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Europa Universalis

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 8 / 11
Date: March 12, 2001
Author: Amazon User

This game is awesome. The things that Imperialism was missing are made up in Europa Universalis. This game shows a great time period which has rarely been covered before, and the political system of the game can't be beat. If you like Alpha Centauri or Imperialism, get this too.

An excellent and deep game

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 7 / 9
Date: May 01, 2001
Author: Amazon User

This game is very big, and seems intimidating at first. The tutorial is slow, and the manual cumbersome. But I can't stop playing. This is not Civilization with a branching tech tree - it is a pseudo-historical simulation, so that would be out of place. This is not Age of Empires with dozens of different delicately balanced units. This is closer to Imperialism, with a greater emphasis on the colonization of the new world, and the maintenance of the balance of power in the old world. Take your time with this title. It will seem frustrating when your ill-timed conversion to Protestantism sets the Highlands ablaze. But treated as an historical role-playing experience, where you set the goals and historical events prod you on your way, you will get hundreds of hours of meaningful pleasure from this title.

An almost-great game with a fatal flaw

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 12 / 21
Date: November 19, 2001
Author: Amazon User

EU is heartbreakingly close to being one of the best computer games ever produced. Economics, religion, warfare, diplomacy, and exploration have never been so successfully integrated. As several people have pointed out, however, the manual and tutorial are woefully inadequate for such a complex game. You'll find yourself learning this game largely by blind trial and error. But I could live with that, given this game's many other terrific features. The thing that destroyed my interest in EU is the fact that this game cheats OUTRAGEOUSLY in combat. It is not uncommon to lose battles even when you outnumber the AI's forces by 10:1 or more. You can spend game-decades building up your armies and planning campaigns, only to watch your entire empire's armed forces get brutalized by inferior numbers of inferior troops. As long as you never fight another major power you're fine, but should you become involved in a war with another power, expect to do a lot of save-and-restore-ing to counter-act the senseless combat resolution. In my opinion, the game is not playable in its current state.

Deep and satisfying

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 8 / 13
Date: March 06, 2001
Author: Amazon User

This is a game for those who love history and a challenge. You have to balance trade, exploration, religion, stability, diplomacy, science, and war to win. This has to be done constantly and with an eye to the future. It has more depth then Alpha Centauri (which I love) and better history then Civilization. This is a hard but satisfying game covering a fascinating period of history.

Better than Average, Still Not Great.

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 5 / 6
Date: May 29, 2001
Author: Amazon User

I followed this game through the beta versions and the magazine write-ups and newsgroup comments for over a year before it came out. And, honestly, if you are really into historical simulations and strategies, this is an outstanding game.

However, if, like me, you are more an historical hobbyist, the historical accuracy and constancy of the game is going to get somewhat tedious after a while. Part of the fun--for me--of a game like Civilization, for instance, is NOT playing the Earth over and over and over and over again. The fun is in randomizing the geography and the cultures and the resources; each of these either dictate or influence strategies, and in a strategy game, create endless playability.

Unfortunately, Europa Universalis doesn't really have that, so for me at least, it didn't create the feeling of "I can't wait to see what my next game brings." I know what it's going to bring. The Pope will declare the Reformation in...etc.

So, between that and the bugs, I can't give it the highest rating.

All the above said, however, there are few games on the market today that rate near it. So, buy it, learn it, play it for 3 months, and then put on the shelf.

Very Indepth Strategy

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 4 / 4
Date: August 22, 2001
Author: Amazon User

I find this game to be one of the more complex games in the history of strategy games. Before I bought the game I heard some people complaining about how hard is to learn to play this game, so I went to the players forum, read the faqs, and also some of the very interesting After Action Reports (AAR). Then I bought the game, and I have to say the game's learning curve is not bad at all. I do think that the main reason some people dislike this game is that you can't play with the same "strategies" of other games like AE, i.e. build a ton of barracks and rush to take over the map, or civilization, where you go bananas building a unrealistic number of small cities, change to democracy, and you have won the game. No, EU is really a strategy game. For example, you have to think before going to war. Is my army strong enough to take over the enemy army? DO the technology levels and morale favor me? Will my allies honor the alliances? How will the rest of the world react to my Declaration of War? And most important, how will my own country going to react to this war? And war is just a small piece to the puzzle, because you also have to worry about your country's economy, infrastructure, religious tolerance, diplomacy and colonial expansion. The other mayor feature of this game, and what puts it appart from many other games is the amount of nations that you are competing against. Apprx. 80 empires, kingdoms and small states are fitting for global dominance, regional influence, or simply trying to stay alive, and to do this they forge very complex alliances and pacts.

A intriguing game that is not very fun to play.

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 9 / 17
Date: July 02, 2001
Author: Amazon User

WArning: this is not an Age of Empires game and its not like Civilization. This game plays more like a very long and complex Avalon Hill boardgame like Third Reich. The kind that says on the back of the box, "Average Game time: 24 hours. Difficulty: Mind-boggling." In fact this game might be described as the ultimate computer simulation of a turn-based board game. There is just no way you could keep track of the economic and diplomatic complexity of thie game using 1 centimeter-square chips. EU's strongest points are its historical accuracy and its immense complexity. There are some very clever concepts intertwined into the game, such as religious tolerance, forced annexation and military unit attrition rate. And you can play with 80 civs on the board!!! It is extremly realistic.....scientific research is painfully slow ( you can't have Democracy by 2500 BC!), exploration is fraught with failure and consumes time and resources. It is very hard to establish a foothold in the new world without sinking on the way or being massacared by the natives. All this means that this game is not actually fun to play. Challenging and complex but really actionless. Wars take forever and its almost impossible to defeat another civ. Even if you do conquer, you still have to deal with the consequences - basically you are seen as a pariah and all the other nations rise up against you and wipe you out. Actually this can be very refreshing...How many times can you play age of empires before you get bored by its unrealistis military aspects. How many times did you play CIV with the same strategy and wish that the different civs had different abilities or that you could do win via a different route. The hardest part about EU is that gamers have not been prepared to play a game where the goals are not clearly defined. Be the all conquering French Emperor, try your hand as John Calvin converting all the neighboring provinces, be Japan and try to remain isolated from the outside world or try to be spain but this time win the Armada and hold on to the New world. The other problem is that Americans are not historically prepared to understand the period that this game covers. 1492 to 1792 after all is all just taught as a preview to thanksgiving over here...the only history of the period that Americans are familiar with is the movie Pocohantas....since there are no talking racoons in this game and you don't get to slaughter indins with your trabuckets, most Americans will scrap this game and play a real historical sim like Age of Wonders, after all they know who Zeus is........

Don't they play a game before releasing it?

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 3 / 3
Date: July 16, 2003
Author: Amazon User

This is, down underneath, a deep and fascinating game, as many reviewers say. But before we can appreciate these depths, we have to put up with several serious annoyances that compromise practical playability, and hence fun, in a major way.

The worst feature can be summarized in one word: pirates.

When the game is well along, one is continually distracted by the appearance of these vermin all over the globe. If you don't deal with them, you lose income from every maritime province next to which they hang out. Furthermore, if one of your fleets runs into a pirate on the way to a destination, it may stop to fight the pirate, win, and just sit there forever, forgetting where it was supposed to go. You can lose a large fleet this way if you don't discover the amnesia soon and remind it.

At first your warships may be simply too weak to take them on. Fair enough. Eventually, however, you can safely beat any number of pirate ships with one of yours. But this does not stop the little bastards from multiplying like flies.

You may discover that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure: post just one ship in every sea sector next to your provinces, and they seldom give you trouble (in fact, this is useful even before you can beat them in a fight). However, your ships die of attrition when kept at sea. So you need to go around periodically, return each of them to the nearest port, and post it again. You must do this every few months at first. When you have done all your naval research, you can safely leave them out for a year and a half. Nevertheless, it's a major nuisance. You might need almost a hundred ships all over the world on pirate patrol, and if you miss returning any of them to port-- DISASTER! This micromanagement is, aside from tedious, totally unrealistic. I doubt that the King of Spain needed to give orders to each little ship in the Caribbean exactly when to stop at the nearest port for supplies.

What really rankles is that one of the research advances is said to be unlimited time at sea: in other words, you shouldn't have to worry about attrition. However, THIS IS A LIE. You can never overcome the problem.

Two other occasional inanities: you might have to engage natives in battle as much as thirty times (that's two or three mouse clicks each) to eradicate them from a province. You win each battle easily, but they're still there. Sometimes you can't see that you have made any progress at all. The click fest gets quite mindless and stultifying. There are, of course, hundreds of provinces in the world. Sixty clicks per province to clear out natives, times 400 provinces, equals repetitive stress syndrome.

Finally, events occur at more-or-less random times. You may be watching important action at one location, and suddenly a message pops up needing your attention somewhere else. You might forget to return to your first location after you have dealt with the interruption; and even if you remember, it's sometimes a chore finding it again.

We should be able to deal with these interrupts the same way a computer does: in either a stack or a queue, including being able to save where we were before one occurred.

With these improvements, I'd give the game a much higher rating. As it is, life is too short and patience limited.

Addictive, satisfying, a litte frustrating

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 3 / 3
Date: May 06, 2001
Author: Amazon User

Download and install the patch before you attempt the tutorial. It's a great game overall, once you learn the ropes. Good AI, good strategy, but a little devoid of variety. Terriffic for 100-200 hours of absorbing, intelligent play. Strategy buffs and history nuts will both enjoy this one.

A Strategy Game for History Buffs

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 3 / 3
Date: August 04, 2002
Author: Amazon User

Conquering the world is a popular objective for strategy games, but in Europa Universalis, that is not necessarily the goal.

In EU's Grand Campaign, the biggest scenario from about a dozen you can choose from, you are in control of a number of European nations at the beginning of the 1400s. It is your job to lead the nation to a glorious future through exploration, diplomacy, trade, research, and good old-fashioned conquest. Your empire begins small, anywhere from a half dozen territories as Austria to twenty plus as France. In EU, not all nations are created equally. Some have very distinct advantages at the beginning of the game. However, even if you begin with a small nation, you don't have to conquer as many territories or make as much money as you would if you were a larger nation to win. The game uses a point system. You achieve victory points by completing missions, such as defending territories, discovering parts of the world, or conquering certain enemies. You have two hundred years to score as many points as you can to win.

EU is a very involved historical simulation. While you steer the fate of a nation and the world around you develops differently every time, there are many historical events that come up at more or less the same time that affect the entire European continent and add a historical flavor to the game.

The game is a good mix of diplomacy, combat, discovery and exploration. You can discover much of the world, though it is disappointing that many portions of it remain unexplorable, like much of Asia as well as central Africa and central South America. Combat is not very involved. You tell your armies where to go, and if there is an enemy army there, battle rages on and both sides take casualties until one side retreats or is destroyed. However, in order for your army to perform optimally, you need to think about things like the terrain of the territory, the composition of your army (infantry, cavalry, and artillery), the quality of your leader, etc. The system is fairly simple but effective.

Overall, EU is a great strategy game. It is a combination of a real time and a turn based game. The days run by at intervals that you can set to however fast or slow a speed you like. It is historically based, has fairly intelligent AI, and most importantly is good fun. On the down side, the manual is more of an explanation of why the game plays the way it does rather than an explanation of how to play, but the controls are fairly easy to figure out, so this is not a big deal.

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