Europa Universalis III

Genre History Channeled
Developer/Publisher Paradox
ESRB Everyone
Requirements 2GHz CPU; 512MB RAM

Game design is a risky venture, especially when your prize franchise is at stake. If you don’t change anything, you’re accused of milking a tired title for all the cash you can get. If you change the wrong things, you can break whatever it was that made your game special. But what happens when you make the right changes for the right reasons and lose something?
This is the paradox facing Paradox. Europa Universalis III is a much-needed revamp of a much-loved title. For the uninitiated, Europa Universalis puts you in control of a nation through the early modern period, from the discovery of the New World to the French Revolution. The current edition’s renovation takes out a lot of the predictability and lockstep gameplay of previous entries, which forced you either to play through history or play around it. (Your Russia is a strong and stable monarchy? Too bad. The calendar says it’s time for the “Time of Troubles.” Have fun with the collapse.) No more of that. Now national fragmentation will be based on policy choices you have made or the incompetence of your random monarch. The historical record remains to be written.
One good example of how this works is the new “core province” system. The earlier games would stick your nation with the “historical cores,” which are provinces that your nation claimed by right. Now cores are acquired in a more dynamic way. Border disputes are randomly generated, giving you the chance to claim nearby territories. This means that your British Empire can get cores around its colonies, or a claim on French lands that surround Calais. You can strike out in whichever direction the new history points you to. The result is a grand campaign game that has even more variation than the earlier entries.
Randomizing cores is only part of the new era. Gone are the major historical events, replaced by more context-dependent ones that can happen to almost anyone. This is a welcome relief for those who planned their games around the scheduling of certain events, but it has two negative consequences. First, the historical events often served to keep a major nation on the right track though historic increases in stability or armed force. Without these, larger AI-controlled powers often hover between low and very low stability. Second, the historical events added some color to each nation. “Expand colonial borders” doesn’t have the same ring as “Found the Star Chamber” or “Reform the Janissaries.” There is less to distinguish one nation from another, and playing Poland isn’t significantly different from playing Portugal.
This missing flavor is replaced by much greater flexibility in customizing your nation. Since all the monarchs, generals, and advisers are randomized after your start date, you can pick and choose your focus. You can choose 10 of 40 government traits, with new slots opening up as you research the appropriate technology. These range from options for better soldiers to lowering costs for stability, but by and large the economic advances are the wiser choices. You can change your government from a monarchy to a republic if you think the payoff is better. Up to three advisers can be chosen to accentuate imperial policy, and the better the adviser, the greater the chance of a beneficial random event.
For people wanting a more historical experience, Europa Universalis III has opened up the game to allow you to choose any start date you want between June 1453 and July 1789. Want to begin on Henry VIII’s first day on the job? Set the menu clock to April 22, 1509 and have at it. Major events like the Thirty Years War have already been bookmarked for your convenience. The menu screen itself is a pleasure, since you can scroll through the months and years and watch the map change.
In fact, the best changes to the game are in the interface. If you’ve ever been confused by Europa Universalis, be confused no longer. Tabs drop to remind you of major decisions that need to be made. Sound cues alert you to diplomatic overtures. There is a list menu you can set to track the things you are most interested in, like ongoing sieges, merchants, or colonies being developed. There’s a lot of information in this game, and none of it is hidden. There’s no way to set messages to pause the game, and some functionality, such as automating the merchants, has been removed. But this game is a tutorial in interface design.
The AI is better at the small stuff, too. It is very aggressive in colonizing the world, assisted by the dispersal of other people’s discoveries across the globe. It manages armies more sensibly, though it is still too reluctant to take on rebels until a city has fallen. Your computer rivals aren’t confident in taking on larger, weaker empires—India falls easily into your lap—but can negotiate a tough settlement on whomever they fight. There isn’t enough gold floating around for war to be profitable, and the wars have limited goals, befitting the time period.
The improvements even touch something as basic as army recruitment. In a feature lifted from Paradox’s World War II game Hearts of Iron II, your war-weary regiments are automatically refilled from a manpower pool that is affected by government type and policies. You can only recruit one provincial regiment at a time, so mercenaries prove to be an important force multiplier. Battles lead to increases in military tradition, from which you draft new generals. It accrues too slowly for you to get really powerful leaders, but your king can be drafted into service in a pinch.
The final product needs some tweaking. It is too difficult to initiate an alliance, spies are mostly useless as advisers and agents, and it is too easy to be tolerant of every culture you run into. You always lead alliances at war, meaning you can stiff your friends if the war becomes inconvenient. The music is much less interesting than the period score that made the last game such a pleasure. Always mod friendly, Paradox has opened up almost everything to amateur improvements, so you can expect a wider range of options in the coming months.
Europa Universalis III is still one of the best grand strategy games you can find. Newcomers to the series will be thrilled by the possibilities the game provides without an overwhelming quantity of menus. There will probably be some complaints about the event culling, but the world is now in the palm of your hand. You chart your course, and you make your fate. Nothing is foretold.

This article originally appeared in Computer Games Magazine #196