Europa Universalis V confirmed

[Crazy_Ivan80]

Is it worth buying yet?

[crazy canuck]

Definitely

[Norgy]

I would recommend it, definitely.

It is sometimes frustrating, sometimes like a wet dream for a history nerd, but it is a very strong game. Stable, runs smoothly, no technical issues.

I've spent some time understanding the supply chains and trade mechanics, and this is much more detailed than just owning a centre of trade like in previous EU games. Granted, I have not not tried the colonisation mechanics. I don't even know how to recruit an explorer.

I would say, expect to spend a fair amount of time learning the game. I doubt the next patch will upend the gameplay completely, as Paradox seems to have learned from the rather frantic patching last year.


I have played another 20 odd years. The reformation has unfolded, but FoW prevents me from seeing much. My only European ally is Hungary, who of course drew me into another war. I have reorganised my armies completely. With the armoury, you get a nice boost to manpower, so I have one 16k strong army, and a smaller one for sieges. The early arquebusiers really litter the floor with Turks, at least. The Knights Hospitallers are no more. Wonder who ended them? Oh, right, that was me. That Serbian alliance did not help much, so now parts of northern Macedonia are: Ours. Hungary's vast armies attacked from the north. Job done in two years.

I am still learning, but it is fun. My next goal is a very ambitious one. Taking back the Holy Land.

[Josephus]

Here's one (of many) things I can't understand.

So why is the cost of building, for instance, a tool workshop different in two different provinces of mine, within the same market?

The first option is to draw from local goods before the market. If there are local goods available, then the cost of production will almost always be lower than the cost of obtaining those goods through the market.  The construction will also be quicker. There are also a bunch of other factors that effect the cost, but I don't remember them.

I don't think the cost increases if the pops who will populate the building after completion are not available.  One of the reasons to construct a building is to allow for the opportunity for those pops to be created.

By local (buy local) do you mean the province or the country?

[crazy canuck]

Province

[Norgy]

I think I got the worst smallpox outbreak I have seen. After ticking slowly up to ten million POPs in the Empire, two years of smallpox has laid waste to most of Inner Anatolia, and is moving westwards. I have built the buildings, like hospitals and lazarettos, but the - sign hovers between 25k and 70k each day, and that is brutal.

And I was doing so well! 

Good income, good tax base, finally some interesting tech and an army that at least sometimes could withstand Mamluk onslaught (they build enormous professional armies and do not even try with levies against them).

I've been trying to roleplay this to the best of my abilities. What would be important for an emperor? To please god, first and foremost, so the Holy Land was re-taken at great cost. The levies evaporated, my fleets, which I had not upgraded much, were easy prey, and only some robust use of the two professional standing armies saved the day. The war lasted almost a decade.

And just when I have finished integrating the provinces, and assimilated most of Anatolia to a, well, passable degree. They speak Greek, but don't look it. Then the pox.

I both love and hate this game. Playing wide is challenging, very much so. Byzantium does, understandably, not have lots of flavour content after 1453. That does not bother me too much. I think the designers knew a lot of players would choose Byzantium, and made it more than a bit challenging.

There are still mechanics I do not understand, like the wild fluctuations in income, despite otherwise stable conditions.

The AI could be tad more aggressive. I am in a bad spot right now, but no-one seems to interested in taking advantage of that.

[Syt]

https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/developer-diary/tinto-talks-105-22nd-of-april-2026.1918289/

One change we're pleased to finally have in is that a country's capital terrain now passively reduces its proximity penalty through that same topography. If your capital sits in the mountains, your whole administration is adapted to mountains, so moving men and goods through mountainous terrain costs you 20% less proximity than it would a coastal lowland power. The same applies to hills, plateaus, flatlands, and wetlands; wherever your state is rooted, it is more comfortable operating there. This reflects something we felt was missing: geography should make a nation used to its own landscape, not just be a static drag on everyone equally.

Not sure how I feel about that. It feels a bit gamey. "I, France, plan to conquer Algeria, so let me move my capital to the desert." "I, Castille, want to conquer the Americas, so let me move my capital to the jungle." (I assume it depends on the other modifiers your capital gives, plus cost/cooldown.)

We have also gone through the Advances-Trees and given terrain-specific proximity reductions to a new slate of countries and cultures whose historical identities are inseparable from a particular landscape. Scotland, Savoy, Albania, the Swiss, and Nepal now all reduce mountain and hill proximity costs through dedicated advances, reflecting the intimate knowledge of passes and ridgelines that comes from centuries of living in them. The Inca got a new advance, Vertical Economy, representing the astonishing logistical feat of governing the full length of the Andes across coastal valleys, mountain slopes, and high plateaus simultaneously. Persia gets The Persian Plateau, and Morocco joins them with advances rooted in Atlas mountain expertise, these were the remaining major mountain nations that didn't yet have any such representation. Countries like Ethiopia, Austria, Tibet, and Armenia already had terrain advances, but we rebalanced their values at the same time for consistency. Finally, we also made terrain and vegetation proximity penalties multiplicative rather than additive into the efficiency denominator, so their impact is now consistent regardless of what other proximity bonuses you have stacked, a mountain is a mountain, no matter how good your roads are.

This seems a better way of doing this, but I also wonder if Swiss knowledge of their mountains translates to them also being great in the mountains of Anatolia, Asia or the Americas? I guess it would make them better at handling the terrain than the Dutch, but I feel there should also be a geographical factor of becoming familiar with the actual geography of an area (though I guess that's maybe a bit too detailed for a game ).

I guess you will be able to go Henry VIII as well:

[Solmyr]

I'm really not a fan of the whole capital moving meta. I'd like to have historically plausible capitals and do well with those.

[Norgy]

Not a lot of countries moved capitals, did they? There must be some malus to doing so, or a direct monetary cost.

[crazy canuck]

I don't think it's accurate to say that there is a capital moving meta in the game. 

There are a number of benefits which accumulated over time, related to building up a population, production and service type buildings in one place.

[Syt]

I feel I've seen a number of comments where players when they start their game will move capital to optimize proximity/control/market access.

[crazy canuck]

Sure. There are all kinds of posts out there about how to do unusual things in an attempt to win max the game.

But my understanding of the word Meta is that that is the thing that most people do because it is the most usual strategy that most players use.

Also, I'm not entirely convinced that is the best strategy anyway. It's Clickbait.

[Syt]

I mean, I generally don't go out of my way to min/max in these games, but my feeling about Johan's games specifically in the past has been that he likes to cater to sweaty MP min/maxers and balances his games around that, so I tend to be a bit apprehensive about the games he helms.

[crazy canuck]

Fair point

[Josephus]

Which is annoying because most players don't play mp. I don't have stats, but I know

Especially in EU5. If we started a Languish game playing a few hours a week, CC and I will be in nursing homes and have Alzheimer's by the time we're finished 😂