Even More Gameplay

More reasons you can't expand

Naturally, if you declare war on a nation, that country's friends (through Royal Marriage or just plain good relations) will look sourly upon you. Its allies are quite likely to declare war, unless you are prohibitively powerful or you have significantly better relations with the ally than the country you're attacking does.

Menu customization

There's info on everything!

Finally, to top things off, let's say you manage to capture this country. Yippee-kai-yay, you're done, right? Nope, now it's time to pacify it. All captured provinces have a Nationalism rating. Nationalism figures into the chance to revolt. Most of the time the odds of your provinces revolting will be negative - good religious relations and a high stability will keep things calm. However, a Nationalism rating is a minimum - even if all the other factors combine to a -6% revolt chance, and Nationalism is 3%, then the newly conquered province will have a 3% chance to revolt, regardless. Nationalism goes down 1% per decade. Yes, you read that right - per decade. Rebellions are extremely dangerous, since they increase the chance of a nearby province rebelling by 2% as well. Also, you shouldn't upgrade fortresses in provinces you just captured, since if these fortresses rebel at the same time as the province, it's going to take much more effort on your part to re-capture it. If many core provinces of a nation you annexed rebel, or if you happen to own provinces that historically rebelled into independence (like the Netherlands), then you might face a new nation forming up in/just outside your borders, which is immediately at war with you.

Holy crap...

That, my dear readers, is just war in Europa Universalis. It doesn't include trade and how to establish monopolies, or diplomatic relationships (royal marriages, bribes, insults, alliances, vassalization and diplomatic annexations) or even special random events (like inheriting a country whose dynastic line died out.) EU is a viciously deep and complex game whose surface I feel I've barely scratched after a hardcore week of playing... but it's not perfect.

Even your enemies, with Fog of War off...

How fast can you take it?

There are, of course, the cosmetic problems with the game. They extend a bit deeper than the graphics or sound. For example, several provinces are mis-named or mis-placed (Danzig is the German name for Gdansk, a province that is part of Poland-Lithuania in most scenarios.) There are more serious issues as well - EU has an annoying tendency to boot to desktop every few hours without warning, without error and with no chance to save, regardless of hardware configuration or patching.

The AI isn't perfect either - when fighting against you, it seems intent on only a few provinces and can be outmaneuvered fairly easily. Allies are flaky at times. Peace negotiations between alliances can be quite unfair, for if the leaders declare peace, the other combatants find themselves with no winnings. Also, as leader of an alliance, it would be nice to give a province that you captured to an ally.

The computer will often demand a province it cannot hope to hold onto - France once demanded the province of Posen from me, even though France is halfway across Europe and has no nearby holdings. If anything, EU's successes in diplomacy, war and peace negotiations make us wish for all the more.

For those who wish more, there are many popular mods out there, often as popular as the game. The two most common ones are the Improved Grand Campaign (IGC) and Real EU - the IGC allows you to play minor nations and have different historical starting points, while Real EU focuses more on limiting finances in Europe to help reflect actual army sizes.