Thoughts & feedback after an Age I - VI campaign

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I’ve just completed my first full-length* campaign in EU5 as the Ottomans and have been recording notes about my experience as I went along, so have decided to compile them here in a somewhat-structured way in order to hopefully both generate discussion and provide (yet another) resource for any of the team who are looking through to the community for feedback. It's important to state at the outset that what I’ve written here is based on my own experience and my own opinions, and nothing more. If you disagree on any points, and you probably will, it would be great to hear what and why – but please try and keep all discussion respectful and polite.

Before I go into my thoughts about what have been the big issues with EU5 so far, I do have to make very clear that I think the game is an enormous and phenomenal achievement, and during development Paradox set the absolute gold standard for communication with the community. Their presence across the forums, YouTube and Reddit is a testament to how much they genuinely care about their players. And furthermore, even in its current state I cannot deny I love the game; perhaps more the idea of it than the reality just now, but I do have faith that we will eventually end up with the game Paradox initially set out to make, which is the greatest historical grand strategy game of all time.

I decided to play as the Ottomans and do a full 1337-1837 playthrough to really test out as much as the game as to offer as possible – regrettably I decided not to engage with exploration or colonisation systems so can’t speak to them except on their realism and historicity as utilised by the AI. Sadly I also didn’t make it all the way to 1837 but decided to end my campaign in 1748 – the reasons for this were partially performance, but mainly lack of desire to micro-manage such a large empire and the lack of challenge after a certain point. I think it’s a testament to how much there is in this game, and how much better-paced the mid-late game is, that I was able to play and have fun for over 400 years which is longer than any EU4 campaign I ever played.

From here on I will be as brief as possible in each section, summing up my thoughts in bullet points. I will try to include positives and negatives, but obviously with a focus on the problems as I see them currently.

General

- I played primarily on 1.0.7, until the public release of 1.0.8 towards the end of the campaign (more on that later). I’m avoiding all betas because they look unfit for anything more than testing.​

​- My general thoughts on the development/support of the game post-release are summed up really well in OPB’s latest video here. The TL;DR is the post-launch has been so chaotic and confusing, and nobody knows what direction the game is actually going in, that apart from squashing the occasional bug it doesn’t feel like anything is being accomplished except continually confusing and frustrating the player base.​

- But now onto the game itself. The general internal systems – values, estates, control, laws, situations, IOs, pops, markets, etc. are fun and interesting, and lay a really solid foundation for what will one day be a great game.​

- After playing EU4 for about 1k hrs and following all the Tinto Talks and online content about EU5, I found it fairly easy to pick the game up. It’s not a hard game to get into at all for someone who’s played Paradox games before.​

- Generally there is so much more to do in peace-time, and peace-time is where EU5 really shines especially in comparison to its predecessor. Warfare and diplomacy are where things really start to fall apart, but even so there’s plenty to be complimentary about.​

- I love how much more granular everything in this game is - from manoeuvring armies and managing supply to upgrading buildings in towns and cities, you spend a lot more time zoomed in close inspecting your realm.​

- As a QoL feature and a learning tool, the automation systems are HUGE. I can’t overstate how important this is for the game. They don’t always work (more on that later) but have the potential to make the game so much more accessible and fun.​

- The late game is still lacking in sufficient challenge – unless you have colonial subjects, in which case it simply becomes an annoying mess. Paradox’s ‘solution’ to prevent snowballing is to artificially slow expansion, but really it should be to create greater stakes and risks for expanding too quickly. As you’ll see in the picture, it’s not hard with certain tags to reach a point where you’re too big to fail. IRL the Ottomans had already started to decline by the mid-18th century – so why can’t that be modelled in-game?​

Mods

- As an avid mod player, I really respect how supportive Paradox are of the modding community. They understand that mods are what make their games come to life for a substantial portion of players, and have even given mods a spotlight in their dev diaries and in-game adverts. They refer to modding as ‘enhancing your gameplay experience’ and that honesty is very endearing.​

- I slowly added a few mods as I progressed in the campaign, mainly in three categories: Flavour packs, war score balances (more on that later), and UI (more on that now).​

UI & Visuals

- Everything there is to say on the EU5 UI has already been said. It’s pretty dreadful. Not universally so – but it’s both ugly and dysfunctional in many places. Empty or unhelpful tooltips, column headings not lining up with content, crammed and busy windows, bugs, the list goes on. I’ll try to mention a few things here that I haven’t seen mentioned elsewhere.​

​- Notifications are a big downgrade from EU4. We receive more, they’re less helpful, and there’s no way to permanently dismiss them – I had to install a mod for that.​

​- ‘Pause when’ settings for notifications only pause the game until you click ‘okay’ – which defeats the purpose of the feature IMO.​

​- No notifications for if your armies or navies are under attack, which mean you have to babysit them and pause constantly while at war. This is a big step backwards. Likewise with no notifications that an ally or enemy has joined or left a war, I find the omission utterly bizarre.​

​- Even moreso than in EU4, if you lose a battle the UI is completely useless in helping you understand why.​

​- I can’t think how much time I spent selecting dozens of tiny blue diamonds in menus – there has to be a click-and-drag or a select-all function for all our sanity.​

​- On the other hand, I think the art, map and character portraits all look fantastic.​

​- The map in particular isn’t the most accurate or flavourful (I worry that certain unique cities like Constantinople are going to be locked behind DLC) but it’s a joy to play on. I particularly love how you can keep the 3D map turned on all the way to max zoom, and under different overlays instead of using the flat map. Conversely, allowing an always-on flat map for slower machines has been a sorely needed QoL feature and is very welcome.​

- Terra incognita however is really quite ugly in comparison to EU4, and really needs a bit of a graphical rethink.​

​- This is probably also the place to mention performance. Things really start to dip towards the end of Age V, where the entire world is colonised and it took about 5s of load time to open up any peace deal menu. This is another reason why colonial nations need to be excluded from European wars (more on that below).​

- Playing on GFN, the performance rating in Age I was around 70, and by Age VI it had dropped to 10. I would consider Age VI not worth playing not only for gameplay reasons but also performance. It’s just not worth the hassle.​

Flavour

- I was pleasantly surprised by the amount of flavour in my campaign. I expected a similar amount to EU4 and that’s exactly what I got. I actually found myself reading the text of most of the unique events.​

​- The Rise of the Turks situation, for a release build, felt like a great starting point to direct the player, and I’m sure it will improve with more content being added over the years.​

​- But that’s all it is – a starting point. Once the situation ends, the successful Beylik then stagnates because even after uniting Anatolia, it’s still no match for its neighbours the Mamluks and Jalayarids who are far, far too powerful and stable. It took me pretty much the entire game to annex about half of them.​

​- My feeling therefore is Rise of the Turks needs a ‘sequel’ which brings in the other large players in the area and allows opportunities for the Turks to subjugate them or facilitates an organic collapse.​

​- Later on the Columbian Exchange was a fun small situation which I engaged with a little. The Wars of Religion never came to anything (as I believe they never do in any game). And the Court and Country disaster was just sort of… nothing. I largely ignored it and it disappeared after 10 years because I was able to raise my absolutism to 50%. But I’ve heard that others have found it completely impossible to resolve and it’s torn their country apart, so perhaps I need experience with more campaigns before I can judge that.​

​- Situations in general need to be deeper and more numerous. I’ll talk more about how I think they could be used to solve some of the game’s biggest problems below.​

​- There’s little else to say here – we all knew the game should ship with an acceptable amount of flavour and more would be added over the years. I’m sure we will eventually end up with double or triple the amount we currently have in the game.​

Economy & Society

- The new control mechanic might just be my favourite in any recent Paradox game. While it isn’t perfect, it goes an enormous way to enabling more realistic borders and spread of wealth, religion, culture and technology.​

​- Maritime presence, roads, proximity modifiers, satisfaction etc. all take a lot of time, patience and thought and reward the careful player. These are very easy to obsess over and it’s just fun.​

​- I also really like how culture and religion are so much more important in this game.​

​- Pops, goods and markets again are a tremendous achievement to make the system so complex and true to life. However, there are still plenty of problems…​

​- Demand for certain luxury goods in markets skyrockets despite none of that good existing within the known world. How can all my pops be angry about not having tea when nobody in my country has ever seen it before?​

​- On the UI front, this game needs Vic3-style graphs for every tooltip on the balance page. When I’m suddenly deep in the red, I don’t want to have to spend half an hour trying to work out why. Learning the economy in Vic3 would not have been possible without these graphs.​

​- Institutions spread far, far too quickly – especially in the late game where everybody’s literacy is so high. It took 5 years for every Age VI institution to reach 100% adoption in all European locations. I’m honestly not convinced Age VI was ever playtested.​

Balance & Historicity

- This is where things get difficult. In many ways the game just feels too ambitious for Paradox; there’s simply so much going on here and so much granular detail in the mechanics that the AI can never hope to play in a historically plausible way without guidance. The wild pendulum swinging and overcorrecting in every patch is testament to this.​

​- France is far too powerful, then England is far too powerful, Bohemia eats the HRE every game, the Hordes never collapse, the Mamluks never collapse, China never reunites, Timur is a wet fart… it’s all been said before.​

​- The Catholic church, and Catholic countries, behave in such an insanely broken and ahistorical way they really need to be reined in. Catholic countries randomly annexing bits of each other is bad enough, but annexing the Pope is just ridiculous - even EU4 had a mechanic to prevent this. In reality succession crises and dynastic claims were the primary driver in pre-Reformation European history for diplomacy and warfare – not random land grabs. In EU5 it’s almost impossible to have a succession crisis; most countries will have a very linear dynastic progression for the entire 500 years where IRL even very stable countries like England had huge and continual succession crises. The Pope needs to have more political power over the rest of Europe, and dynasty has to play a larger role in warfare.​

​- A huge debate has been going since the first TT but has really grown in the past couple of weeks about ‘railroading vs sandbox’ and the community seems to be gravitating more and more towards a more ‘guided’ approach. Personally I just don’t feel the game’s systems, as good as they are, are ever going to be good enough to believably simulate actual history. My general feelings on this are summed up really well in this Lemon Cake video.​

​- I think being more prescriptive and flavourful in the ‘situation’ and ‘IO’ systems is one way out of this mess:

• Castile keeps eating Portugal? Extend the ‘Iberian Union’ situation to the beginning of the game and make it a generic ‘Iberian kingdoms’ situation which balances the diplomacy of each of the three kingdoms – and the Muslims to the south.​
• Austria never becomes powerful? Add a ‘Habsburg empire’ situation which incentivises and enables getting their dynasty on thrones across Europe.​
• Russia never forms? Add a Russian situation or IO to make it more likely that it does.​
• Britain never forms? Add a ‘dual crowns’ situation where, like the Iberian Wedding, they are more likely to form diplomatically rather than forcing England to annex Scotland which wouldn’t have been possible historically.​

- Colonisation speed also needs to be cut down by about 80% in the Americas and 99% in Africa. I remember the devs explicitly said it would be slower and more realistic in EU5, but it seems that was just untrue. It’s just as bad as EU4 if not worse – I’m not sure how they managed to get it quite so wrong.​

- Ultimately many of the historicity’s biggest issues would have been solved by a later start date. I think it’s inevitable that either in a few years Paradox will introduce a later start date or there will be a popular mod which does. My vote goes to 1492​

Diplomacy & Subjects

- This is where I really started to experience the biggest issues and bugs in my game, alongside warfare.​

​- One positive first, there’s been a lot of discussion about it but I think PUs are infinitely better and more historically authentic in this game. PUs are not subjects, and they are seldom permanent, and history is proof of that.​

​- Not being able to mark provinces of interest is another big step backwards. Watching the one province I wanted in a war be occupied by my ally because their 100 stack reached it three ticks before my 20,000 stack is never fun. I’ve also noticed sometimes when I siege a location it automatically flips to an ally (even when they aren’t war leader and they have no claim or core on it).​

​- The constant hegemon switching is awful. This was mentioned during the very first round of YouTube videos months ago and it’s strange it still hasn’t been fixed – and neither has the broken rival system which penalises you for not having valid rivals.​

​- Generally I feel rebels popping out as a new tag is a huge improvement – but they still feel far too easy to deal with (even easier than in EU4) and barely worth sacrificing a cabinet member to prevent. As a fully belligerent expansionist Ottomans, I had 4 or 5 rebellions the entire game and none more than a few locations in size.​

​- Subjects and rebels generally are very buggy and unstable at the moment, and I’ll share just a few of my experiences here.​

• Vassal vs. overlord strength calculations need a rework. As #2 GP I had a loyalty decrease from my #1XX GP vassal – meanwhile the Jalayarids have a loyalty increase even though their tax base and army are actually larger than their overlord Egypt.​
• Even when Jalayarid loyalty ticked down towards about 5%, they never attempted independence. They were more powerful than Egypt, but still a vassal, for 300 years.​
• On two occasions I had a neighbouring country who was a vassal of a larger power. I then had separatists declare war on me and join that vassal, allowing me to annex the whole country without the liege being able to do anything or receive any antagonism.​
• One one occasion I separate-peaced out an ally of a revolting nation, which instead ended the whole war and allowed the revolter to remain independent. This could not be fixed even after multiple reloads.​
• Another time the secessionists were allied only to a sub-Saharan African tag I couldn’t even see on my map.​
• I had a PU no-CB truce-break and, by pulling me into the war, caused massive stability loss.​
• And finally, I had a situation where my vassal (Venice) called me into an independence war against Milan (and every single other GP in Europe) where the secessionist tag didn’t actually exist, and Milan immediately gained 100 war score. So when I got called in, there was no war goal and no possibility of peacing out. I used debug mode to switch to Venice and discovered that because the rebels didn’t actually exist, there was no way to end the war and no possible peace options that Milan would accept. If Ironman mode was on, this would be a run-ending bug.​

- I didn’t personally mind the centralisation/decentralisation rework in 1.0.8. The update came just as I reached the Age of Absolutism – so I was hit by the double whammy of -10% for the Age and another -10% for centralisation. But it presented a fun challenge and I eventually weathered the storm by decentralising and annexing vassals and more foreign territory, finishing the game on 100% decentralisation which I was absolutely fine with.​

Warfare

- Possibly the most frustrating and unbalanced part of the game, there are many negatives to warfare as it stands. But I can’t deny I had some very, very fun campaigns – like the two where I marched up the Italian peninsula while defending Venice from the Milanese, Genoese and Austrians until my two groups of armies could meet.​

​- I genuinely felt like a general coordinating movements, organising supply, reinforcements etc. The new systems around food, unit types and reinforcements make warfare so much more interesting.​

​- Prisoners are also another nice addition and really add to the immersion.​

​- The increased army/navy micro, while often fun, can also be tedious. I enjoyed cycling ships in and out of fleets but didn’t enjoy having to watch them 24/7 to prevent random snipes.​

​- I found a major issue where if your fleet is engaged defensively by an enemy fleet on the same tile as, eg. a single allied fishing ship, depending on your admiral’s stats your fleet will be called in as reinforcements and will most likely be stackwiped. It’s therefore possible to lose a fleet 2-3x the size and quality of your enemy’s in this way.​

​- The QoL improvements for managing armies and fleets such as clicking enemies to auto-attack and general automation features are hugely welcome – though frequently they bug out or just cease to function completely. The ‘focus siege’ and ‘hunt armies’ actions in particular seem to get disrupted by just about anything and will usually leave your armies standing around on occupied terrain doing nothing.​

​- To remedy this, I would like an option to fully hand over control of my armies to the AI in cases where I have overwhelming superiority in a war and I really can’t be bothered -managing 10 individual stacks.​

​- On a few occasions I watched as an automated army strolled right through a zone of control, but then couldn’t leave again the same way when I tried to pull them back, eventually dying of attrition.​

​- Likewise, if your armies lose military access to a country while crossing a neutral desert corridor, they will become permanently trapped there and die of attrition.​

​- Allied military AI has seen little material improvement over EU4. It often feels like CK3 where friendly AI simply cannot work together – even subjects set to ‘supportive’ are completely independent and will likely wander deep into enemy territory only to be wiped.​

​- I like that it’s much harder to get CBs in this game – but there need to be other ways than just through parliament which becomes stale and repetitive very quickly.​

- The ‘Leader as General’ (or whatever it’s called) policy is not compatible with automated general/admiral replacement, as it will routinely swap him out if there is a better option available.​

​- The army/navy morale and experience both being represented by a small green bar is confusing and another downgrade from EU4. It also happens that experience decays so quickly that it is almost completely pointless to drill armies outside of niche situations.​

​- Because of the granularity of the locations, warfare on the steppes is very painful and not fun to play at all.​

​- Army templates are an essential addition, they would probably have allowed me to save about half an hour over the course of my full campaign.​

​- Remembering to balance every army and navy before and after very single encounter, merge etc. is really tedious. Balancing needs to have an automation setting.​

​- Combat is definitely a big improvement over EU4, but is still very board-gamey and feels like it pulls a lot of different meaningless stats just for the sake of making the system deeper. Frontage isn’t a real thing. Initiative isn’t a real thing. Combat speed, unless we’re talking about the literal speed of cavalry vs infantry vs artillery, isn’t a real thing. Even though the game has this left-right-centre system, it has no relationship to IRL front line composition. I feel Paradox missed an opportunity here to make a combat system true to life and intuitive.​

War Score & Peace Cost

- My biggest issue with war, however, is war score and peace cost. So I’m giving it its own section.​

​- Starting with war score, battles are now almost completely meaningless. Because battles count for so little war score, it’s absurdly difficult to get enough war score in a ‘Show Superiority’ war. There were some cases where I fully wiped all enemy armies which only amounted to c. 2% war score, and because there were no armies left I had no way to continue to get war score, except start occupying their entire country (which, because of the war goal, counted for almost nothing). So in one case a full occupation of both primary combatants and over 200 battles resulted in 8% war score and therefore not enough to make any demands whatsoever, even though their countries were completely broken. I don’t remember it ever being this bad in EU4.​

​- The reason for the above, I surmise, was because they had unoccupied colonial subjects. This was another promised improvement from EU4 that never materialised, that colonial subjects would not be required to engage with, or be occupied by, European combatants. But sadly it’s very much still the case.​

​- Likewise the effect from capturing capitals needs to be massively – and I mean maybe tenfold – increased. In history, if a country’s capital was taken, there was very little chance of anything other than total capitulation. Now I’m not suggesting EU5 takes it that far simply for balance reasons. But in a typical war with a large country you receive in the region of 0.5-1% score for capturing the capital. This is simply senseless.​

​- To give another example, in one war I occupied all of Two Sicilies, and had held their capital for 3 years. This only amounted to 20% war score and therefore was not enough to take even a single province.​

​- Peace cost has been driven through the roof in EU5, and bizarrely gets more and more expensive as you advance through the game and increase the size of your country. By Age V, I was only able to take 2 provinces with 100% war score, even with a 25% reduction from the CB. I calculated that it would take 900 years to annex all of Italy at that rate. I understand this is improved by around 60% in Age VI, but you shouldn’t need to wait 400 years to take more than a couple of provinces.​

​- Through all of this, I completely fail to understand why there is not a greater deference to how historical wars were actually fought. Whereas your average mid-game EU5 war may contain 100-200 battles, in history it was not uncommon for a single battle to determine the outcome of a war. If I stackwipe an enemy a few months into a war, they have no prospect of recovering. Historically, the nation would know they were beaten, and sue for a quick peace so they could lick their wounds and rebuild before their country was torn apart. But in EU5, while we were promised shorter and less ‘total’ wars, often the only way to have an enemy submit to a peace deal is to fully occupy their country and it is completely devasted, hampering their long-term prospects. In this sense there has been no improvement over EU4 whatsoever - the AI simply does not possess the capacity to understand when it is beaten.​

Conclusion

I really don’t want to go on longer than I have because this post is already far longer than what the vast majority of people will read. I feel I have to restate that I had a huge amount of fun with this campaign and want EU5 to be the game it wants to be – which is why I’ve written so much here. I’m sure people will disagree with a lot of it, but having recorded it all as I went along I felt like I had to share and hopefully help in some small way to give the feedback Paradox need to hear. I’m actually really excited to start my next run (going to try a tall colonial Scotland) and see what else the game has to offer on a completely different campaign.