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Europa Universalis

by James Sterrett

Article Type: Review
Article Date: June 25, 2001

Power Behind The Throne

A number of games have come out over the years that take on the trappings of history, such as Civilization or Age of Empires. Europa Universalis (EU) does a superb job of presenting much of the substance of the period it covers while still leaving the player’s freedom of action intact. EU places the player as the “eminence grise” (grey eminence, or power behind the throne) of any of the major European powers for the period 1492 to 1792: from the discovery of the New World through the French Revolution, from the Middle Ages through the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, from the dawn of guns to Napoleon; a period where Europe moved from being a backwards, strife-torn peninsula on the ass end of Asia to being the advanced, strife-torn rulers of the world. EU does an excellent job of portraying the period’s rich panoply of people and events such that while the course of a game will not mirror history, the same historical forces will drive the game.

Originally, EU was a boardgame of stunning complexity. It required seven people to play and the economic model was so complex that it used several sheets of paper of economic records per player per turn. The group I played it with gave up in exhaustion, wondering when it would get turned into a computer game: and apparently Paradox had the same idea. Paradox made a number of changes, most of them for the better. The biggest change Paradox made was taking a turn-based boardgame and making the computer game real-time. This does not mean that EU plays like an RTS. The real-time function serves to keep the game’s actions properly sequenced, dispensing with the kludges necessary in a turn-based game. However, there is no need to move the mouse around like a weasel on steroids.

“…there is no need to move the mouse around like a weasel on steroids.”

You can give orders, move sliders, and examine things to your heart’s content while the game is paused, and the game speed can be set anywhere from a blistering 8 months per minute, to 1 month per 5 minutes, with 1 or 2 months per minute being my typical play rate. At 5 minutes per month, the Grand Campaign would require 300 hours, or 12.5 days, to play. At two months to the minute, the Grand Campaign takes “merely” 30 hours - and that assumes you never pause the game. You can choose to have those events you deem critical pause the game as well, ensuring you don’t miss an important diplomatic envoy or a loan coming due.

The computer pursues diplomacy too

In addition, Paradox moved the economics to the macromanagement level of the rest of the game. The player has critically important decisions to make, but they are generally handled at a macro level. Because there are a lot of these things to keep track of, and many of them interact, EU is indeed a complex game. However, it’s not complexity of trying to remember to tell every soldier to invade the Palatinate (a small country on the Rhine). It’s the complexity of figuring out how to acquire an army to invade the Palatinate, while isolating the Palatinate diplomatically so you won’t be facing war with every other neighbor at the same time, while leaving money in the bank to cover your trading concerns, your exploration and colonization, and maintaining internal stability and diplomatic position despite the hit that will come from declaring war on a minor who shares your religion and with whom you have a royal marriage. No one task is especially complex on its own, but the combined knot is often complex.

The Four Basics

There are four basic spheres of the game: economics, war, diplomacy, and religion. Touching all of these at some point is national stability, which helps determine factors ranging from the profitability of your provinces to the probability of a province revolting. High stability is good, low stability is bad. Investments to improve stability come from the monthly income pool, which is divvied up using sliders. Unfortunately, the money that might be used for stability may also be needed for investment in developing various military (land and naval) and economic (infrastructure and trade) technologies, or minting cash. Minting cash is a nice option, since it lets you cover your monthly expenses, or even gain some spending money, but the downside is that the resulting steady increase in the monetary supply increases inflation. You will learn to sweat the difference between a .15 and a .16 monthly rate of inflation after you see the impact on your costs after 50 years of price increases!

“You will learn to sweat the difference between a .15 and a .16 monthly rate of inflation after you see the impact on your costs after 50 years of price increases!”

Fortunately, in addition to your monthly cashflow, your state also receives taxes once a year. In the long run, it’s best if you can make ends meet on the basis of your tax income, but that often seems a very thin source of revenue. As it was for historical rulers, the temptation to mint money is generally irresistible. There are also a handful of structures you can build in each province, once you have the relevant economic or military technologies for them. They are expensive enough, however, that building them turns out to be a strategic decision, not micromanagement.

Dutch rebels besiege Zeeland

The four tech levels (land warfare, naval warfare, infrastructure, and trade) arrive in a steady series of improvements, each generally small in and of itself, yet immense in aggregate. The trade and infrastructure techs only progress through ten levels each, but moves your economy from weak medieval near-barter to a powerhouse fuelled by early modern banking. The fifty-two land and forty-two naval technologies steadily move your army and navy from reliance on shock to reliance on firepower. Early armies do best with lots of expensive cavalry. By the end, the cavalry is an adjunct to the devastating firepower of infantry and artillery. Military tech improvements also improve the morale of your forces, representative of steadily improving training techniques. A difference of a few levels of military technology may make little difference. A difference of ten or twenty levels is usually devastating.

Suvorov stops the Turks

Morale, Attrition, Fortresses

Morale is, in fact, one of the keys to success in battle. You cannot control the battles in progress (other than deciding to retreat), and the winner is usually the one whose morale shatters second. Outright destruction of an enemy force is rare, though a defeat through rout often inflicts immense losses on the defeated force. Even more deadly than combat is attrition, representing disease and desertion. Players who can keep their attrition losses merely equal to their combat losses have played a very good game: historically, the first war in history where combat losses rose equal to medical losses was World War I.

“…the winner is usually the one whose morale shatters second.”

In addition to field battles, every province has a fortress, rated on a six-point scale from “minimal” to “mighty”. To control the province, you must take the fortress, and sieges are, as in history, both much more common than field battles and equally fraught with danger of failure. Minimal fortresses are easily overcome, while mighty fortresses may hold out for years – all while your cannon try to pound breaches in the walls, and your troops sicken and die in the trenches outside. Direct assault is possible, but sure to be bloody and usually results in failure – but if it works, the butcher’s bill may be smaller than the attrition losses from an extended siege. [Suvorov’s assault on Ismail was one of the bloodiest, because he lost around 30% of his attacking force: but he lost fewer men in the assault than his predecessor had lost in the siege.] The interaction of tech levels with force structures and improvements in fortification means that the balance and nature of warfare slowly and steadily shifts.

Players who do no keep on top of the “state of the art” may find themselves with armies that lose for having an out of date balance of infantry, artillery, or cavalry. Equally, the base cost [pre-inflation] of each of these arms varies by nation, lending each a touch of a national style. Poland-Lithuania, for example, get much cheaper cavalry than other nations. Finally, various leaders from history also appear on the scene. Rated for their abilities in maneuver (prevents attrition!), fire, and shock, these can raise the performance of the force they lead well far the norm. Even the moderately good ones are cause for celebration. The truly excellent leaders, such as Marlborough, Vauban, or Suvorov, are a near-guarantee of tactical victory. Making their tactical victories add up to a favorable peace is your problem.

Diplomacy is handled in detail

Heads of State

In addition to military leaders, national monarchs are also modeled, and their skills in the military, diplomatic, and economic spheres has a distinct impact on the game. Many are historical figures who are likely to appear around their historical reign. Unfortunately though accurately, there is little you can do when a terrible monarch comes along but hope for a swift end to the reign. Equally, however, when talented monarchs come along, accomplish as much as you can while their reigns last!

“…when talented monarchs come along, accomplish as much as you can while their reigns last!”

That doesn’t necessarily mean to go on a round of military expansion. A monarch with a strong economic rating can help your efforts to improve your economy, and a monarch with a strong diplomatic rating is very useful in shoring up your relations with your neighbors.

Diplomacy

Bella gerunt alii; tu, felix Austria, nube. (Others make war; you, happy Austria, marry.) Pay attention to the old saying about Austria if you play that country in EU - or, indeed, if you play any other country. The diplomatic model is as detailed as the military model, and diplomacy will have as much impact on your game. EU allows for a wide variety of actions, ranging from diplomatic insults through diplomatic annexation (a peaceful integration that takes a great deal of prior diplomatic work to achieve.) In addition, the diplomatic model comes into play for peace resolutions. The era rarely saw total wars such as are common now. To reflect this, you may rip off from a country no more than three provinces in a given peace settlement - and the scale of military victory necessary to achieve such a peace is significant, especially when facing a major power. If you control every last province of a nation, you do have the option of full annexation, provided the country doesn’t think some larger ally will rescue it.

“…you do have the option of full annexation, provided the country doesn’t think some larger ally will rescue it.”

The military annexation of even single provinces, however, comes with a cost in diplomatic relations, and the military annexation of an entire country, even a very small one of one or two provinces, carries a very large diplomatic cost. If you go on a rapid military expansion, as did, say, Louis XIV, you may find the rest of Europe arrayed against you, especially if you show any sign of weakness—as did Louis XIV, who spent the second half of his reign desperately defending the acquisitions of the first half. The diplomatic penalties wear off over time, so a slow expansion is possible without overmuch trouble. Diplomatic annexation is slow, but produces far fewer waves.

Civil War is a devastating random event

Religion

Religion, which produced far more history than Europe could consume locally in this period, also plays a major role in the game. As you get involved with EU, you will become conversant with the various twists and turns of the Reformation and its dramatic impacts on the European politics. Each state has a religion, and each province has one too. Each state also needs to set a tolerance for every religion in the game. Tolerance is presented as a zero-sum game. Maximize your tolerance for one religion, and your tolerance for others will drop, which may incite revolts in the provinces which don’t happen to follow your chosen religion. Moreover, diplomatic relations between various types of Catholics and various types of Protestants are often strained. A state’s conversion breaks off all previous diplomatic relations and considerably worsens most of them to boot. You may not literally get the Thirty Year’s War, but the when Luther arrives on the scene, European relations are about to get a bumpy ride.

“…when Luther arrives on the scene, European relations are about to get a bumpy ride.”

As a player, you can change your own state’s religion (within the limits of the historically possible: France can become Protestant - the Huguenots win - but Russia must remain Orthodox.) However, it is a strategic decision of the highest magnitude. The cost in stability is enormous, as is the damage to your diplomatic relations with the rest of Europe. If you’ve been annoying the rest of Europe, your suddenly unstable regime, probably fighting off frequent revolts, may look like a tempting target.

American rebels invade Canada

The Hand of Fate

Add to this brew a large number of random and semi-random events ranging from the sublime, such as a reduction in inflation, to the devastating, such as a civil war, in which around half of your carefully assembled troops desert to the rebels. (If, for example, the rebels take over every province in the country, they win, and you get a new government to control. In the meantime, the damage done to your position will have been considerable, especially since your neighbors will take advantage of your weakness.)

The truly random events are based on things that happened historically, but which are not particularly specific in nature, such as the deflation event. The semi-random events are those such as the English Civil War or the conversion of various provinces and states to newer brands of Christianity, which are set up to occur at more or less the time they did historically, just as the monarchs and leaders are arranged to appear in more or less their historical time-frame.

“The AI is not brilliant, but it does handle things reasonably competently…”

The AI is not brilliant, but it does handle things reasonably competently, putting up a good fight and pursuing more or less historical objectives. If the AI palls, there is a multiplayer option (though I have not been able to test it.) Or, through a program quirk, you can shift countries and take on the behemoth you created: save a game as country A, start a new game as country B, load your savegame from within the scenairo and you're playing that scenario as country B. The manual that comes to explain all of this is simultaneously superb and awful.

Documentation

One hundred and twenty-six pages of small print go into great detail about numerous aspects of the game. Unfortunately, much of the manual serves to explain the history behind the way the game works, without actually explaining how the game itself works. For example, the section on the Treaty of Tordesillas (an event that will probably occur in the game) explains what the treaty was, and that it was invalidated by the Council of Trent (another event that will probably happen if Tordesillas happens), without actually explaining directly what happens in the game (the Treaty divided the world between Spain and Portugal, and while it is in effect in the game, those nations may simply march in and claim other Catholic nation’s colonies in their respective halves of the world). I strongly recommend players find, download, and print out Stefan Huszic’s FAQ, MGS' EU charts and tables, and peruse the EU Webboard.

Wallenstein on the march

Technically Speaking

The game itself is generally very stable. It does crash, very occasionally, but a yearly autosave should prevent this from being a disaster. It has a few balance issues when playing against the computer, with respect to missions and China. China is too easy to conquer, and conquering China presents a stupendous economic advantage. (Interestingly, conquering China was virtually impossible in the boardgame.) The game generates victory points through a variety of means, but one of them is “missions” to achieve various objectives in a set time limit. If the game is set to assign these randomly, the player frequently gets stuck with impossible missions - discover provinces on the far side of the world while landlocked, or get a royal marriage with the Pope.

If the player chooses missions, then they are doable, but the computer does not choose missions, so the player gains a distinct and unfair advantage in points. Fortunately, the folks at Paradox hate computer AI that cheats, and they claim there is only one cheat in the game: they couldn’t make the computer players manage inflation well, so it is set to track more or less along with the player’s. And the ending movie animation is, to put it mildly, uninspiring compared to the events you’ve gone through.

The Joy of EU

These are minor gripes. The ending movie can be forgiven because the joy of EU is in the journey, not the ending. The data structures of the program are very open, which has spawned two total conversions, each aiming at greater historical accuracy (and both making China harder to conquer) along with a number of smaller scenarios. Unfortunately, that very open-ness made it impossible for Paradox to release a demo version of the game, so you’ll have to rely on my word for it: Europa Universalis is superb. It has the same addictive qualities as Civilization, but where Civilization presented a quickie parody version of history, Europa Universalis oozes high-quality history from every line of code.


Europa Universalis

[Author's Note: The text in the screnshots suffered significant loss of clarity when scrunched down to 640x480. The text is perfectly legible in the game.]







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