Europa Universalis V (EU5) Review – The Most Complex Grand Strategy Game I Have Ever Played
- Genre: Grand-Strategy | Historical
- Developer: Paradox Tinto
- Publisher: Paradox Interactive
- Price: $59.99 | 59,99€ | £49.99
- Release Date: 4 November , 2025
- Reviewer: Nuno Marques (PC)
- Target Audience: Grand-Strategy players, History buffs, and Paradox Games fans.
- Final Score: 8.7/10
Europa Universalis V (EU5) immediately showed me just how challenging it is. Even as someone who’s played many complex strategy games, I found it incredibly intricate and a bit overwhelming. Let’s start our look at the game by going back to the chaotic mid-14th century.
Europa Universalis V differs significantly from its previous version by starting in 1337, over a century earlier than 1444. This places the game right in the middle of the Middle Ages, just before two key events: the Hundred Years’ War between France and England, and the Black Death. The Black Death begins in 1346 and devastates Europe, Africa, and Asia, wiping out a huge portion of the world’s population. These events have a major impact on gameplay, presenting difficult challenges that are well-integrated into the game. The Black Death, in particular, is incredibly harsh, potentially undoing any economic progress and forcing you to completely rebuild your nation’s economy.
The way population works has been completely overhauled. Instead of a simple number, you now manage specific groups like nobles, clergy, workers, merchants, and slaves, each with their own traits, skills, and what they need to stay happy. Unlike previous games, people now have to be in a location to work there, making the economy much more detailed and complex. There are a lot of factors to keep track of – population numbers, what goods are needed, and prices – to build a successful economy. It’s a deep system, and definitely rewarding for players who are willing to learn it.
Europa Universalis V adds a new Estate system that puts population management at the heart of the game. You’ll now govern four main groups – Nobles, Clergy, Burghers, and Peasants – each with their own goals and desires, mirroring the traditional social hierarchy. Importantly, your own Crown is also considered an Estate. Nearly every decision you make will affect how these groups view your rule, and losing their support can create significant problems.
The game’s Estates – groups like merchants and nobles – are crucial to how you play. You’ll always see how happy and powerful they are at the top of the screen. Giving or taking away rights directly affects who controls the country. Pass laws that favor merchants, and they’ll become more influential. Try to limit the power of the nobility, and their support will likely waver. This is a big change from previous games, and because it’s connected to how the population works, politics and the economy are closely linked – which makes sense. However, it also means you’ll constantly need to solve new problems and manage these groups carefully. Trust me, keeping the Estates happy is challenging – history shows us that powerful people don’t like it when you try to change things.
While Estates adds a lot to the gameplay, I think its biggest impact is how it changes the player’s perspective. In previous Europa Universalis IV games, you played as the abstract ‘spirit of the nation,’ making decisions as a unified whole. Now, by having you play as the Crown – one of the Estates – it immediately separates you from that collective identity. Your goals often clash with those of other Estates. I quickly realized I was focusing more on my character – or my role as the King – and less on the nation itself, like Castile or England. This is historically accurate, as the period was about rulers gaining more power, and I find that challenge really engaging, even though it’s tough.
As a huge fan, one of the things I really love about this game is how much your capital city matters. Where you decide to put it isn’t just cosmetic – it seriously affects how well you can control your whole country. Basically, provinces closer to your capital are easier to manage and give you more taxes and soldiers, but that control drops off fast the further you get. It’s surprisingly realistic – building a massive empire is genuinely challenging! You can’t just expand wildly; you really need to focus on solidifying control over the land you already have. Before launching a big invasion, you’ve got to make sure you can actually hold onto any new territory, or it just won’t be worth the effort. It makes expansion much more strategic and rewarding, honestly!
The game’s control system is excellent and adds interesting strategic depth, but the way new regions are integrated after conquest feels flawed. You have to assign a governor to a conquered province to begin integration, which should be reasonable if it didn’t take so long. Currently, it takes 10 to 20 years to fully integrate even a single province – and you earn no income from it during that time. This feels unrealistic, particularly for provinces near your capital. Ideally, integration should begin immediately after capturing a major city or province, managed by existing local leaders. I appreciate the game’s focus on economics and its attempt to discourage rapid expansion, but this system feels unnecessarily restrictive. It’s disappointing, given how much effort went into creating such a detailed and immersive simulation.
As a huge fan, I’m really excited to dive into the new market system in Europa Universalis V, but honestly, I’m still getting my head around it! From what I’ve seen, it’s a really dynamic system based on supply and demand, and it changes constantly depending on where people are moving and what they need – which is cool, since population movement is a big part of the game. Thankfully, you can automate it, and I’d definitely recommend doing that at first. But, even with all the work they put into making the economy and population feel alive, the game isn’t perfect. One of the biggest issues for me is how fast everything happens. I haven’t seen any delay when the market changes, and it’s just too much to keep up with. It’s frustrating, because it feels like I’m missing out on a really interesting part of the game if I have to automate it. But if I don’t automate, I basically have to pause the game constantly just to adjust everything, which isn’t ideal either.
These paragraphs highlight how Europa Universalis V truly shines as a game centered around the economics and society of its historical period. It’s incredibly complex and realistic – I don’t think I’ll fully understand all its systems anytime soon! Every decision, no matter how small, can have significant consequences later on. Before I explore the military aspects, I want to emphasize how much I appreciate the depth of the economic and societal systems, even though they’re dauntingly complex. I love how the game tries to realistically simulate historical challenges, and I’m really enjoying the process of learning, even if I suspect I’ll never master it all.
I’ve spent the most time playing the Crusader Kings and Hearts of Iron games from Paradox. Honestly, I’m not drawn to their military aspects. I love Crusader Kings 3 for its complex medieval politics – it always feels like watching Game of Thrones – and Hearts of Iron 4 for the fun challenge of rewriting history. Based on what I’ve seen of Europa Universalis V, it doesn’t look like that will change, and I’m happy with that. As regular readers know, I prefer strategy and direct control. If I can’t be actively commanding troops, I usually don’t find the military systems very engaging.
What I find most interesting about Europa Universalis V’s military system is how realistically it’s simulated and how it connects to population and the economy. In the game, your initial troops, called levies, are recruited from the local population of each province. This directly reduces the available workforce and impacts your economy. If these troops are lost in battle or to disease, they don’t return to work after the war, creating a significant strategic consideration. Warfare isn’t just about having a larger army; it requires careful planning and resources. Starting a war without enough money and a stable economy can quickly lead to disaster. The time it takes to integrate newly conquered provinces further discourages reckless military expansion in EU5.
It’s hard to say how this game’s military system stacks up against the latest version of Europa Universalis IV, but it definitely borrows a lot from the popular Hearts of Iron IV. A key improvement is the ability to give your armies broad strategic goals, which cuts down on tedious tasks like constantly splitting forces to attack multiple cities. Now, you can simply order an army to besiege several locations, and the game’s AI will handle the details. You can assign armies different missions, from aggressive attacks and sieges to more defensive tasks like patrolling areas. So far, based on my experience playing as Castile, it seems to work really well.
My main issue with the game’s army system is how raising levies works. You can only call up troops after declaring war, which doesn’t make much sense. Preparing for war often needs to happen in secret, and being able to mobilize troops immediately would be a big improvement. I realize this restriction might be to keep things balanced, but instead of preventing early mobilization, the developers could warn other countries if I start moving troops around. This could also open up new strategies – like making a neighboring country prepare for war, which would cost them money and resources. Just some thoughts on how to make it more interesting.
Let’s quickly cover diplomacy and colonization. While I haven’t deeply explored colonization, both systems are simple to use. Diplomacy works as you’d expect, with various options and outcomes based on different factors. Colonization is a neat feature, especially for naval powers like Portugal or Castile. If you play as one of them, you can start sending out exploration and colonization expeditions very early in the game. This involves funding expeditions to discover new lands, then slowly establishing colonies by sending people and supplies. These colonies will eventually send resources back to your home markets, utilizing the same economic and population systems we’ve already talked about. Just to give you a sense of scale, Europa Universalis V features over 20,000 different locations.
We’ve gone over the main features of Europa Universalis V, so let’s talk about how complex the game is and how that interacts with its automation features. I usually appreciate games with depth, but I believe that complexity needs to be balanced with good design. The game’s systems should be logical and feel realistic, and it should offer a helpful tutorial and a clear, user-friendly interface. Europa Universalis V both succeeds and falls short in these areas, and I’ll start by explaining what I mean when it comes to the tutorial.
The game’s tutorial doesn’t offer much guidance, leaving new players to figure things out on their own – it felt like being quickly shown the ropes by a manager with no time to spare. While that’s realistic, it’s not ideal for introducing players to the game. I’ve played similar games from Paradox, so the interface wasn’t confusing for me, but I can see how someone new to the genre would be overwhelmed. The interface isn’t inherently bad and mostly presents information clearly, but it has a few small issues. Some buttons don’t look clickable, and others don’t do what you’d expect when you click them. A particularly frustrating example is when assigning commanders – two buttons layered on top of each other control different actions, which is confusing. These are relatively minor problems, but they’re worth pointing out.
Two features are sure to help players manage the game’s complexity:
Europa Universalis V offers incredibly detailed maps for just about anything you need – and they’re essential for making smart choices. My main frustration is that the game often makes you switch away from the map when you’re trying to build something. For example, if I wanted to check a location’s population before building, I kept having to flip back and forth between the map and the game’s interface. This can get really confusing when you’re overseeing so many places! Otherwise, the maps are fantastic – that’s my only real complaint.
Players have a lot of control over how much of the game they want to automate. If you’d rather not manage things like the economy, diplomacy, or even warfare and exploration, you can let the game handle it for you. This lets you focus on the parts you enjoy most – maybe even just playing the role of a ruler and making big-picture decisions while your advisors take care of the details.
Before I wrap up this review, let’s talk about how the game looks, sounds, and runs. Thankfully, there isn’t much to criticize. The graphics are beautiful – the map is richly detailed, and seeing cities and armies move really brings the world to life. It genuinely feels like you’re watching history unfold. The sound design is solid – not groundbreaking, but perfectly enjoyable. It’s not as epic as the Age of Mythology soundtrack, but it doesn’t need to be. Performance-wise, the game hasn’t crashed or been seriously unstable. However, it doesn’t always run at a consistently smooth frame rate. I’ve noticed occasional hiccups, like pop-ups appearing slowly or slowdown at the end of each in-game month. While this doesn’t happen all the time, it occurs often enough to be frustrating. It’s hard to say whether this is due to my computer or the game’s optimization, but it’s something I experienced (you can find my computer specs listed earlier).
Final Verdict and Score
8.5/10
It’s nearly impossible to fully review Europa Universalis V – it’s just too huge, complicated, and captivating. I could write endlessly about all its features, both good and bad. But after playing for a couple of weeks, I want to share some final thoughts.
Paradox has created something truly impressive with Europa Universalis V. It successfully combines the best features and mechanics from all their previous games. While the game itself is well-made, it could benefit from more detailed tutorials, particularly for complex systems like the economy. Currently, too much is automated, which prevents players from fully experiencing and understanding a key part of the game.
As a long-time fan of grand strategy games, I can honestly say Europa Universalis V is everything I hoped for – huge, sweeping, and wonderfully complex. It really delivers on that epic scale you crave. What I appreciate most is that the developers weren’t afraid to try new things, even though they could have just stuck with what worked in Europa Universalis IV. And so far, those new ideas are really paying off!
After I finish reviewing a game, the biggest sign it’s truly good is whether I still want to play it, even if I don’t plan on making videos or writing about it anymore. And in this case, I definitely do!
I’m saying ‘yes’ to Europa Universalis V not because I believe it’s a flawless game that will revolutionize the grand strategy genre like Europa Universalis IV did. Instead, I’m impressed by its depth and the way it appeals to my interest in history. It offers a lot of freedom to experiment with historical scenarios, which is rare in more serious war games. Plus, I find myself wanting to replay and explore how different choices can change the course of a nation’s development.
I hope you found this review helpful! I’d love to hear your thoughts, and whether or not you’re planning to pick up Europa Universalis V.
Game Score Breakdown
- Core Gameplay & Mechanics: 9/10
- Content: 9.5/10
- Graphics & Artstyle: 8/10
- Sound & Music: 7/10
- Technical Performance: 7/10
- Replayability & Value: 10/10
- Monetization & Business Mode: 7/10
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2025-10-31 21:46