Europa Universalis III is nothing if not stately. You can pretty much tell by the name. A couple of regal sounding Latin words, followed by the fat Roman numeral that means people have been playing it in large enough numbers to merit sequels. These are games about nations creeping across a sea of data with all the pace and purpose of a glacier. Whether you’re France, England, Prussia, or someplace small you’ve never heard of because history swallowed it five centuries ago, you’re riding a slow and painstaking spreadsheet of continental drift. If you’ve played the previous EUs, you have an idea what you’re in for. If you haven’t, this is a good place to start. Just be warned that this is your father’s strategy game: a throwback to old-school numbers-oriented stat-driven gameplay that especially a history wonk would love.
It is broad, gradual, grand, and meticulous, except for the times that it’s not. Because the funky thing about the EU games is that they’re not turn-based. They’re real time, with day-long ‘ticks’ that are particularly transparent during battles. When EU breaks into war, the scale crumbles and you’ll find yourself playing an army management game for a while, jockeying for favorable terms at the inevitable suing for peace, yours or theirs, before going back to the slow spreadsheet gameplay.
To be fair, the army management in this third iteration is as good as it’s ever been. But that doesn’t change the fundamental problem EU has always had: How to you reconcile a game that might last hundreds of years with the historical significance of a battle that might last a few days? The answer, according to the EU games, is “not very well, but no one else is trying, so until someone else does it better, here’s what you get”.
A lot of the fussy management stuff has gotten better. This is arguably the most manageable game developer Paradox Interactive has ever made. The new outliner, as they call it, is a huge help. This persistent panel sits comfortably in the upper right hand corner, where it dynamically lists things like your provinces, colonies, armies, battles, centers of trade, and so on. You can jump to any of these things by clicking on them in the outliner, and it’s a great overview of what’s happening and where.
But overall, the interface is still a messy handful. For all the advances Paradox has made – and they’re considerable – there’s still far too much information spread out in about six too many panels, with about ten too many buttons, and about twenty too few hotkeys, with probably two thirds too much important data hidden in the ledger. Managing armies can be a hassle, particularly when you want to split them up and assign your all-important generals just so. And if Paradox insists on skimping on the hotkeys, bigger buttons would have been nice
The biggest omission is the most curious. For some reason, you can no longer tell Europa Universalis to pause the game clock at certain events. There used to be a lot of security knowing that you could max out the speed without missing any reaction time the moment someone declared war, or moved an army into your territory, or offered you a royal marriage. Now you have to stare wide-eyed at the screen with your hand ready to slap the space bar to pause the game. History as whack-a-mole. Don’t blink!
It’s astonishing that a company like Paradox can come so far and still learn so little about how to do an interface. Perhaps they were preoccupied with the transition to a 3D map, which is about as useless as you’d expect for a game like this. If anything, it’s a step backwards from what they were able to do with the evocative 2D art in the previous games. Perhaps to make up for it, the menus and splash screens are adorned with gorgeous artwork in the style of oil paintings. And, of course, you get the classical music pleasantly marking time in the background.
As for gameplay, there are also a few surprising holdouts. Sea battles and naval supremacy are still poorly represented, which gyps countries like England and anyone else who was particularly proud of her navy. Blockading is marginally more useful, however. Perhaps the most persistently broken feature is trade. Managing merchants is still an unholy mix of abstraction and unnecessary futzing, particularly if you aren’t a commercial superpower. Because EU has evolved so little in this regard, you might as well not bother trying to eke out a slice of the marketplace if you’re one of the smaller players. Trying to insinuate a merchant into a market recalls, once again, whack-a-mole.
