Documentation

European history in PDF format

And there are other problems as well, most notably the absence of a paper manual for Europa Universalis II and a serious problem with the on-disc PDF version. The Adobe Acrobat document is next to useless, as whoever formatted the thing managed to excise all of the odd-numbered pages. Brilliant. Since the strategy epic is as deep as a doctoral thesis, it’s pretty much unplayable out of the box without a manual. Even if it was complete, a game that features four centuries of European history, complete with thousands of actual events and personages, needs more than a PDF manual.

Opening moves

Market forces

Victory is ours!

At least you do get a short paper booklet that goes over the basics of Crown of the North. This manual is actually an improvement over the documentation provided in the original Europa Universalis II, in that it goes into quite a bit of depth on this single campaign while the first book addressed only the generalities of play and glossed over specifics. Paradox has scrapped this approach here for tables detailing unit, recruitment, province, and terrain specs.

Random Fact: The manual for the original Europa Universalis was a great history primer. Unfortunately, it told us more about Suleiman the Great than how to play the damn game.