In many of the video games I play, especially in roleplaying games, my options at any given moment are limited, and restricted to the situation I am in. I might be in a dialogue and have dialogue options, I might be in combat and have different attack options, or I might be on an overland map and have different options where to go. But when I am in a dialogue, I can't fire a magic missile at the person I am talking to (unless that is a foreseen dialogue option), and when I am in combat, I can't talk to my enemies. Europa Universalis is different to that. All the buttons of the game are available all the time. The game doesn't tell you that you are now in a dialogue and should pursue diplomatic relations with your neighbors, and while some diplomatic options might be impossible during war, the diplomatic menu never goes away completely.

And unlike most other games, choosing one action doesn't necessarily prevent you from doing something else. In most games, if you choose for example to cast a spell, that is your action for that turn in a turn-based game, or for so many seconds in a real-time game. Even in a real-time game with pause you might at best be able to give a series of commands that will be executed sequentially. In Europa Universalis and similar grand strategy games, you can pause and then give dozens of commands in different parts of your menu.

All the buttons being available from the first moment of the game and simultaneously creates a bit of an accessibility problem. Paradox published a video today called Here's Everything You Need To Know Before You Unpause Europa Universalis V, because there is a whole game you can play to go through all the menus and understand your chosen country before unpausing and letting anything happen for the first time. Different countries have very different starting situations regarding their economy, their population, their estates (power groups), their military, and their diplomatic relations. I will certainly take a good amount of time on my first game on Tuesday to just go through everything and see where I stand, and whether there are actions I need to take early. In EU4 I once played a game as the Teutonic Order, and there is a specific disaster looming over you, which will very much mess up your game unless you know about it and address the problem from the start. For a new player, having all the options and not knowing what is important to do now, and what can wait, can be really overwhelming.

But of course there is also the option of just letting the game run and see what happens, treating it more as a simulation than a game. In the past weeks, EU5 has garnered some criticism based on somebody showing a time-lapsed video of the world without the player doing anything. Some people felt that in that situation, the AI wasn't aggressive enough, and countries didn't expand enough. Especially some nations, like the Ottoman Empire, appeared un-historically weak. For that you need to know that EU4 starts in 1444, at which point the Ottoman Empire is already large, while in EU5, starting in 1337, the Ottomans still have a rather small country. While historically the Ottoman Empire was a huge threat to Christian Europe, sieging Vienna twice in 1529 and 1683, and EU4 reflects that, in EU5 it isn't a given that the Ottomans grow into a large empire at all. In fact, if the player chooses to play Byzantium, they will almost certainly stop the Ottoman Empire from happening.

There are several interesting design questions involved here: One is how much you tune the AI towards aggressive expansion and huge empires. Historically, global empires are rare, world conquest (which is something some EU4 players like to do) never happened, and regional empires had a tendency to break apart over the centuries. The way EU5 AI is programmed now seems to be in line with both history, and the player expectations of how the world would look like after the first 107 years, from the start date of EU5 to the start date of EU4. If in a typical game of EU5 in 1444 for example the Holy Roman Empire would be largely united, or consist only of a handful of countries, that would be both unhistorical and somewhat weird as well.

Which gets us to the second big design question, which is in how far designers just let the simulation evolve countries, or in how far they add scripted events. EU5 starts less than two months before the historic start of the Hundred Years' War and nine years before the Black Death. These are events that will most certainly be scripted to happen in EU5, as will the Protestant Reformation in the 16th century. Other big historical events, like the discovery of the New World, has been left to happen "naturally" in EU4 and EU5, controlled only by naval technology. Which means that I have seen EU4 games in which AI Denmark colonized Canada and North America, rather than the English or the French.

The big problem with scripted events is that players quickly reverse engineer those scripts, and exploit them when playing in a region where they happen. Read or watch any guide on how to play France in EU4, and it will tell you how to deal with the Surrender of Maine or the Burgundian Succession, both of which are important scripted events. I don't even know whether these events will be in EU5, because with over a century of an earlier start, how likely is it that England will hold Maine in 1444, or that the Burgundian ruler dies in 1477 without a male heir? Which gets us back to the rise of certain empires in history, like the Ottomans, or Prussia, which historically involved some element of chance, and thus in a pure simulation have a good probability of not happening at all. In EU4 there was a game mechanic called "lucky nations" (which you could turn off), in which certain nations got bonuses that made it more likely for them to become important and play their historical role, but the devs decided to not do that in EU5.

Fortunately for me, none of this is a problem. I am okay with EU5 as leaning a bit more towards a simulation, and being a bit less game-like. I never liked world conquest gameplay in EU4 anyway, and am okay if it is strongly hindered by problems of large empire stability, as that is historically realistic to me. I'm also okay if certain things in my game don't happen as they did historically, as long as they seem somewhat historically realistic or possible. And I realize that the number of historical events and scripts added to EU5 is very much a function of time, as they take time to program, and much will be added via DLC. That doesn't stop me from playing the game on release, with a bit less of all that.