#Europa universalis 4 strategy guide series

International relations, for example, are hugely complex.

There are a relatively large number of concepts to master and each one of them is a challenge on its own. This effectively creates a set of mechanics that challenge the player to constantly come up with new and ever more sophisticated strategies in a game one could spend years mastering.įiguring out this game was one of the toughest challenges in my gaming life. One must balance religion, economics, war, diplomacy, stability, technology, and competing interests as well as cultural and racial politics in a delicate dance on the road to power and control. Balance is key in EU4, as a purely military strategy will result in grand alliances against you which you will be unable to deal with. An interesting side effect is that reloading a previous save game will end up being very different from the last time you played it. This becomes a fun study in managing large numbers of low probability events. There are no guarantees but there are a lot of different things you can do to nudge the odds more in your favor. This adds to the realistic and historical feel of the game, in which unlikely events do occur and can catch you off guard. Random events, uprisings, and battle outcomes each proceed in a probabilistic fashion with probabilities determined by a myriad of factors. The other important difference between this game and others in the genre is the use of probabilities things don’t happen in a deterministic fashion.

Things take time, not turns, which means the player often has to watch nervously as his troops march to put down a revolt, hoping his city can withstand the siege just a little longer.

#Europa universalis 4 strategy guide series

In EU4, by contrast, the player has no control over battles, only over the campaign map they can pause the game to issue a series of orders to armies, navies, diplomats, merchants, etc., but those orders aren’t executed until the game is unpaused, at which point they are executed simultaneously along with everyone else’s. The Total War series uses a combination of turn based strategy and real time tactical battles. In games like Starcraft 2, being excellent at the micromanagement of units is usually far more important than any sort of strategic thinking. By that, I mean that most games billed as RTS games are focused primarily on tactics rather than strategy. Europa Universalis IV is a rare true RTS game.