Since the original Great Western Trail from 2016, there have been a second edition, variants like Argentina or New Zealand, and an expansion called Rails to the North. All of these easily take 3 hours to play, which doesn't include rules explanation time and the added delay when playing with new players. Which is why I never played any of these games, they are simply a bit too long for my game nights. Experienced players who don't suffer from analysis paralysis can certainly play Great Western Trail in under 3 hours, but for my typical player round the risk would be high to get kicked out of the game store at closing time without having reached the end of the game.

Thus the big advantage of Great Western Trail: El Paso being shorter, and I very much enjoyed my first game. Having said that, I have mixed feelings about other aspects of the downscaling strategy. They made the game not only shorter, but also smaller, and cheaper. The game board is made out of cloth, leading to the first time of me ironing a game board, as it gets creased when folded in the box. The cards are smaller than in the original game, and the money tokens are so flimsy cardboard that I used some metal coins I had in reserve instead. While all this make El Paso also a lot cheaper than its bigger brothers, the result was a bit substandard for my tastes. I generally prefer board games with quality components, tokens, and cards.

In Civ7, Antoine de Saint-Exupery is quoted as saying: “An engineer has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but nothing left to take away”. While I haven't played the other Great Western Trail games, I am certain that they do have a deeper decision space. But getting to a very similar gameplay experience with fewer game mechanics and rules is an achievement. And I can think of several other board games which would benefit from the same treatment. If a game has a weight of over 4 on BoardGameGeek and takes 4+ hours to play, you could probably turn it into a shorter and more accessible game by taking things away. And if that is well done, the fundamental game experience can remain similar, just easier. Which makes the game accessible to more people, and could therefore improve sales. What's not to like?

In a game like Expedition 33, nothing happens when you aren't doing anything. You could stand in place for hours, and the game state wouldn't change. A few role-playing games have some sort of day / night cycle with NPCs performing a semblance of a day's activity, but other than the location and availability of quest NPCs, that doesn't change anything. The evil villain isn't getting any stronger because you were idling, nor does anything else interesting happen in the game world. That forces the player to be constantly active to make stuff happen, because otherwise the game is very boring. And that requires a certain amount of energy from the player to move things along.

In contrast, simulation games like EU4 have the possibility to unpause and let the game play for itself. Often the player is even forced to do that and wait, e.g. in EU4 while waiting for a truce to end, or your aggressive expansion to go down, before you can start another war. Or to finish constructing buildings, ships, or the recruitment of soldiers. And while the player waits, interesting stuff happens between the non-player nations. I'm currently in a game of EU4 in which I am playing the Teutonic Order, and what happens between Poland and Lithuania is of high interest to me. I actually spent one war just to break their personal union, trying to divide them, and prevent them from forming the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Well, they still reformed a military alliance afterwards, so I'm not sure whether this was worth it.

In any case, sometimes I just unpause EU4, wait, and watch. It is a far more passive sort of gaming. I still need to pause the game from time to time and give commands, but a good chunk of my time is spent watching how things work out and see my plans succeed or horribly go wrong. It requires a lot less energy from me as the player, and thus there are periods where I prefer that sort of gaming.

The other reason I prefer this right now, is that my activities in EU4 are more cerebral in nature. I plan, make a strategy, devise tactics, manage stuff. In Expedition 33 the activities are more action-focused, even if combat is mostly turn-based. But much of what you do during a game session is running around and interact with various points of interest, whether that is NPCs to talk to, or enemies to fight. There is of course some tactics involved in combat, and some strategy in character development, but that is only a part of the game. I am sure that at some point my mood will change, and I will be in the mood for this more active and less cerebral sort of gaming. Until then, I'll play Europa Universalis IV.

Many countries in EU4 start with a tech level of 3, and at administrative tech level 4 you can build temples / churches. Somewhat unintuitively, these are economic buildings, as they raise the tax rate in the province you build them in. In a typical developed European province, building a church for 100 gold results in a raised income of 0.2 gold per month, or 2.4 gold per year, thus 2.4 yield, taking you a bit over 40 years to get your investment back. Which already means that over 400 years you get 10 times your investment back. And as long as you reinvest that into other buildings with similar financial yields, you can get that compound interest train rolling and be relatively rich later in the game.

But weirdly that isn't even the best or earliest method. Even before you unpause for the first time in 1444, you can already make a much more impactful financial decision, available to many countries: Razing all your fortresses. A fortress costs 200 gold to build, but costs 1 gold per month, 24 gold per year in maintenance. If you destroy your fort, within 8 years you earn the money to construct it back. And while higher level forts can have a big impact later in the game, the level 2 forts you have at the start of the game aren't terribly useful, especially on flat land. A mountain fort at your borders can have a bigger impact in a war, but if your warfare has economic problems, razing your forts and putting the money into your army probably has a better effect.

The game impact of compound interest in Europa Universalis 4 is lessened by gold being not the most important currency. Monarch power points in administration, diplomacy, and military are far more important, with an excess in the first two of those categories being easily transformed into gold income by spending them on province development. Most players with a decent gold income will transform that into monarch power points by hiring advisors. An advisor costs around his level squared in gold per month, that is a level 1 advisor around 1 gold, a level 2 advisor around 4 gold, and a level 3 advisor 9 gold. And that is only at the start of the game, the cost goes up by 0.5% per year, so in 1644 they all cost twice that. Hiring advisors will drain your gold, so most people won't constantly reinvest gold into buildings that get them more gold over time, and compound interest isn't such a big game design problem. If you played without advisors, it would also be likely that you'd run out of investment opportunities, as without spending monarch points on province development, you run into building limits quickly. On the other hand, developing provinces and increasing tax base and production results in a higher yield for your buildings.

Ultimately the effect of expansion in Europa Universalis 4 is a lot more powerful than economic gameplay. Playing "wide", that is to say conquering a maximum amount of provinces, is a lot easier than playing "tall", that is to say building up the value of existing provinces. That is not only true for the player, but also for the AI. In consequence, the map that starts out as quite a patchwork in 1444 tends to consolidate a lot in the centuries that follow. It will be interesting to see whether this remains the same in Europa Universalis 5, which starts over a century earlier. Because if it does, the EU5 map in 1444 would look a lot less patchworky than in EU4.

I saw a streamer playing the Teutonic Order, and the mission tree looked interesting, so I decided to try that. Then of course there was a disappointment: That interesting mission tree wasn't included in the starter edition of Europa Universalis IV, I needed the Lions of the North DLC for that. On Steam that would cost €15. With EU4 having so many DLC, buying all of them over time can get rather expensive. Fortunately, there is a better alternative, a subscription: On Steam, you can subscribe to access to all EU4 DLC content, for which I paid €15 for three months. A €8 for one month option is also available.

I really like this option, especially for older games that have a lot of DLC. I might actually be interested in a DLC subscription for other Paradox games, like Crusader Kings 3 or Victoria 3. Realistically, I usually play these games for some weeks or months, and then leave them be for a few years before returning. A subscription business model suits me a lot better for that than a purchase model. Especially for EU4, where I probably will buy EU5 at some point, and thus a large investment into permanently owning a lot of DLCs would be kind of a waste.

From what I can see in the previews, EU5 is a bigger game, even bigger than EU4 with the DLCs. But I already heard one reviewer complaining that only 60 countries have large mission trees. I guess that DLCs with mission trees for a specific region (like Lions of the North for EU4) will be coming out for EU5 as well and keep the ongoing development financed. I'm okay with paying for DLCs (to own or subscribe) when they contain added content. I like it a lot less if it feels as if somebody deliberately cut content from the base game to sell it as DLC, or when the purchase of a DLC becomes necessary to access new game mechanics.

I can see how the option of DLC subscription won't be available for EU5 anytime soon. The game isn't even released yet, and nothing has been announced about DLCs. And a DLC subscription only makes sense when there are already several of them. I can see EU5 having something like a "season pass", with which you prepay for several DLCs in advance, but I find that business model a bit less attractive.

The example that probably has the most data is crime statistics vs. fear of crime. Time and time again, and in different countries on different continents, there have been many recent examples where polls showed that people are increasingly afraid of violent crimes, while various statistics clearly show that the probability of becoming a victim of violent crime is decreasing. Much of the difference between reality and perception can be explained by how media evolved over the past 30 years: We have a lot more news sources today than we had 30 years ago, and in the competition between these news sources, exaggeration brings more revenue. Any given crime that happens today is both far more likely to be reported, and also likely to be reported in the most lurid way possible. That influences everybody's perception, and makes the world look a lot more dangerous than it is.

Increased reporting sometimes goes hand in hand with increased understanding, adding another important factor to our perception: The broadening of definitions. For example, our understanding of mental health has improved, which leads to people getting more easily diagnosed for depression or autism, which leads to statistics that suggest that depression and autism is a lot more prevalent today than it was in the previous century. Another example of better understanding leading to more reporting is when during the me too movement, the reported rape cases in the US shot up to nearly double in the span of 5 years. The sad reality is that rape cases were simply very much under-reported due to shame before, just like depression cases were under-reported before. It is very hard to say whether these things actually went up or down, we are just very much more aware of them. In Germany this year a politician lost his seat in parliament due to accusations of "sexual violence"; while part of that was due to an intrigue and somebody in his party making false statements under a false name, the proven misbehavior of that politician was described as "flirting" and "touching a woman's arm". That sure was inappropriate, especially from a man in a position of power towards younger women, but wouldn't have registered as sexual violence in the previous century. In reality, the situation in the previous century was worse, but the broadened definition and increased reporting is making women feel a lot less safe today.

Sometimes the increased fear is simply due to younger people not having been around when things were actually worse. I remember reading Tom Clancy's Red Storm Rising in the mid-80's, when it came out, and Third World War scenario of a Soviet Union launching a conventional attack on Europe was scary as hell, because it very much reflected our fears at that time. I read the same book 20 years later, and it had stopped being scary, due to the fall of the Soviet Union. While Putin is certainly a nasty piece of work, the actual threat he poses ranks a lot lower than that of the Soviet Union in the 80's. Another example is society's treatment of queer people: When I was a kid, homosexuality was still illegal in many western countries. In the USA, the supreme court decision of Lawrence vs. Texas that ended the last anti-sodomy laws was in 2003. Having your sexual identity getting embroiled in today's culture war certainly isn't pleasant, but objectively speaking the situation for queer people in first world countries has much improved over the past 50 years. Feeling that something that happens today is a lot worse than things were before is natural, and the lack of awareness of how much worse things actually were before gets even worse when we go beyond a typical human lifespan. The Covid-19 pandemic was bad, but the Spanish Flu or the Black Plague were objectively much worse, there just aren't many people other than historians that have this point of comparison.

Finally, society's attitude towards victimhood and towards sensitivity have changed a lot. 50 years ago, the last thing you wanted was to be seen as a victim; today some people revel in victimhood. I'm currently watching the TV series Will Trent, in which the two main characters are constantly depicted as traumatized victims of their childhood in foster care, while still solving crime cases. If you are used to detective series or films from the previous century, that seems quite weird, but is simply a reflection of how attitudes have changed.

Of course, many of these societal changes have been powers for good, and have been responsible for today's situation being better than things were half a century ago. You can't improve things if there is no awareness. But my message of hope is that increased awareness of bad things is a good thing, because it leads to improvement, and doesn't mean that these bad things suddenly happen now, when they were unknown before. Catholic priests didn't suddenly become paedophile in the 1990s, it was our awareness of their behavior that suddenly increased, and probably led to lot fewer of them being able to act with impunity today. We might feels poorer today, and beset by dangers, but in reality the world is a lot richer today than it was before, life spans have increased, and a lot of dangers are actually a lot lower than they were before. We are just more sensitive to whatever bad things are left.

The specializations of the other Paradox games sometimes frustrated me. You know, the situation where your main character in Crusader Kings 3 unexpectedly dies and the duchy you built up is divided among his heirs, leading to a sharp drop in your power. Or the situation where you research advanced technologies in Victoria 3, and then can't use them, because the world doesn't have enough trade in the required raw materials like rubber or oil yet. By being less specialized, Europa Universalis sometimes is actually easier to play than those other games. It is also the game that makes the least effort to remain historically accurate. At its core, Europa Universalis 4 is a simple game of territorial expansion. Even in my game, starting as the one-province city state of Aachen, after 8 hours I control already 4 provinces making up the whole of the Lower Rhineland area. A lot of the game mechanics are simply there to stop the player from expanding too fast. Taking provinces causes "aggressive expansion", and if you collect too much of it too fast, everybody gangs up on you and beats you down. So after every episode of expansion comes an episode of consolidation, in which you deal with new provinces to reduce their unrest, and wait for your aggressive expansion to slowly dissipate.

What is really good in Europa Universalis 4 is the mission trees, which make countries more different from each other than they are for example in Victoria 3. They also provide some guidance about possible goals. Taking the whole Lower Rhineland was a mission for Aachen, and forming Westphalia would be next, with forming Germany as a long-term goal. Play well enough, and you can take a one-province start all the way to controlling a whole continent. As I said, not much effort to remain historically accurate. My least favorite part of Europa Universalis 4 is the combat system, which has the same problem as in Crusader Kings 3, where chasing the enemy army all over the map to actually get into a battle is the hardest part of warfare.

At the very least, I am now better able to understand the discussion around the just announced Europa Universalis 5. The good news about that game is that is Swen Vincke compliant, that is to say an obvious passion project from a senior developer at Paradox who wants to make the best Europa Universalis possible. He does that by adding more of everything. Where EU4 had 3k provinces, the smallest unit of land in the game is now a "location", and EU5 has 27k of them. And it has 60k population groups distributed over those locations, leading to a staggering amount of possible detailed micro-management. With EU4 already being daunting even for experienced strategy players, the obvious question is whether there is even a market for an even more complicated and detailed game. And with a huge amount of detail and so many different game mechanics, we don't know yet whether the developers will manage to turn all this into a reasonably balanced good game with decent flow.

Europa Universalis 4 is one of those rare games which today has more players (average peak in May 2025: 25k) than on release (August 2013: 15k). I actually made a mistake by buying the starter edition which included some DLCs, and then buying a few DLCs I needed to access specific features like army drill or the ability to curry favors. It would have been cheaper for me to buy a subscription for $8 a month or $15 for 3 months that would give me access to all DLCs. The player numbers aren't huge, but by keeping up those player numbers for over a decade and being able to sell DLCs and subscriptions, Europa Universalis 4 is certainly a good and reliable money maker for Paradox. Replacing such a lifestyle game is fundamentally hard, as Firaxis just found out with Civilization VII. While looking at videos on how various features of EU4 work, I found that the "expert knowledge" of EU4 veterans very often involves knowing all sorts of exploits, like selling crown land you don't actually own, or selling the province Maine as France before you lose it in a fixed event. A lot of that expert knowledge will become obsolete when switching to EU5. For me, as a "new" EU4 player, I would certainly welcome some modernization changes, like a better user interface. For EU4 I needed to fiddle with a UI scaling setting labeled "experimental", just so that I could actually read the small text on a 27" screen. All this to say that it isn't obvious in how far EU4 players will all switch to EU5, or whether it is possible to grow that user base. Kudos for trying!

The only difficulty was that Google doesn't allow to create such a podcast from the link to the post. I got a "unable to import web page due to domain restrictions" error when trying to link the blog post directly. Which is weird, because my blog runs on Blogger, which belongs to Google. Why does one Google website restrict the access of another Google website? Maybe Google is well aware of AI bots scraping the web and has put up defenses against that, which now even affect its own AI bots. Anyway, copying and pasting the text works, so it wasn't a big problem. If you prefer my blog as a podcast, feel free to use NotebookLM to create a podcast of a copied post yourself.

Personally, I am not worried by the capabilities of AI to create internet content "putting me out of business". That is because I don't have a business. I write my opinions on various things on my blog for fun, as a sort of public diary. There is only a single reader who used the "buy Tobold a coffee" button once per year in the last two years. This isn't a commercial enterprise, and as such it isn't threatened by possible cheap AI knockoffs. But obviously this is more of an exception these days than the rule, the majority of internet content is created with the purpose of making money. I would be somewhat upset if somebody actually created a Tobold podcast copying my blog posts into NotebookLM and then managed to monetize that. Fortunately my content is too weird and inconsistent to make that a viable strategy.

You could probably create a realistically sounding and monetizable podcast by just selecting some hot topic every day, asking ChatGPT to write a text about that, and copying that text into NotebookLM. The sad fact is that much of the human-made content on the internet isn't terribly original, and thus an AI can produce something of similar quality that many people won't be able to distinguish from the real thing. We are getting closer and closer to the situation described in the Dead Internet Theory, where AI produced content is consumed by bots, with more and more net traffic not involving humans at all.

If you are interested, you can listen for yourself.

The recent news in the domain of grand strategy is that Paradox finally officially announced Europa Universalis 5. With me warming up towards Paradox grand strategy games, I might want to play that. But, amongst the complete range of Paradox series, Europa Universalis is the most complex one. And I never played any of the previous games of the series. Then I saw that with the EU5 announcement came a big Steam sale, and I decided to risk $12 on the Europa Universalis 4 “Starter Edition”, which includes the base game, and apparently the most essential DLCs. That would give me the opportunity to try out this game, which both makes it easier to decide whether I actually want to try EU5 when it comes out, and if I do gives me at least some basic understanding what Europa Universalis games are about.

Having said that, I am still at the stage of looking at EU4 tutorial videos, because this game is a lot more complex than Victoria 3 or Crusader Kings 3, both of which I already have a decent understanding of. In fact, most tutorial games simply ignore big chunks of the game mechanics, just because that would overload a tutorial. EU4 simulates a great many things, some of which aren’t overly important or necessary to deal with before getting some sort of fun game experience going. I’m not sure I like that, I tend to be afraid that a game mechanic I don’t understand and therefore ignore is ultimately going to break my neck. On the other hand, I don’t see how I could get started at all without willfully ignoring a large chunk of the game, as it is definitely too complex to understand in advance.

The ultimate question I have about Europa Universalis 4 (and by extension 5), is whether in the end there is still enough of a fun game in there somewhere. Or whether it is a great simulation of complex historical systems, which is too complex to derive enjoyment from.

There are too many games released every year. The price at release for these games is rising, now moving towards $80 for triple A titles. Meanwhile disposable incomes are falling due inflation, tariffs, and a global cost of living crisis. Which means that increasingly releasing big video games is a zero sum game. In May 2026, a lot of people will think that GTA 6 is a must-have game, and will therefore not buy other games around that time, because they simply can't afford it. More and more game releases will be affected by similar games releasing around the same time, and the relative success or expectation of success of those.

Hard data will be impossible to come by. How many people exactly didn't buy game A this month, because they bought game B around the same time? We can only speculate. But between rising console prices, rising game prices, and an ever increasing number of games released every year, it isn't hard to see that we are approaching a breaking point. And games (unlike their hardware) are a business that isn't even affected by tariffs yet, although the recent move to tariff movies doesn't bode well. I don't think that the wave of layoffs from 2022 to 2025 is over yet.

Now the more idealistic people interpret this evolution as being motivated by "people power". However, that might be overstating the actual power that can be wielded by making a cross on a piece of paper every few years. Even people who voted for the party in power often feel disconnected from later decisions of that party. In some countries there are only very few parties, sometimes even just one or two, that have any realistic chance of coming to power. In other countries with more parties, some people vote deliberately for the least mainstream option, as a form of protest, in some instances not even really caring whether that option is of the extreme right or the extreme left.

The real advantage might actually lie elsewhere: Having political decisions being made by a committee, rather than being based on the decisions of an individual person. The simple fact of a law being discussed by a group of people, even if that group is as little democratic as the communist party of China, already weeds out some of the more extreme aspects of individual whims. It also leads to greater stability, simply by the process being slower, and changes taking longer.

A lot of ink has been spilled on the fact that Trump is trying to rule America by decree. I don't want to discuss all the legal and constitutional aspects of that, because those are often a lot more complicated than people think, and clearly open to bias (which is why the political composition of the Supreme Court is so often discussed). Clearly the US constitution has some wriggle room, and different presidents used that room to different degrees. But the reason why previous presidents used it much less than Trump might have less to do with the constitution, and more to do with efficiency and practicality.

Tariffs are a prime example of why ruling by executive orders can be a bad idea: One of the main purposes of tariffs is to persuade capitalists to invest in manufacturing. But investments take years, and to make an investment decision, capitalists need some certainty that those tariffs would still be around by the time the factory is built. The Trump tariffs this year changed so frequently, that nobody in his right mind would make an investment decision based on them. If you put a tariff on Mexican car parts, only to revoke that tariff in exchange for Mexico doing more against drug smuggling and migration, then the tariff clearly isn't about the car industry at all. Not even the Chinese believe that America wants to have 145% tariffs against China for several years, so the business discussions are all about "how do we store goods until the tariffs go away", rather than about investing in US manufacturing.

Executive orders that come seemingly out of nowhere tend to produce a lot of chaos, which is why so many of them ended up getting "paused" for 90 days. The more traditional way of getting a law through congress takes a lot longer, but that also allows for checks of whether a decision is actually possible, or allows for time for government institutions to adjust to the new law. The closing of the de minimis loophole on small parcels failed on the first attempt simply because US customs couldn't handle it and needed more time before it could be implemented on the second attempt. It is also a lot more difficult to sue against a newly made law that went through all the necessary parliamentary steps than it is to sue against an executive order. The 141 executive orders Trump signed in his first 100 days may look as if he did get of stuff done quickly, but the reality of things is that his administration will spend a lot of energy for the next 4 years fighting the various challenges to these executive orders in court.

Do you remember how much Republicans railed against the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare? Guess what, this 2010 law is still mostly in effect in 2025. If Obama had done this by executive order, Trump would have revoked it in 2017, Biden would have reintroduced it in 2021, and Trump would have revoked it again in 2025. That is no way to rule a country. Executive orders come with an implied expiry date of the presidential term, even if obviously not all of them are revoked by the next guy. Laws enacted by congress tend to last significantly longer, even if the majorities in congress change.

Perversely, Trumps many executive orders make it more likely that the next US president will be a Democrat. To achieve a lasting change for America, ruling by decree is simply too chaotic and inefficient. Implementing political decisions by taking a shortcut just makes those decisions easier to reverse. Not using the parliamentary majority is a mistake that will cost Trump whatever legacy he is trying to leave.