EU5 achieves a lot of things by simulation, or as the 14th-century Arab historian Ibn Khaldun said: "Geography is destiny". Unlike EU4, in EU5 your control over your provinces is strongly influenced by proximity to the capital. As a coastal country you can project that proximity by sea, but a landlocked country like Hungary can only build roads, and is limited by the technology for that, with railroads only arriving close to the end of the game. With mountain ranges limiting proximity and thus control, and slowing down your armies, limitless expansion has become a lot more difficult in this version. The simulation works reasonably well in motivating AI controlled countries to behave similar to what they did historically.

On top of that, there is historical content in the game, much of it country or region-specific. There are one-off events, and longer situations, like the Black Death or the Hundred Years' War. These usually change a number of parameters, rather than being totally fixed, e.g. I've seen the Hundred Years' War end after 30 years, because France reached the victory condition for it early. There are also country specific disasters that can happen when certain bad situations happen in the simulation. Plus there are country- / region- / religion-specific entries in the tech tree. The technology system is also much influenced by the institutions that unlock parts of the tech tree, and these appear in a historically accurate time frame and region. Not exact location, in my first game the printing press appeared in Leuven, Holland instead of Mainz, Germany, but there is a list of possible spawning locations, so it can't spawn for example in Beijing.

AI countries don't always behave historically. Sometimes they simply can't, because players don't behave historically. While the mechanics are in the game for Brandenburg to form Prussia, they won't do so in my current game, because I am playing neighboring Mecklenburg and took a lot of Prussia's future territory. In my first game, my Holland discovered and settled North America before the English ever got there. But again, geography is destiny, and with the New World institution spawning on the Iberian peninsula, and the distance simply being smaller, Spain and Portugal are more likely to colonize South America than other countries are. Some players delight in uncovering hidden ahistorical possibilities in the game, for example you can revive the Carolingians in Europe, or Carthage in North Africa.

At the start of the game, when you select a country, you will get information about how many country-specific events and bonuses are in the game. A lot of lesser countries have none, but historically important countries like England already have over 200. And while in EU4 patches also contained new game mechanics, EU5 follows the concept of other newer Paradox games of putting game mechanics in free patches, and country-specific content in DLCs. For example the first DLC announced for Q1 2026 is Rise of the Phoenix, with additional content for the Byzantine Empire.

In the end, all of this makes Europa Universalis V a historically flavored simulation game, with plenty of alternate history mixed with historical events. And there is some randomness in the simulation, so letting the game run in pure AI mode won't result in the same outcomes every time. I like this middle ground, but of course there are people upset about something historically important not happening in their game, or on the other side something historical happening and messing up their game.