While incredibly hard to get into for newcomers, Europa Universalis III offers a supreme amount of depth that hardcore strategy fans will lap up.
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He won't enjoy playing it, the readers won't respect his opinion, and you won't be happy with the feedback.
He could be a great reviewer for all I know... I'm sure the results would be similiarly horrid if I were asked to review a Super Mario Bros. game. Great games I've been told, but just not my cup of tea.
Regards,
Mortibus
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An opinion is only worthwhile when it has a valid point of reference. In regards to physics, i am sure that i am entitled to as many opinions as i can come up with. Does that make my opinions as valid as Stephen Hawkins opinions on physics? I hardly think so.
I am inclined to believe that your reviewer did not play the game as much as he would like for us to believe. He says that he played the game extensivley over the course of a few days but then claims that it takes 70 some days to build troops. As you advance in game time and advance in tech that time is drastically shortened. So much so that before the first hundred years of the game expires you should be cranking out troops in about 20-22 days. Thats at an average land tech level, lets not even get into advisors, policy settings, and military building that can bring that number down even further. Needless to say that is a far cry from 70 days. How did the reviewer miss this when he played said game EXTENSIVELY? I have my doubts in regards to the amount of playing that he formulated his reviews with. Noffense, i think it is just a tad bit irresponsible of him. You should go to the Paradox forums, or the Matrix forums, or the SSI forums, or the Stardock forums and recruit your self a strategy grognard if you want to review games like this in the future. I could point out some more factual inacuracies on your reviewers part but it seems like a gang bang of sorts and i do not want to add to the mob mentality. I like this sit but i must admit that i am a bit dissapointed.
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Funniest... Review... ever.
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OK, now that that is off my chest, you have a point about accessibility. Starting the game from the beginning was the thing that kept me from appreciating EUII (the previous version... bear with me) when it first came out. I agree that this kind of game has a steep learning curve for a beginner.
I disagree however about strategic depth. I came back to EUII a couple years later and I realized that I had learned maybe one percent of the game. I was hooked for two years finding different avenues of control of this game. I managed to "diplo-annex" two thirds of Europe as Brandenburg (check the paradox forums for just how you would do this), paint the Americas British red (actually quite easy), convert Rome to the Shia faith playing Grenada, and capture Porto playing as the Huron (this requires you to pick up some Stolen Rutters from the Europeans and actually does take the patience of Job).
Notice this was from EUII. EUIII is much more complex, is more strategically open, and has been made virtually non-deterministic compared to EUII. You will be amazed once you have put a few months into EUIII just how strategically deep the game really is. "Hmm, I wonder if the population of my province has an effect on the taxes I can get?" "How the heck do I find Manhattan?"
Final note and a minor point: Make sure you actually have your army ready to attack BEFORE declaring war. Machiavelli and Sun Tzu have some good points on how to achieve strategic victory. Wars are won before they are started.
I think it's stupid to dump on a reviewer so I figured I could give a couple pointers on what gamers look for in a game like this. It really IS a different animal.Last edited on Wed 31 January 2007 by Stolen Rutters
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I tried getting into this - as well as EU II at the time it was released - but I found both to be overly complicated and slow, even compared to the likes of Civilization, which is one of my favourite game series ever.
I felt the same way about the Advance Wars series versus Disgaea, which I've managed to play more extensively than EU II & III. The former proved to be accessible yet maintained considerable depht (comparable to Chess), while the latter just threw exorbitant amounts of stats, items and rules at you that didn't really add much to the actual battlefield tactics.
I guess my point is that this review is useful enough for someone like mo who feels that complexity does not necessarily equal depht, and that it's quite often frustrating rather than fun.
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"and while I'm at it, why should you have to move your navy into the middle of the sea to be able to load units onto them? Why can't this be done in a port?"
Your armies are vulnerable in the middle of the sea. They can be attacked while armies are loaded into them. Seems like the best way to represent that. WAD. (As somebody else said, MTW also does it)
P.S.: You can build a whole army consisting of multiple units of soldiers/cavalry/artillery in a single EU province. Is a army "a single unit" in your book? It consists of multiple "squads", doesn't it?
Falcon4 is less inaccessible than EU? For Falcon you need to memorize a billion buttons. It of course is not for everybody - my less patient friends got along much better with the more war-focused Hearts of Iron series. But accessible? It's extremely accessible. If you need any help, there are tutorials as well. Fitting comparison: I found Splinter Cell Double Agent to be less accessible than the EU games due to the sheer awfulness of the tutorials in that game (No, I'm not going to compare its gameplay with that of EU :p). They're not even good to test graphics performance on something that loads quickly as they slap you in the face with a completely white level and then ask you to complete various tasks without sufficiently explaining how. The training stuff in the Metal Gear Solid games was worlds better.
Of course maybe I'm too used to there being games that do not offer tactical unit control - but GalCiv2, which also is somewhat limited there, managed a 9/10 or something on this page. Master of Orion has tactical control, but it also - like Medieval/Rome - allows to auto-resolve combat. EU shows you the actual resolving, and instead of just telling you that 100% of your forces were annihilated in the Battle At Antares, it lets you watch your troops get annihilated. The classic game Imperialism can be seen as a fully turn-based dumbed down EU, and while it does offer controlling your units in battle, that is just tedious there. If you want to let your units roam around, play Warcraft 3, and if you don't want to bother building a base, Ground Control II. Both have way more unit balance than Dawn of War and friends and might even manage not to overwhelm you with complexity.
On the topic of "opinions": You are not so much stating an opinion as talking nonsense through most of this. There's nothing wrong with disliking a game and making valid points explaining why - but as I said in my earlier post, neither the arguments for nor those against are really truly valid here. They just seem randomly conjured up.
Now, on to what the other honeys wrote (big thumbs up to the guy with the paragraph-by-paragraph feedback, spot on).
jtorry, you say "If after his time with the game he missed things, that is surely just as much a fault with the game's design and how it welcomes new players, as it is Ian's apparent overlooking of key features.".
Why is a reviewer's incompetence now a fault of game design? The average online shop has a more confusing website than all the Paradox games I played. Ian's overlooking of key features may be rooted instead in him only looking for battle elements. Sure, you can let a FPS addict review Rollercoaster Tycoon and complain about the lack of guns and give it a 1/10 for that.
"Being his opinions, they can't be wrong, they can just be the polar opposite of other people's."
So if I have the 'opinion' that the freedom of speech and press freedom is at the exact same level in the whole western world, is that then infallible as well? You do realize, I hope, that opinions tend to be based on observation and observation is something this reviewer at least fails at in a spectacular way.
This reminds me of people in game support forums who constantly try to justify hideous bugs as features. (Spoiler: poor excuses just make you look, well, poor.)
Civ Fan:
I admit I only played it for 4 or 5 hours, but Advance Wars did not give me the impression that it'd ever tremendously exceed the complexity of Sudoku too much and finding just what you want in the menus is not the fastest thing ever, either, but that can be expected with a GBA game.
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Ian gave the game a bad score because it wasn't an RTS/TBS. His problem with the game seems to stem from the fact that it's not of a genre that he's used to, and that is a poor poor reason to give a game a bad score.
Such "reviews" are the type of things I would expect from a bunch of teenagers arguing on a forum somewhere, not from a professional journalist (by the way, how long has Ian been writing professionally, because this really was an amateurish review IMO)
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Even though I notice that the text has been slightly altered now, many of the things people have pointed out are still in there - and perhaps the damage is done already, no matter what changes are made :( Furthermore, some of the new bits and pieces just adds to the impression that the reviewer has not actually given the game an objective chance. Merceneries are "understandably" nowhere as talented as a regular army? While I am aware of the drawbacks of using mercenaries, such a comment makes me believe that the reviewer is not. Besides, mercenaries certainly tended to have more fighting experience and better equipment than your average peasant army. I don't think you need to be a "history buff" to understand that.
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"I tried getting into this - as well as EU II at the time it was released - but I found both to be overly complicated and slow, even compared to the likes of Civilization, which is one of my favourite game series ever."
This game certainly isn't for everyone. Similarly, I am not a huge fan of WC3, that doesn't mean it isn't a good game.
From a reviewer, however, I would expect a reviewer to actually be familiar with the game type (strategic instead of tactical) and review the game based on what the game is trying to accomplish. Put it another way, if I am a gamer that enjoys Grand Strategy games, would I enjoy EU3? Or is the game so poorly implemented that I should stay they hell away from it?
The reviewer did not answer this question - or even come close to addressing it. Instead, the reviewer compared this game to the likes of Company of Heroes!?
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I am also a long time chess player, and there are similarities between chess and the EU series in terms of strategic depth, EU series being more diverse and allowing more combinations.
And guess what? Chess pwns all your strategy/RTS/shoot em up games, being the number one strategy game ever and I mean ever!
One wonders what the reviewer would rate chess as a game, boring as hell? Get someone who appreciates strategy to rate a game of strategy.
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