Europa Universalis 5 is an instant grand strategy classic and developer Paradox at its best

Playing Europa Universalis 5 as a long-time fan of Paradox grand strategy games is like going into the star gate in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Everywhere you look, whirling past you, you see influences from its predecessors and contemporaries. "Oh, look, you can change production methods like in Victoria 3, the rulers are like they are in Imperator, and the levy system feels like Crusader Kings 2!"

If you have yet to play any of the Europa Universalis series, they have always been one of Paradox's beefier offerings, focused on early modern history. This fifth instalment has effectively cranked up the scale and given you a microscope with which to observe the minutiae of your nation.

Let's begin with the time period that it covers – your game starts in 1337, a year that saw the start of the Hundred Years War, Petrarch visiting Rome for the first time, and, apparently, the founding of Berkshire's Bisham Priory. The next few centuries are yours to seize control of, one way or another, and you can do this on an hour by hour basis, should you choose.

It starts more than a century before games in Europa Universalis 4, allowing for some extra time in the late Middle Ages, before knights give way to hussars. This also neatly allows the game to introduce situations, a new feature in EU5 that makes certain events play center stage, more than they did in its predecessor.

For example, when the Hundred Years' War kicks off (pessimistically still named that in 1337), it's easy to, at a glance, see the strength of each side and who is in whose alliance, which lets you check whether you can tip the balance. Situations spring up throughout the game and include such historical moments as the struggle between the Guelphs and Ghibellines and the Reformation.

This new starting point also comes with a price – the Black Death will start raging its way around the world after a few years. In both of my campaigns as Castille and as Holland, my population was halved by the pandemic. In EU4, a plague meant losing income or autonomy; here, it actually matters on a much greater scale. The game models your nation's population whether you are a one-province minor or a great power, and each dead subject means one less job, one less soldier, one less bit of productivity for your nation. It's my favorite change in the game, and represents a trend away from abstractions and towards more concrete, important measurements of a nation's abilities.

Abstractions were everywhere in EU4. Your provinces could be developed, but that didn't really mean much beyond being slightly richer and the province having a few more buildings. Administrative, diplomatic, and military points, known as mana, functioned as your ability to develop provinces, to promote generals, and to research new technologies, which were very limited in number. Mana doesn't exist here, beyond some ratings that allow you to see what your rulers and courtiers are best at. You develop provinces by directing a minister to do so, while research is now based on more concrete factors like your people's literacy.

The tech tree is a genuine delight, too – the number of techs is boosted by a ridiculous degree, with each of the game's ages, bar the very first, having more than 100 techs. It's much more like a tech tree that you might find in Civilization than the, once again, abstracted variant encountered in EU4.

Choosing a national focus at the start of a new age also unlocks certain specific techs, and you can focus on administrative, diplomatic, or military techs. As you progress along the techs, you'll unlock new laws to codify, new government reforms to shape your state, and more. States are more fluid than in previous instalments, too – gone are national missions that could railroad your progress.

Here, you can shape your nation however you like along various axes representing things like centralization vs decentralization, aristocracy vs plutocracy, and traditionalist vs innovative. These can be changed at any point by assigning one of your cabinet members to influence the nation, while government reforms represent powerful ways to change your nation's central ethoses.

Call of Ducats: Early Modern Warfare

The genre EU5 occupies is often referred to as map painting games, and, as you'd expect of a game that kicks off with the Hundred Years' War, waging wars is integral. You can't just let your neighbors have that tasty trade good, after all. The military aspect of the game feels like a mesh of EU4 and the Crusader Kings series.

As mentioned, you can call up levies, but you can also (and should) build a professional military, too. Capturing forts and cities gives you a zone of control, so focusing on those rather than individual provinces is the order of the day. It's far from exhilarating, but it does interweave wonderfully with the game's systems.

Soldiers and sailors are people, so calling up either land or naval levies reduces the population in their home area. This means that for each levy called up, local food production and raw materials output drop, and troopers lost from your levies are lost from your wider population. If your military is professionalized, you won't be calling up big Bjorn the farmer anymore, so he can keep tilling his land, making them a potentially better value proposition.

War is more expensive than it's ever been in the series, and not only because of the effects on population. You also need to factor in upkeep costs and the ability for your soldiers to find food, a new resource, while doing their grim duty. How you do this isn't particularly well-explained (one of the game's few pain points), so until you figure it out you can expect to wind up with quite a few of your men dropping dead from attrition. The Clausewitz quote that "War is the continuation of policy with other means" is made very plain here, and it affects your country to a massive degree.

A map that's truly off the charts

What a map it is to paint, though. Just staggeringly enormous, with a dizzying number of countries to play as, from the Aak'u to Zutphen. Everywhere you look, you notice little touches. Some are obvious, such as the way that all but the smallest nations will be made up of multiple locations, allowing for more development options for small countries, with each area having a good that you extract with a Resource Gathering Operation (RGO).

Others are more subtle, such as the increase in the size of the Holy Roman Empire, which is made up of many more states than it was previously, or that zooming in on a location shows individual buildings that you've built, and hovering over them will tell you what they are.

The only problem that I've noticed is that native peoples seem to be underrepresented; there's really not that many of them, particularly in North America, and that's a real shame. I imagine it will improve over time with DLC, but at the moment, they're thin on the ground.

In addition to the traditional fare of grand strategy games, that is, landed powers, you can also play as landless nations for the first time. You can, for example, play as the Bank of Peruzzi or the Hanseatic League and be a kingmaker without ever actually owning any land directly. Landless nations are pretty sparse in terms of options at the moment, but I still appreciate it, as playing a bank seems like ‘playing tall’ (developing your nation rather than conquering others' lands) taken to its logical conclusion.

Whichever type of nation you play as, you'll be up against AI that feels more aggressive than in previous games. In multiple games, I saw France (and it is always France) conquer chunks of Aragon or gobble up German provinces by the pfund. Whether I was fighting them as Spain or allying with them like a remora fish allies to a shark as Holland, they were a major force to be reckoned with. I was at one point able to break EU4 over my knee, but the same strategies don't seem to work here, so be prepared to learn it all over again.

Speaking of learning, EU5 is both the most accessible and most complex that the series has ever been. New automation features allow you to hand off control over taxes and trade to the AI, should you choose, and it's pretty darn good at it, too. This is pretty necessary, as until you've paid your deposit, measured in, conservatively, tens of hours, you're going to have some trouble reading the UI.

It's often not particularly clear how to do certain things or which menu you need to open to do them (I'm looking at you, RGO construction menu). The tutorial is noticeably better than in earlier Paradox titles, but still leaves some things unexplained, which is frustrating.

The only other small nitpick that I have with the game is that it recycles a good number of events and achievements from EU4. I appreciate that completing, say, the Lion of the North achievement is going to be different in this game, but I'd have preferred some fresh challenges. Similarly, as you roll from month to month as an experienced EU4, you'll recognise some of the event pop-ups and their options.

Despite these small issues, Europa Universalis 5 represents a huge leap forward for the series. While writing this review, I've been pondering who I would like to play as next, which economic approaches to use, and what other parts of the world I want to see. Monumentally complex but more accessible than ever before, it is already a grand strategy classic and already a worthy replacement for its predecessor.

Should you play Europa Universalis 5?

Play it if...

Don't play it if...

Accessibility

Accessibility features are pretty lacking in Europa Universalis 5, but there is a colorblind mode, which is likely the most important accessibility feature for a game like this. A high-contrast map mode would be a great addition, as would the ability to change the game's font.

How I reviewed Europa Universalis 5

I played as both Castille and the Netherlands, and also tried playing as the Bank of Bardi, giving me a good look at several different nation types. In addition to this, I took part in colonisation and exploration, the Reformation, and several other key events throughout the game. I played the game on my PC, which has an Intel i7 12700f CPU, 32GB of RAM, and an Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 graphics card.

First reviewed October 2025