Europa Universalis IV (2013)

Intro

EU4 is a grand strategy game. You pick a date (1444 to 1821 CE) and any country on the map. Then you trade, fight, schmooze, explore, et cetera.

Review

I played this for over 13 hours. Initial attemps failed due to incompetence of allied AI countries. Then i settled on playing Portugal, one of the easiest countries to start with. I kissed the pope's ass, sailed to India, married every Spanish and English prince/princess and conquered parts of Morocco.

This took quite a long time, most of which was spent sending diplomats. Wars are a bit more exciting, but the addition of forts that completely inhibit travel was a huge mistake IMO. How is a fort under siege going to prevent me from travelling somewhere 100+ km away? The end result is the AI can retake provinces while you are clumsily moving troops around. Ugh.

Each country has a sort of quest trees with goals like "build the army to the limit" or "take x and y province". These are a neat idea, but they're extremely rigid. At some point i had to figure out the exact peace treaty to sign, taking into account that earlier progress in quest line doesn't always count for later parts, as well as expiring claims to land.

I just got bored with it. There is so little to do and combat is still the exact same as it was in EU4. You have infantry and cavalry (all the same type) and you send them to a place to fight. That's it. I just don't enjoy this anymore. I miss the freedom of EU3. Like starting a game then switching between countries (you can freely switch when loading a game) to release all possible vasals to completely fragment the map. It all takes so very very long too. Meh.

Just played this for 2 hours on Very Easy as Holland. Notes/observations:

• It's ten times more complicated than EU3. I played tons of EU3 and i barely have any idea what is going on.
• There don't appear to be policy sliders. Instead there's some other system you can't use for the first 10 years?
• Burgundy got in a war with Austria, Hungary and co. I captured several provinces and fought a bunch of armies, as did B. and our allies. Then they just kinda stopped and let A/H retake everything and siege my provinces. Wat?
• My armies retreated from Holland to... Burgundy or some ally south of Normandy instead of to Zeeland, the province right below Holland. Wat?

Maybe i'll try Castille or Portugal instead. :-/