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!