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to play Europa Universalis 5 Paradox is like walking into Stargate as a longtime fan of grand strategy games 2001: A Space Odyssey. Everywhere you look, wandering through the past, you see the influence of its predecessors and contemporaries. “Oh, look, you can change production methods Victoria 3rulers are as they are within Imperatorand feels like a levee system Crusader Kings 2! “
Review the review information
Platform reviewed: PC
Available: PC
Release Date: November 4, 2025
Let’s start with the time period it covers – your game begins in 1337, a year that saw the start of the Hundred Years’ War, Petrarch’s first visit to Rome, and, apparently, the founding of Basham Priory in Berkshire. The next few centuries are yours to choose one way or the other, and you can do so on an hour-by-hour basis, should you choose.
It dates back more than a century in sports Europa Universalis 4allowing some extra time in the late Middle Ages, before knights gave way to hussars. This also allows the game to introduce situations neatly, which is a new feature EU5 Some events from this play center stage, much more so than it did in its predecessor.
For example, when the Hundred Years War begins (desperately still named 1337), it’s easy to see at a glance the strength of each side and who’s in whose alliance, allowing you to check whether you can indicate the balance. Situations begin throughout the game and include historical moments such as the struggle between the Guelphs and Ghibellines and the Reformation.
This new starting point also comes with a price – the Black Death will begin to make its way around the world after a few years. In both of my campaigns as Castile and Holland, my population was halved by plague. i EU4a plague means loss of income or independence. Here, it actually matters on a much larger scale. The game models your nation’s population whether you’re a provincial minor or a major power, and every dead subject means one less job, one less soldier, one less productivity for your nation. This is my favorite change in the game, and represents a trend away from abstractions and toward more concrete, substantive measurements of a nation’s capabilities.
The best bit
Fighting for new colonies in North America with the English. They thought they had me, but they didn’t bank on me being allied with France, who promptly tripped them up.
Abstracts were everywhere EU4. Your provinces could be developed, but that didn’t mean much more than a little bit richer and a few more buildings in the province. Administrative, diplomatic, and military points, known as mana, served as your ability to grow provinces, promote generals, and research new technologies, which were very limited in number. Mana doesn’t exist here, beyond some rankings that allow you to see what’s best among your rulers and courtiers. You develop provinces by instructing a minister to do so, while research is now based on more concrete factors like the literacy of your people.
The tech tree is also a real joy, – the number of techs is increased to a ridiculous degree, with each round of play having more than 100 techs, barring the first one. It’s like a tech tree you can find civilization Again, abstract variety was encountered EU4.
Choosing a national focus at the start of a new era also unlocks certain tanks, and you can focus on administrative, diplomatic or military tanks. As you progress with the techs, you’ll unlock new laws for codify, new government reforms to shape your state, and more. States are even more fluid than in previous installments – they’re national missions that can reel in your progress.
Here, you can build your nation however you like along different axes such as centralization vs. decentralization, aristocracy vs. plutocracy, and traditionalist vs. modernist. These can be changed at any time by assigning a member of your cabinet to influence the nation, while government reforms represent powerful ways to change the central ethos of your nation.
Call of the Ducats: Early Modern Warfare
gender EU5 Occupants are often referred to as map-painting games, and, as you’d expect from a game that starts with the Hundred Years’ War, battles are a must. After all, you can’t pass this tasty trade off to your neighbors. The military aspect of the game feels like a mish-mash EU4 And Crusader Kings Series
As mentioned, you can call levies, but you can (and should) build a professional army as well. Capturing castles and cities gives you a zone of control, so focusing on them rather than individual provinces is the order of the day. It’s far from happy, but it interacts wonderfully with the game’s systems.
Soldiers and sailors are people, so calling for land or naval revenue reduces the population in their home region. This means that for each levy called, local food production and raw material output drop, and troops lost from your levies are lost from your wider population. If your army is professional, you no longer call the mass farmer, so he can stick to his land, giving them a potentially better value proposition.
War is more costly than ever in this respect, and not just because of the impact on population. You need the ability to cover maintenance costs and feed your troops, the ability to find a new resource, while still doing their serious duty. How you do this isn’t particularly well explained (one of the game’s few pain points), so unless you figure it out you can expect to leave some of your men dead from corruption. Clausewitz’s quote that “war is the continuation of policy with other means” is oversimplified here, and it affects your country to a large degree.
A map that is truly off the charts
What a map to paint, though. From Ako to Zatfan, just amazingly many, with a dizzying number of countries. Everywhere you look, you get a little touch. Some are obvious, such as the fact that all but the smallest countries will contain multiple locations, allowing for more development options for smaller countries, in each area it’s good to extract with a Resource Gathering Operation (RGO).
Others are more subtle, like the increase in the size of the Holy Roman Empire, which is made up of many more states than before, or that zooming into an area shows individual buildings you’ve built, and hovering over them will tell you what they are.
The only problem I’ve noticed is that the locals seem to be underrepresented. There really aren’t that many of them, especially in North America, and that’s a real shame. I imagine this will improve over time with DLC, but right now, they’re thin on the ground.
In addition to the traditional fare of grand strategy games, namely options, you can also play as landless nations for the first time. For example, you can play as the Bank of Perugia or the Hanseatic League and become kingmaker without actually directly owning any lands. The landless nations are very limited in terms of options at the moment, but I still appreciate it, as playing the bank seems like ‘playing the long game’ (developing your nation rather than conquering other people’s lands) to its logical end.
Whichever nation you play as, you’ll be up against an AI that feels more aggressive than previous games. In several games, I saw France (and it’s always France) conquer parts of Aragon or gobble up German provinces. Payfund. Whether I was fighting them as Spain or with them as remora allies like Holland, they were a force to be reckoned with. I was able to break through at one point EU4 More than my knee, but the same strategy doesn’t work here, so be prepared to relearn it.
Speaking of learning, EU5 It’s the most accessible and most complex the series has ever been. New automation features allow you to control taxes and trade on AI, should you choose, and it’s pretty good at that, too. This is very important, because by the time you make your storage payments, conservatively, measured in tens of hours, you’ll have some trouble reading the UI.
It’s often not particularly clear how to do certain things or which menu you need to open (I’m looking at you, RGO Construction menu). The tutorial is significantly better than previous Paradox titles, but still leaves some things unknown, which is disappointing.
The only other small nitpick I have with the game is that it pretty well recycles events and achievements. EU4. I appreciate that, say, Tiger Lion is going to be different in this game, but I would have preferred some fresh challenges. Likewise, as you roll from month to month as a veteran EU4you will recognize some event popups and their options.
Despite these minor problems, Europa Universalis 5 Represents a huge leap forward for the series. When writing this review, I’m thinking about who I want to play as next, what economic approach to use, and what other parts of the world I want to see. Memorably complex yet more accessible than ever, it’s already a grand strategy classic and already a worthy alternative to its predecessor.
Should you play Europa Universalis 5?
If you play it…
If you don’t play it…
access
Accessibility features are quite lacking Europa Universalis 5but there is a colorblind mode, which is a potentially accessible feature for a game like this. A high-contrast map mode would be a huge addition, as would the ability to change the game’s font.
How I reviewed Europa Universalis 5
I played as both Castiel and Netherland, and also tried playing as the Bank of Bardy, which gave me a good look at a number of different types. In addition, I participated in colonization and exploration, reforms, and many other important events throughout the game. I played the game on my PC, which has an Intel I7 12700F CPU, 32GB of RAM, and an NVIDIA GEFORCE RTX 4070 graphics card.
First reviewed October 2025
1 Comment
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