My first campaign in Europa Universalis 5 may have ruined the entire series for me

Everybody in the Europa Universalis community has spent the last four months worked up about the (admittedly hilarious) glitches that have plagued EU5 since its release, but the real problem with the game is much deeper.

I'm an EU4 veteran with 1,700 hours and a world conquest under my belt, and I can attest that EU5 has left me in a state of anger and confusion. Halfway through my first 93-hour campaign as Castile, I realized I loved this new entry. But by the time I was done, I decided I didn't want to play it again.

Worst of all, I went back to my beloved EU4 only to discover that EU5 has ruined its predecessor for me forever. Each of these games has something the other lacks, and Paradox has yet to provide the perfect synthesis.

I don't say that lightly, because it's not a stretch to say that Europa Universalis 4 changed the course of my life. I had a few weeks of EU4 YouTube fame back in 2016 for making a meme video about a one-province map mod. More importantly, I wrote about EU4 in my admissions essay for grad school (and got in!), where I wrote another paper about the game's (mis)representations of humanity's dynamic past, and later presented it at an academic conference.

Then EU5 came out. My two-month-long Iberian joyride showed me that the game has the groundwork to be the most immersive, all-encompassing historical grand strategy game in the genre; but the lack of differentiation between its factions—Spain plays just like Hungary, who play almost exactly like the Ottomans—is a discordant note that ruins the symphony for me.

Breaking the map-painting curse

Europa Universalis 5 is actually complicated, whereas I have long contended that—as much as I love it—EU4 is a relatively simple game (map painting) disguised with false complexity.

I ended my 93-hour EU5 Castile campaign with an empire—if you could even call it that—barely extending beyond Iberia. In EU4, this would be such a sad conclusion that I would be afraid to even mention it at one of the dinner parties, soirees, salons, or hootenannies at which I often find myself talking about Europa Universalis.

But in EU5, every broken, buggy moment in 500 years of Castilian state management sucked me in deeper. And there are a lot of bugs: Every four in-game years for the last ~150 years of my campaign, all thirty of my Spanish colonies revolted one-by-one and then immediately accepted peace, over and over again.

I caught myself many times just watching the virtual months roll by without even giving much input, purely for the joy of seeing the systems interact: saving up thousands of ducats and mass-building roads just to see my control go up, slowly centralizing my personal unions with Portugal and Hungary, watching the trade ships cross the Strait of Gibraltar en route to the Ocean Sea.

But the game spat me out on the other end with some newfound conclusions: all of EU5's beautiful groundwork isn't enough on its own. EU4 rode a ten-year high of flavor additions that made each country a hoot; EU5 comes with almost none of this flavor baked in. I'm not the only veteran EU4 warrior (we can't call ourselves that?) complaining that every playthrough feels the same. One astute Steam reviewer notes that, while Europa Universalis is supposed to be a historical sandbox, too much sand is a bad thing: it's "coarse and it gets everywhere".

I finished that run on February 15, and I have not touched the game since. I've even stopped reading r/EU5 like it's the newspaper. I have no idea when I'll go back, and I don't feel the drive to.

Even before its deluge of addons, EU4 was notably superior in this regard at launch thanks to how it handled geography: A run as Ashikaga on the Japanese archipelago will feel like a very different game from land-locked Bohemia caught between a kaleidoscope of acquisitive Eastern European powers.

But in Europa Universalis 5, imperial expansion isn't really the game. Like I mentioned above, I campaigned as the strongest imperial power of the 16th century—a run that, in EU4, would have likely ended in control of half the world—but I ended only with Iberia, a bit of Morocco, and a chunk of Caesar's obstreperous Gaul. At least one commenter on my colonial revolt video expressed surprise that I managed just to defeat France.

No, EU5 is as much a Victoria-style economy sim as anything else, and much of the player's focus is, by necessity, turned inward. Rebellions are far more frequent and harder to control, your economy demands more micromanagement, and I probably spent a quarter of my total playtime nannying the forty exploration missions I had running at any given time.

The geography-based strategic delights of EU4 no longer mean much in EU5, because this is not a conqueror's game as much as it is an administrator's. I found much less emphasis on planning a 50-year campaign to dominate the western Mediterranean and rein in the Italian city-states, much more on balancing the books at home to make sure all of my numbers kept creeping up excruciatingly slowly.

Depth without flavor

EU5 is also missing national ideas and mission trees, both of which could grant a journeyman strategician some truly colorful opportunities to control half of Europe without ever going to war, or generate Prussian Space Marines capable of 17th-century Thermopylae stands. Nor does EU5 even have generic idea groups to choose from, so a player can at least inject some basic novelty into a second game. EU5 not only lacks the decade of flavor that trickled into its predecessor via its famously well loved DLC scheme—it also lacks a clear path forward to reproduce that flavor.

There are very few unique mechanics—even my beloved Holy Roman Empire, a true pandemonium (in the original meaning of the word), feels two-dimensional. In any other context, a singleplayer game sustaining 93 hours of playtime would be a true achievement. But as a follow-up to a 1,700-hour game-of-the-decade candidate, I am bereft.

EU4's flavor solutions were controversial, and I'm not saying that its successor needs to have a railroaded storyline. But I pray to the PDX pantheon that they give us something to choose—an idea group, a mission branch, anything—that will make a game as Delhi feel fundamentally different from one as Spain.

That is what I hope Paradox fixes, even more than the bugs.

I fell in love with EU4 because, despite its own shallowness, its tapestry of national colors was a pleasure to look at, finishing missions and idea groups triggered all the right brain chemicals, and I usually felt like I was doing something. Europa Universalis 5 has the framework for an infinitely tactile historical simulation, but it lacks some je ne sais quoi, some feeling of higher purpose; and that's a more fundamental design flaw that can't just be fixed with some light polish or an overpriced fairly priced DLC.