One interesting fact about my first 31 hours in the game is that I am still on my very first run, having started with the recommended country Holland; and this first game is now on January 1, 1437, the start of the Age of Discovery. One century played, four still to go, which means I'll probably take over a hundred hours for my first game. Nobody ever accused EU4 to be a particularly fast game, but EU5 is significantly slower.

Part of that slowness is technical: If I set the speed to maximum, it takes me nearly 2 minutes to run through 1 year, so that is already 3 hours for a century without actually playing. And mine is a comparatively fast computer with 32 GByte of RAM, others have reported a century taking 6 hours of computing time. Another part of the slowness is of course this being my first game, and me needing a lot of time to learn. Some of that learning takes place without advancing played time, for example by watching YouTube videos and Twitch streams. Holland turned out to be an inspired choice for a first country, because the fact that it is the smallest of the recommended countries means that there is a lot of content available already.

But the main reason for me taking so long to finish the first century is the huge scope of the game. Unless you automate everything, which I find a bit silly because I want to play the game, there is just so much stuff to constantly track and try to balance. The large majority of those 31 hours were spent while the game was paused, and I was fiddling with the thousands of parameters in the game. There are a lot more game systems than in EU4, and everything you do affects a lot of other things. That is not only hard to wrap your head around, but also very time consuming. Which ultimately isn't a bad thing, because I am having fun during all that time spent. But I do hear the people complaining about the pacing, and I get their point.

According to SteamDB, EU5 had a peak concurrent player base of 77k. Which is nearly twice as much as EU4 ever had. With this and the "very positive" Steam rating, I would say that the launch was a success. This is nearly as much as Civilization VII, a game that is a lot less complex and was deliberately trying to be more accessible. Europa Universalis V is uncompromising in its inaccessibility and difficulty. It is the Elden Ring of grand strategy games. If you try to extrapolate from the player count to sales numbers, you end up with between 200k and 400k of sales, or around $20 million. With an estimated development cost for 30 people during 5 years being up to $15 million, EU5 is already a financial success, and that is before Paradox spends another decade of releasing DLCs.

What kept the launch from being an even bigger success is the fact that the game still has a number of bugs, with the first patch already being out, and even more importantly feels rather unpolished. Most of the roughness is in the user interface. While it is prettier than the UI of EU4, and does improve some things, there are also a number of areas where EU5 has less good UI systems than EU4. For example the notification system is absolutely abysmal. For example I was allied with France, and at some point France broke that alliance. Would have been nice if they would have notified me of such an important event, but they didn't. I tried to fiddle with the messaging system, but couldn't even find an option to either get messages of broken alliances, nor for getting notifications about a specific important country. You can click on a little star icon on the country panel of France, but all that does is to pin it to your quick access bar on the right.

Another atrocious part of the UI is the tech tree. It can't be fully zoomed out to get an overview, and if you zoom in enough to be able to read the text, there is far too much empty space between the tech advances, so you need to scroll around a lot. And UI problems like that can be found everywhere in the game. In many menus it isn't obvious which sections are just giving information, and which sections are actually buttons allowing you to dive deeper. Of course there are already mods out there, including one that lets you zoom out the tech tree, but that brings me to the weird policy of Paradox on achievements for Europa Universalis games.

I am not the world's greatest or most experienced player of EU4, far from that, I only started this year. Nevertheless I have an EU4 achievement "Just a little patience" for playing through a full game, and only 9% of EU4 players have that. The reason for this is that you only can get achievements in Europa Universalis games if you play on ironman, with no mods or other help. In EU5 that policy is so extreme that even if you turn on the tutorial and/or mission tree for helpful guidance, you can't get any achievements anymore. Yeah, right, a game that still has crash to desktop bugs and takes 100 hours wants you to play it only in ironman mode, that sounds like a really great idea! Use a mod to improve visibility of the tech tree, and you are excluded from achievements for cheating. So the vast majority of people just plays without the achievements in non-ironman mode. Which has the added advantage of actually allowing you to cheat if you want, by starting the game in debug mode and using various console cheat commands.

The gameplay systems of Europa Universalis V mostly work. There are a few weird things, like my 14th century peasants in Holland wanting exotic foods like rice and olives to be satisfied. I didn't even know the Dutch invented the paella that early. Where things get confusing is usually when the actual EU5 gameplay mechanics are either unhistorical, or different from how the same thing was handled in EU4. For example in EU4, you had the option of making your ruler a general, but that didn't do much other than saving you the cost of that general, and it increased the chance of your ruler dying. In EU5, I can't find out whether my ruler dies faster if he is an admiral or general, but I do know that giving him that additional role increases my crown power, which is very important.

While I love the much expanded options and game systems that EU5 has for the economy, I am still struggling a bit when the game is too good at proving the efficient-market hypothesis: Trading is very profitable at the very start of the game, but becomes increasing unprofitable over time, because the combined trading activity of you, your burghers, and the other countries results in all opportunity for arbitrage being traded away. If goods are plentiful in one place and rare in another, the price difference will quickly disappear due to trading.

But up to now, the positives of EU5 for me largely outweigh the negatives. And I have hope that bugs will be fixed, and the rough UI will be improved over the years. The underlying core of EU5 is solid, and because it is highly complex, it has the potential of keeping me engaged for a very long time and a great many number of hours. The meme is that for a Europa Universalis game it takes a thousand hours to finish the tutorial. That probably isn't for everybody, but I am fine with that.