Europa Universalis III Review

Review by Ian Morris

Europa Universalis III is more than a little tricky to review. Hardcore strategists and history fans will lap up the attention to detail, the old-school presentation, the incredible amount of depth, and the slow gameplay; however, fans of what we now consider to be RTS games (Command & Conquer and the like) may quickly be put off by those very same features. It’s because of this that EU III seems to be aiming for an entirely different target market, so much so that it may as well come with a warning sticker on the box: “Do not play unless you’re very enthusiastic about history.” Accessible it certainly isn’t, especially if you’re coming to the game thinking it has any real relation to the likes of Rome: Total War.

Putting you in the role of a nameless leader of a country of your choosing (you can play as any one from the known world at that time, which leaves plenty of unexplored continents for you to discover), EU III sets you the task of doing… well, whatever you want. An open-ended strategy game in the extreme, the choices you make really are entirely up to you; there’s nothing in the way of a story to follow, and no objectives to complete. It’s this level of freedom that can make Europa Universalis III quite daunting at times and also means that anyone who doesn’t have the patience of a Greek philosopher will face an uphill battle getting involved.

Played from a top-down perspective, as if surveying a map, your land is divided into different provinces, with large red borders separating your nation from its neighbours. This is the only view you can have of the game – the entire game plays out like a glorified, real-time version of Risk. Just a lot, lot slower. Anything you attempt to do will take months to complete; things such as recruiting an army or moving units between provinces can take upwards of 70 days, so whilst it may sound impressive that the game spans over 300 years in history, you’ll still find yourself getting little accomplished. This also means that the game requires some incredibly complex forward planning, as, if you ever happen to get invaded, and you don’t have the necessary amount of troops ready, there’s no way you can put together a counter attack in time. Although you can hire local mercenaries, these are, understandably, nowhere near as talented as properly trained soldiers, meaning you’d probably be better off spending your time and money waiting to recruit more soldiers, whilst praying that your province’s keep doesn’t fall before you manage to get anything done.

Whilst you can speed up the game, choosing from one of around five different speed settings (depending on the speed of your computer), all this does is make it even easier to lose control of your nation, as problems will begin cropping up far too quickly, even if your armies are being built faster. This effectively forces you to play it one of the lower three speeds, where things take a very long time. It’s this unforgiving double-edged sword that Europa Universalis wields that makes it appeal to grand strategy veterans, while at the same time making it incredibly inaccessible for anyone who’s new to the genre.

Despite an overly clunky interface and a disappointing lack of appropriate tutorials, you can’t help but be impressed with the way EU III lets you adapt your nation to your liking. You’re able to change everything from your Government’s level of investment in certain things, to choosing advisers to your leaders, or even setting ideas for your nation to follow. All this has to be done while trying to keep your citizens happy and thereby prevent them from rebelling, as well as maintaining your country’s good name and reputation around the world. This can be a genuine challenge to accomplish, especially for a relative newcomer to the genre such as myself – keeping everyone happy is never easy, and you’ll likely find yourself with a few rebellions that need squashing in the first few years of play. This is by far the most interesting and most enjoyable part of the game, and could well have made the game a must buy, if it weren’t for the fact that the menu system seems to be constantly working against you. Simply put, there are far too many menu screens, each with too many buttons and nowhere near enough explanation. As you can imagine, this leads to a horrendously steep learning curve for any newcomers to the game. Finding the appropriate menu to do a certain thing takes forever, and with numerous sub-menus to navigate, and a disappointing lack of shortcuts, many will find themselves in a war of their own as they attempt to do the simplest of tasks.

Combat is another area where Europa Universalis falls disappointingly short. For the sake of this example, let’s presume we’re playing as sleepy old England. As a country which begins the game at war with France, you’re going to want to amass a decently sized army to defend yourself against any possible attack, as well as reinforce your province in Calais. However, as each of your provinces can only build one army at a time (taking at least 70 days a piece), you’ll find yourself having an incredibly long wait before you get a chance to defend anything. To make matters worse, there’s also every chance that whilst you’re sitting around waiting for your units to be built, the French will march in with a 10,000 strong army and take Calais from right under your nose, before you’ve even had a chance to react. This is just one example of the incredibly tough situations that Europa Universalis III throws at the player, and newcomers are likely to feel completely overwhelmed.

If you eventually do find yourself in a brief spell of peace time, you may find yourself wanting to invade another country, to garner better taxes, and provide a second base for your armies. To get your troops to another you country, you must first load them onto a boat, before setting sail for enemy territory. However, for some strange reason, you can’t load your armies onto a boat when the boat is docked at one of your ports – the boat must first set sail and position itself in the middle of the ocean before your troops can climb on-board. It’s a bizarre design decision and is downright confusing for a game which prides itself on realism.

After you land your troops in enemy territory, presuming that you don’t come across any enemies defending the province, you’re then in for a long wait, as you just sit and watch a still image of the enemy province’s keep, waiting until you see it catch fire or the walls collapse. At this point you can choose to assault the keep or wait for them to surrender due to starvation – it’s up to you. Again, this can take weeks or months, just as it would in real life. It’s just that reality doesn’t always make for an enjoyable game. Unfortunately, combat with two armies feels just as slow and uninspired; when you and an enemy enter the same province, a battle between your two forces will automatically occur, and you then sit and watch as the numbers go down, and the enemy team trounce yours. You can’t arrange your armies and you have no command over the battle at all, a feature which proves to be very limiting, and makes you feel far too detached from any battles which occur – the ability to change the formation of your soldiers, or even issue some sort of orders would have been nice, and made the game feel much more involved at the same time.

At the end of the day, if you’re a relative newcomer to the grand strategy genre who’s interested in sampling what the genre have to offer, this really isn’t the game you’ll want to get started with. The incredible scope, combined with the awkward menu system and lack of tutorials just serves to make this game completely inaccessible to the grand strategy novice. If you’re a fan of EU II, you’re sure to love this and will probably see many of the issues highlighted as problems for newcomers as reasons why you love the series. However, without anything there to hold your hand through the first few years, EU III is a game that will be completely inaccessible to the average gamer, and because of this it’s hard to recommend.

Editor’s comment: The review text has been altered slightly from the original which was published on 29.01.2007. These changes were made to more accurately represent the views of the reviewer.

Turn to page 2 for a second opinion on Europa Universalis III

You got your Machiavelli in my Sun Tzu! – Review by Thomas Kinnebrew

A new release for those with a penchant for world domination, Europa Universalis III is the latest grand strategy title from Paradox Interactive. This impressive game allows you to rule in intricate detail virtually any nation that existed during the Age of Discovery.

Based on a strategy board game, the original Europa Universalis was released in 2000 and successfully introduced the series, followed in 2001 by EUII, which further improved on the solid gameplay.

EUIII is a quality title and will be loved by aspiring dictators everywhere. This game takes a while to learn, and if this is your first time with the series you should definitely go through the tutorials and at least skim through the 148-page manual (available as a free download from Gamers Gate if you order EUIII online).

Or, you could decide that you’re a genius and just jump in like I did. I found out I wasn’t as smart as I thought I was and it took some time to grasp the huge amount of options at my disposal. I spent the first hour just tinkering with every menu and button I could find. In the process of playing for a while and resenting the difficulty, I somehow found myself completely immersed in trying to keep my Portuguese empire alive, and this was just the demo. I had to get this game.

EUIII looks like your beloved Risk board; presenting you with a map of the known world for the period you’ve chosen to play. There are over 250 countries you can rule and over 1,700 provinces and sea zones. There are thousands of historical characters and rulers and you can pick any starting date from 1453 to 1789. Seven ‘bookmarked date’ scenarios are included, including the discovery of the New World, the Thirty Years War and the American Revolution. To say there is a lot to do is an understatement.

You’ll control your nation as if you were looking over this world map, with various display filters to show national borders, terrain, religious influence and so on, allowing you to assess the global situation with a few clicks. An army is represented by a single soldier (like a game piece), regardless of the size, and navies are similarly indicated by a ship piece that graphically indicates the best boat in the fleet.

Graphics are simple but give the appropriate board game feel familiar to the EU series, with nice water effects and visual representations of any construction that may be occurring in a province. You move your armies with the familiar left select and right click, and the controls are intuitive in most cases. Menu buttons unobtrusively line the edges of the screen, with further details of your empire available by clicking on your country’s flag to open your national menu. This allows you to set research, impose even more taxes on your unfortunate subjects, hire and fire your court and military leaders, and even set your national religious preferences.

EUIII feels like a turn-based board game, but it’s real time. You can pause and give commands, and if you’re like me you’ll find yourself doing that often as you try to think of some way to keep the aggressive (almost angry) AI off your back. There are five different speed settings but I wouldn’t recommend going faster than the third setting if you are at war, as you may find yourself on the losing end of an unexpected battle if you’re slow hitting the spacebar. Fortunately, you can set autosave to yearly, bi-yearly, or monthly in case you forget to save the game.

At first this hybrid TBS/RTS system didn’t feel right for a big strategy game but it grew on me. If you’re not at war you can just hit the fastest speed setting and keep sharp for interesting occurrences. While it can be aggravating to monitor your speed to suit the situation, there is in my opinion one huge advantage over most games of this scope – no turn processing time. After playing Civilization IV and more recently Dominions 3, this is a refreshing change. It feels like it is turn based but without the turn processing wait.

At times it can be slow-paced and uneventful but that won’t last for long. Short periods of peace are suddenly broken by huge wars involving many nations. One minute you’re busy building improvements, fine-tuning your tax policy and research, and exploring uncharted territories, while the next you’re frantically trying to deal with a multinational war of alliances. Now there’s too much to do and you’re making diplomatic deals to secure your eastern front, sending spies into enemy territory to cause trouble and raising more troops than you could ever afford using loans from greedy bankers.

Battles are resolved in an abstract fashion like CIV, where the board pieces get into a simple fight animation and the fight can take months of game time. An info panel reveals the terrain effects, various combat values, troop or ship types (of which there are many) and the amount of men or boats remaining on each side. Of course I wanted more control but that’s why I play strategy games to begin with – I have control issues. Thankfully, this does provide me with a lot of ‘alone time’ in which to play strategy games.

That controlling urge soon passes as there’s so much more to do that a war is often just one of many worries. In a popular RTS like the Total War series strategy takes a back seat to tactical control of your army during a battle but EUIII is the opposite. You’re the ruler of an empire and have no business personally commanding filthy peasants. That’s what your generals are for; you’re responsibility is to keep an eye on the big picture.

Despite having a great time, I had some minor issues with the game. Some controls were difficult to figure out, for example using ships to transport your troops. The ship must leave the port and go to the adjoining ocean province before troops can board, just like in TW. You then right click with your army to board the ships and right click to unload your men at your own port. Good so far. However, if you are invading an enemy province, you don’t right click to disembark, you have to left click on the ‘troop tab’ of your navy panel and then right click on the province. This should be simplified to right click board, right click disembark. It’s perfectly possible that someone might load their troops, attempt to invade an enemy province with a right click, and figure that it’s just not possible to do without a marines upgrade or something. You could even play the game for days under this false assumption before figuring it out. Besides this little quibble, I found the controls to be pretty simple and only had to refer to the manual a couple of times. I think an advisor would have been a nice touch and will probably be needed in the future if the series is to reach new players.

Another portion of EUIII that seemed unusually difficult to accomplish was the trade system. However, I didn’t devote as much time to this aspect as I did to other areas of the game and I haven’t tried out all of the research. Lastly, multiplayer has some stability issues and is probably a patch or two away from being viable for large games.

I’ve sunk a lot of time into this title and I’ve only scratched the surface. This game has a lot more to it and really can’t be given justice in a short review. If I had to describe this game to someone who was totally unfamiliar with it, I would say it’s a combination of the board game Risk and Civilization. The graphics and sound won’t wow anyone but, given the incredible scope of EUIII, this is understandable. I’d encourage any interested new players to download the free demo to try it out and if you’re a fan of huge strategy games just go buy it – you know you want to.

The overall score for Europa Universalis III takes the two reviews into account.