can imagine but rather than worsening the game or feeling as if European colonialism has been glorified, I actually feel the juxtaposition this tone creates enhances the experience. Slaves are a trade good in Europa, phenomena like the Columbian Exchange and Triangle Trade do appear as events and when playing as a pre-Columbian civilisation in the Americas your nation will be absolutely ravaged by small pox; unlike the rest of the Paradox grand strategy franchise, the rest of the world outside of your immediate area and diplomatic contacts is completely unknown to you too, for all you know, the Castellanos could be right at your door, or under the boot of France.
As a European, colonial nation? Europa Universalis 4 with its region-specific music and mechanics has the player peel back the fog of war, dispassionately conquering the Western Hemisphere and Africa to sweeping orchestra and an overflowing treasury.
As an African kingdom or a nation like the Inca? The player hears the beating of war drums and flutes, growing rich and prosperous off the hills and mountains laced with gold and precious stones until one day, decades into your game, mysterious new map colours appear in the fog, men with rifles speaking new languages cross the frontiers and then inevitably, the pox, the threats and the economic pressure follow, building to an inevitable and bloody climax.
Empire and colonialism are not a racialised, exclusive method of expansion in Europa Universalis 4: any nation that achieves the technological, ideological and developmental requirements can take part and this cynicism is something I thoroughly enjoy; it is not good or evil, it’s not ideological, there’s no higher ideal at play, just another tool of the man: the bastard who wears a crown and enjoys exotic New World delicacies while you’re subsisting off sawdust-bulked bread and eels from the Thames.
Veni, Vidi, Vici
I have reviewed 2 other Paradox games previously: Victoria 3 and Hearts of Iron 4, in those reviews I mentioned that aside from the time period in which they are set, each Paradox title is separated by a specific gameplay focus. In Victoria 3 it’s economics, demography and politics, in Hearts of Iron 4 it’s war, logistics and weapons production; Europa Universalis 4 is all about empire and nation building, whether that means leveraging naval power to wrestle control of maritime trade routes, colonising resource-dense territories or consolidating military control over your corner of the globe is up to the player.
Owing to its age, Europa Universalis 4 is absolutely full to the brim with region specific content, systems to engage with, cultural flavour and facilitates a wide variety of playstyles; I’ve played an aggressive, continental-minded France, a colonial and trade-focused Netherlands, a navally oppressive Denmark, worked to build dissent in the Holy Roman Empire as Milan and everything in-between. Given the scope and variety on offer, it’s hard to definitively say “This is what you do in Europa Universalis 4.” But every nation will take part in at least a little bit of war, trade and internal development, especially if you’re a republic.
The big drivers of gameplay though are the Mission Trees and these function a bit like the Hearts of Iron 4 focus tree… except better in every single way.
In Hearts of Iron 4, the Focus Tree functions a bit like a drive-thru menu: you open up the UI, you pick whether you want: 4 Military Factories, Large, or a Doctrine Bonus with Extra Cheese and then? You sit and wait.
In Europa Universalis 4 the Mission Tree is more of a reward system and gives you a shot of dopamine and bonuses for achieving important milestones in the development of your empire, this not only makes the game astonishingly addictive but also lends itself to a more compelling gameplay loop. Think of it as a snowballing-aid. Take the Muscovite/Russian mission tree for example: if you build up your army to 80% of force limit, you get claims on enormous swathes of culturally East Slavic territory, then if you take that army and manage to defeat the Republic of Novgorod (вечная память, Александр) you’ll get an event to aid the development of your Baltic trade networks and then get claims on the territories of rival Baltic powers; the mission trees are all very much like this but with more trade-focused nations such as The Netherlands tasking the player instead with exploiting resources and generating revenue and a more diplomatic tree might task you with making 3 allies or becoming an elector of the Holy Roman Empire.
Of all the Paradox games, for better or worse, Europa Universalis 4 is the one that most closely resembles the tabletop games this genre of strategy traces its lineage back to; sieges, generals recruited, event outcomes, ruler stats, chances for events to spawn, the likelihood of a native uprising in your new territories? Percentages, dice rolls, chance and probability. Random, random, random.
Another important and somewhat controversial system all players will engage with is ‘mana:’ the community’s pejorative name for EU4’s 3 most important currencies: Administrative, Diplomatic and Military points. These 3 currencies, generated from your ruler’s random stats, your National Focus (which of the 3 the player chooses to prioritise for the next few years) and hired advisors are the price you pay for a wide array of boons for your empire; development, research, recruiting generals, admirals and conquistadors all cost mana. On one hand, the delicate juggling act between developing your territory, maintaining technological parity with your rivals and making sure you have enough left over in case you get mugged by a random event or blindsided by a dead general provides the kind of constant friction that makes for a consistent and engaging challenge; spent all your diplo on increasing gold production? Well, now France has surpassed your naval technology. Didn’t save enough mil points to replace that dead general? Well, now the Prince will have to command and if he winds up dead you’ll end up a junior partner in a personal union. These are all very real considerations that will dog you throughout your game of EU4.
On the other hand, this constant friction from the mana system can feel extremely ‘gamey’ and artificial: as if you can’t take the actions you want due to some imaginary value in a video game, not because this nation cannot.
If we look at Victoria 3 by comparison, you might have a province rich in gold mines and the desire to develop it but be physically or politically unable to: perhaps your economic laws have made long-term investment projects too expensive for the state to handle? Perhaps these gold mines are in an area with poor infrastructure and an insufficient working population? Maybe the resulting influx of gold would create an unwanted dependence on the metal and the interest group who will ultimately work those mines? These don’t feel like artificial barriers created by a video game but considerations and consequences that would make sense in the real world. This thought process is a lot more braindead in Europa Universalis 4. Do I have enough diplo to increase the gold production in this province? Yes. Can I afford to spend the admin required to lower inflation every few years? Yes. Cool, free money.
Aside from these issues, the worst part of mana is, of course, that the player has next to no control over it. If you get a string of awful rulers (which absolutely does happen) short of spending vast amounts of your income on advisors, you will fall behind fast and hard with no way out.
Now, I’m a big believer in intangibles in history and in people: innate talent, ambition, luck, diligence, quickness of learning, but these intangibles are just the ‘ore’ waiting to be refined; I’m talking about education. In Crusader Kings 3, hell, even Crusader Kings 2: a game older than Europa Universalis 4, if you happen to sire an heir who turns out not to have much behind their eyes the child can still be educated and a talented courtier can often make a good monarch of them… this is not the case in Europa Universalis 4. It’s all out of your hands.
Alea Iacta Est
By now you’ve no doubt picked up on one of my 2 big complaints with Europa Universalis 4: the RNG (random number generator) influence over the way EU4 plays is much, much too high.
Strategy games are my favourite genre of video game. In genres like online FPS’s and team-based shooters the outcome of your engagement is largely decided by latency, character match-ups and Ritalin and in genres like the RPG or especially in fighting games, player skill is 20% input and 80% having extensive knowledge of frame data, character builds and stats screens. Strategy games, at their best are the antithesis to this kind of game design. Back when Total War wasn’t crap, you could overcome a much larger force and a bad start simply with better positioning, development and expedient use of your ranged and cavalry units, in Crusader Kings 2 as I mentioned before, a monarch born born dull and with a clubbed foot could still become the greatest the realm had ever seen. To put it simply, in a good strategy game the player can overcome horrendous RNG through careful play and diligence… and I just don’t think that’s the case with Europa Universalis 4.
If the people you hope to expand into ally several powerful nations at the start of your game, your hopes of territorial expansion and following that branch of your mission tree are doomed, often forever because AI alliances very rarely break in this game; I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had to restart a run as Brandenburg because some German minor state next to me has managed to wrangle an alliance with Poland, Bohemia, both, or another kingdom like Denmark, who of course controls Sweden and Norway at game start.
I once had an online save going with another player too where I was stuck the entire game (we played from the 1444 start until around 1750) playing as The Netherlands without Limburg or any of Belgium which the Dutch owned historically, all because one of these tiny states had managed to secure an alliance with France early on.
Most guides for this game include a set of conditions like ‘If X has an alliance with Y then restart.’ Because the wrong RNG in EU4 can make your save borderline unplayable. Whether its bad ruler stats, events that steal your ducats and mana, alliances that choke your expansion or forts that have a 57% chance to fall on the next siege tick but don’t for months while your own territory is gobbled up by the enemy, Europa Universalis 4 always finds a way to royally piss you off with obstacles to success that feel like manufactured, casino gameplay. There comes a point when the player’s ‘strategy’ becomes how much you can prepare to mitigate awful RNG but it never strikes when you’re ready.
I know the kind of comments this complaint tends to get on Reddit or other places online…
I’ll openly admit Europa Universalis 4 is the Paradox title I’m the worst at but the way I see it, this game is difficult in ways that don’t feel legitimate, furthermore… it is a video game. A big part of game design is providing predictability within the expected mechanics while still allowing for a lot of surprise, so it makes sense for Vienna to hold in real life despite being on the absolute brink but in a video game? It just feels like the AI gets to cheat.
My second big complaint with Europa Universalis 4 is that the game is brutally unfair and absurdly punishing. Make one mistake, one little slip-up and your 10+ hour save is down the drain.
The worst example of this is in warfare; you cannot decisively lose a war in Europa Universalis 4, it will be the end of your run because the AI, no matter how likely it is to cause a coalition to form against them, no matter how unstable they are, will always carve the player’s nation up like a roast ham.
To me, a big part of making a game fair is an allowance for player error. You make a mistake in Super Mario Bros. and what happens? You lose a life, the game mocks you a little with the death jingle but then you get to try again. You lose a war in Crusader Kings and what happens? Your king might be left wounded or killed, you’ll probably face a lot of debt and some instability but ultimately? You can recover. In Europa Universalis 4, unless you’re a globe spanning empire with loads of territory and resources, your defeat will likely end you, or reverse your progress so far you just won’t want to bother anymore; I used to play Paradox games online with some people and a combination of the RNG and how quickly and brutally players would be doomed caused us to remove Europa Universalis 4 from our rotation of games, you haven’t known how badly someone usually calm and reserved can rage until they’re wiped out by the Ottomans 17 hours and 4 sessions into your online save.
What makes this all ten times more infuriating is how the alliance system and AI behaviour is stacked so obviously against the player. In Europa Universalis 4, if you want your allies to join you in a war, you have to use diplomats (of which you have but a handful) to curry favours: a kind of diplomatic currency you can trade for their military aid and other useful things like extra sailors and soldiers. This is a long, annoying and often unsuccessful process but the AI are absolutely ride or die for each other and come to the defence of/assault with their allies no questions asked, even if they’re in no position to do so.
The AI will also beeline for the player when fighting an alliance of several states and commit an extravagantly huge portion of their army to ensure that you suffer the most.
I’m going to be 100% honest: I sometimes have a bit of a temper problem with games.
I’ve played Street Fighter 6 just 3 times and broke a controller in one of those sessions, I have obliterated other peripherals playing Tekken; it’s not something to be proud of and I’m very cool-headed in real life and in the majority of what I play but there’s something about video game rage that hits me particularly bad when I get it and it’s for that reason that I only have about 400 hours logged in Europa Universalis 4 (a lot but low for Paradox game standards) I just can’t keep my cool while playing this game, it’s too annoying, too enraging, too punishing, even getting screenshots for this review and putting in a couple dozen more hours has had me slamming my fist on the desk.
I’ve ragged on EU4’s excess nonsense for a long while now but I’d like to end this section on a high note.
The extremely high difficulty makes Europa Universalis 4 a very rewarding game when you finally get a save that goes beyond the initial stages and while it gets excessive, the AI possesses a level of cruel cunning in this game that they lack in the rest of Paradox’s titles. If you invade a country and it’s a completely one-sided beatdown, it’s not uncommon to see the AI declare war and race you to snag as much land as possible, as well as that, the nonsense way forts work means that sometimes, you can be trapped in choke points and it’s always kind of impressive when the AI take advantage of this to dogpile you when you least want it. I won’t praise them too much though, it’s not rare to see two warring nations’ armies walk past each other to see who can siege the other country’s forts down the fastest.
Mare Nostrum
Europa Universalis 4 is a very old game now with lots of systems and mechanics crudely bolted onto it, hell, from what I hear Mission Trees: the backbone of the game’s progression weren’t even a thing until a few years in but despite all this bloat and complexity I still feel the game is at its best when you’re gradually blobbing across the map and building an empire as a colonial power outside of the Holy Roman Empire or out from beneath China’s vassalage. To me? Settling the New World as Spain, unifying the kingdom and then looking across the Atlantic as France or taming the vast, wild steppe as Russia are the times where EU4 hits its highest highs, call it a genetic predisposition.
You can absolutely play tall in Europa and many nations are well-suited to it but I find sitting on 4-5 speed for hours, watching mana build up so I can develop my provinces and sending diplomats around to fellatiate the AI to be a kind of sleep aid.
But whether playing tall or wide, projecting military or economic might, a big part of what makes playing the game so satisfying is the navy and global network of trade nodes.
Europa Universalis 4’s trade system is quite deep and if I wanted to explain it in all its depth I’d be here all day but on a basic level, a trade node’s value is determined by the value and quantity of trade goods produced locally and that flow into it with the most valuable trade nodes in the game tending to be End Nodes which are the end point of a region’s trade network: a single node which all others in the region flow into; in the early game, the Caribbean end node and the end nodes around the Italian Peninsula tend to be the most valuable but this will shift towards places like the English Channel and Gibraltar. If you aren’t located by an end node, then you can use merchants to channel trade from other nodes into your local one which can make it just as profitable... but also multiplies the revenue upstream for potential competitors.
Europa Universalis 4 begins in 1444 and doesn’t end until 1821, so as time progresses, the New World is colonised and colonial powers secure their own sources of goods like Spices, Coffee and Sugar you get to watch in real time as market forces work their magic; the Caribbean, Mediterranean and more pointedly: the Spanish, Portuguese and Ottoman Empires fall behind the curve having lost their monopolies on Spices and cash crops while countries with industrial goods like Coal, Copper and Iron or with large reserves of gold, namely, nations like France, England the 13 Colonies and Russia begin to take the economic lead.
A consistent issue with Paradox games and one that Europa Universalis 4 partially avoids is a black or white view of military conflict. You are either at war or not, you are either winning or losing with no give and take. In real life and especially in this time period, cross-border raids, regional skirmishes and fighting between local lords was incredibly common; Scots would raid into Northern England for cattle, Cossacks would go on great raiding campaigns against the Golden Horde and while it isn’t perfect in Europa Universalis 4, you can engage in some hostile actions and restricted wars via the navy.
The period from about 1650-1730 is referred to as ‘The Golden Age of Piracy’ where the great seafaring empires hired privateers: essentially legal pirates, to pilfer the maritime commerce of rival powers and the waters were infested with independent pirates too.
You can engage in such skulduggery yourself in Europa, with a dedicated privateering mission to assign your fleet around a trade node, which steals trade power from others operating around the node. Trade embargoes and disputes are another tool at the player’s disposal, allowing you to wage restricted wars for trade power at no risk to your sovereign territory, this Trade Dispute casus belli isn’t terribly useful in truth but it provides another option for weakening a rival and pushing them further down the naval pecking order should you so wish.
Europa Primum
Europa Universalis 4 is obviously quite a euro-centric video game: the clue is in the name, I don’t have a massive issue with this since the period from 1444-1821 is really the story of how Europeans came to dominate the world and replace ancient centres of power like China, India and the Eastern Mediterranean but one area where I do find this a bit disingenuous is with the technology system.
In EU4, technology is split into three trees for each type of mana: Administrative, Diplomatic and Military technology. To access new technology you have to accumulate a certain amount of points which you then spend to unlock it; every 50 years an institution appears like Colonialism or the Printing Press and the longer it takes you to embrace the institution, the slower it will be to research modern technology. This sounds like a fair system in theory since institutions can technically spawn in any province that fulfils certain requirements but since the Renaissance will always spawn in Italy, giving Europe a head start right at the beginning and since the continent is so incredibly dense with provinces… institutions will almost always spawn in Western or Central Europe. I don’t like this because technology wasn’t so black or white in our own timeline: the Portuguese regarded the technologies of some ‘primitive’ nations as being superior to their own, particularly some of the seafaring equipment being used around the Horn of Africa and of course the elephant in the room is that the gunpowder weapons we used that held the world by its throat were pioneered in China and the Far East.
My point isn’t that Europe shouldn’t overtake the world technologically in EU4 because by around 1700 it certainly had and despite what popular memory and media says, places like India and Africa wound up colonised because many of the local rulers were willing to sacrifice their sovereignty to get said European weapons technology and assistance against their neighbours, no, my point is that the institution system gives Europe this advantage too quickly and ignores the fact that for basically all of history until this point, places like China and the more successful Indian states had the edge on Europeans.
Like the balance of the economy, the centre of technology should shift to another part of the world as the game progresses… but it’s too late now, Europa Universalis 4’s final DLC is over a year behind us.
Iudicum
Despite my many complaints, I really do enjoy Europa Universalis 4 and I kind of owe a lot to this game for setting me down a new path.
I’m someone who’s always been deeply interested in language and history: it’s a big part of why I’m such a hard ass and insist on original hardware when retro gaming and also why Paradox games appeal to me so much. In turn, my fascination with languages has had a profound and enriching experience on my life. I wasn’t schooled in a mainstream setting and neither was I particularly well behaved, I actually completely ruined my secondary school history grade by doing half a bottle of rum with a friend before the exam (and for those of you who live in the UK, I think I only have 3-4 GCSE’s) but I’ve always been quite a diligent person, so my hobby of learning Russian as a teenager led to a high-level of proficiency I achieved on my own, which led to me winning a scholarship and being moved up to a high level Russian language degree in a prestigious university.
But what does this have to do with EU4? Well, my fascination remained but with one language under my belt I had no idea what to do next.
One fateful day, I reinstalled Europa and started playing around the Mesoamerica region, I couldn’t work out how to pronounce a lot of the names and thought to myself “What is all this?” This led me down a deep, deep rabbit hole of pre-Columbian history and the South American indigenous languages, I enjoyed my reading so much and was so impressed by the different ruins and accomplishments I read about that I decided I’d start learning Spanish in the hope of visiting myself someday, I’m about a year in now and it’s a great hobby and intellectual outlet.
Europa Universalis 4 is a game that I am thankful to for sparking a new passion of mine and it can be great fun… but I find it very difficult to recommend.
For certain, with Paradox already grifting several DLC before the game is out and the launches of Victoria 3 and Crusader Kings 3 being as they were, it will likely take 18 months minimum for Europa Universalis 5 to be a suitable replacement for its predecessor, however, the sheer hostility of this game to the player, how much it bloody annoys me and how once again it requires a DLC subscription for the full experience leaves me loathe to recommend it instead of waiting for November.
Unlike Crusader Kings 3 which is essentially Crusader Kings 2 casualised for the mass-market and with prettier graphics, Europa Universalis 5 looks to be akin to Victoria 3: the same name and time period slapped on a game that holds little mechanical and thematic similarity to its forebears and honestly? I think that might be for the best.
Europa Universalis 4 might only be 12 years old but after how far the grand strategy genre has come since 2013, it feels absolutely ancient.
Thank you very much for making it to the end of my review of Europa Universalis 4. My next review will be for Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater but beyond that, expect more Paradox and the usual retro offerings.
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I just wanted to say thank you for all the time and thoughtfulness you put into these game reviews. I only discovered you about a week ago but I've read through about five of these now and I cannot get enough. I'm really grateful.
Modding EU3's map to add some mostly forgotten HRE fief will always be one of my fondest memories regarding Western grand-strategy games, I haven't dabbled with EU4 the same way but I still had a lot of fun with it years after it was released, even if I was also unimpressed by some of the AI issues you outlined and ended up not engaging with most of its DLCs.