Europa Universalis 5 (EU5) Review – The Most Complex Grand Strategy Game I Have Ever Played

Reviewing Europa Universalis 5 (EU5) feels like one of the most daunting undertakings I’ve ever faced. When the review key arrived in my inbox a couple of weeks ago, I was excited—ecstatic, even—because this game had been on my wishlist for ages. As someone who missed the Europa Universalis IV (EU4) bandwagon—and will never be willing to spend hundreds of dollars on a single sitting of DLC—this was my perfect opportunity to start anew with the franchise (though I barely remember the hours I spent with EU3).

• Genre: Grand-Strategy | Historical
• Developer: Paradox Tinto
• Publisher: Paradox Interactive
• Price: $59.99 | 59,99€ | £49.99
• Release Date: 4 November , 2025
• Reviewer: Nuno Marques (PC)
• Target Audience: Grand-Strategy players, History buffs, and Paradox Games fans.
• Final Score: 8.7/10

After booting it up, Europa Universalis V (EU5) quickly humbled my ambitions. This is one of the most complex, intricate, and downright daunting strategy games in existence—and that’s coming from someone who has reviewed very complex wargames before. To begin this review, let’s go all the way back to the turbulent mid-14th century.

Europa Universalis V takes a significant detour from its predecessor, rewinding the clock to a much earlier start date of 1337, over a century before EU4’s 1444 beginning. For those who may have skipped history class, this places the game squarely at the height of the Middle Ages, immediately prior to two major events. First, the Hundred Years’ War, which pitted France against England and drew many other nations directly or as proxies. Second, the Black Death, which appears in 1346 and ravages Europe, Africa, and parts of Asia, killing between a third and a half of the global population. Suffice it to say, the inclusion of these events dramatically shapes your experience. They provide two major, early challenges that are relatively well-implemented. The effects of the Black Death are particularly brutal, almost negating any economic advances you might have made, forcing you to rethink how you’ll kickstart your economy, which will find itself in major disarray.

Population is another subject that has changed dramatically. Players must now account for the specific types of populace available in any given location: Nobles, Clergy, Laborers, Burghers, Slaves, and more. Each group possesses distinct characteristics, job performance, satisfaction levels, and vastly different needs regarding goods. A massive change from EUIV’s more abstract population system is that in Europa Universalis V, population must physically exist in a location to work the jobs there. As you can imagine, this makes the game’s economic system a huge and abnormally complex affair. With so many variables, it becomes challenging to track everything required to maximize the efficiency of your economic model, which involves population, goods, and prices. Do I think there’s a lot here for those willing to spend the time learning the intricacies of this system? Absolutely.

Speaking of population, Europa Universalis V introduces a new Estate system to the forefront of the gameplay. Players now manage four different types of major population groups, each with its own agendas, needs, and aspirations. These comprise the famous societal pyramid we all learned about in school: the Nobles, the Clergy, the Burghers, and the Peasantry. I should also add that the Crown (you) is considered an Estate as well. Almost every move and decision you make will impact how one of these four groups feels about your rule, and losing their support can quickly become a major hurdle.

These Estates are so central to the gameplay that their satisfaction level and progress are always visible in the UI’s top-left corner. Adding or removing privileges to these groups directly dictates who truly holds the keys to the realm. Promote enough burgher-friendly laws, and they’ll surge in power. Try to quench the nobility’s privileges to force a centralization of power, and their once-unwavering loyalty will start to look rather shaky. This is a massive change from Europa Universalis IV, and the fact that it directly impacts the population system we discussed earlier means politics and economics are extremely intertwined (as they should be). However, it also adds a new, constant layer of complexity and problem-solving you must stay on top of. Believe me, managing those Estates is not easy work—if history has taught me anything, it’s that those in positions of power hate when you try to shake the status quo.

Despite all of the gameplay implications of Estates, I think we need to discuss a major one that might fundamentally change how players view the game. In Europa Universalis IV, players took the role of the intangible and hard-to-define ‘spirit of the nation,’ where decisions were made as a collective entity. This time, by introducing the Estates and making the player an Estate as the Crown, the player is instantly separated from that collective spirit. Your interests are now often at odds with those of other Estates. I felt, almost instantly, that I was playing a game centered far more on my character, or at least my role as the King, and less on my role as, say, Castille or England. This is, of course, extremely realistic to the period. Given that the Europa Universalis series takes place during a time of major power centralization processes, I truly enjoy this challenge, difficult as it is.

Another key mechanic centered around the influence you, as a character, exert over the country is the existence of different control values based on your capital’s location (where the monarch resides) and how close or well-connected other provinces are to it. This control level directly dictates the amount of taxes and manpower you can receive from a province. At the start of the game, it’s not rare to see extremely high values near your capital quickly deteriorate to extremely low ones just a couple of provinces away, making the farthest parts of your country exceptionally hard to control. It’s a fun and sensible mechanic; managing large empires is now a real pain, and ensuring every province provides you with resources is a massive undertaking. This control factor is especially important before deciding to embark on a major conquering campaign. Unless you can establish control over a conquered region—and integrate it first—military expansionism is simply not as sexy or profitable as it used to be.

While the control system is very well made and introduces many new layers of strategic considerations, the integration system doesn’t make a convincing case, in my opinion. Before you can start reaping the rewards of a conquered region, you must initiate an integration process, which requires a member of your governing body to be actively stationed there. This would be acceptable, and would make sense, if the process took only a couple of years at most. As implemented right now, integrating a new province (not a whole country, mind you) will take anywhere between 10 to 20 years. For the entire duration of this integration period, you won’t make a dime from the region you just conquered. This is not a realistic prospect, especially for provinces located very close to your capital. If anything, the integration process should start almost instantly once a major city or province is captured, and be handled by the local authorities. I understand that Europa Universalis V has a greater focus on economics and is trying to limit world conquest, but the system, the way it’s currently implemented, seems a bit too arbitrary. It’s a shame, considering all the effort that went into making Europa Universalis V a living, breathing simulation.

I’d love to go in-depth on the market system, which is yet another major change from Europa Universalis IV, but I’m still trying to figure it out myself. What I can tell you is that it’s a dynamic market system operating on supply and demand, constantly shifting based on the population’s needs (a direct result of their physical movement and migration, as discussed earlier). Fortunately, you can choose to automate this part—which I highly advise doing the first time around—but more on automation later. Despite the effort to bring such an intricate economic and population system to life, Europa Universalis V isn’t without its flaws. The first major one is how instantaneous everything feels. I can’t find evidence of a market-influence delay, but the constant and immediate changes are simply too overwhelming to keep up with. It feels like I’m losing a very interesting part of the game’s experience by being forced to automate it. While it’s easy to suggest simply not automating it, that necessity means I need to have the game paused 90% of the time just to constantly tweak values.

Essentially, these paragraphs aim to show that Europa Universalis V is clearly a game focused on the economic and societal aspects of the time it portrays, delivering an extreme level of complexity and simulation that I doubt I’ll fully grasp for the next hundred hours. Every menu I open, every tweak, and every small change can—and often has—major impacts down the line. Before I jump into the military side of things, I want to reiterate that I love what has been done with the economy and societal mechanics, despite them forming a beast of unfathomable complexity. The fact that these mechanics attempt to portray true-to-life challenges just tingles my brain in the best possible way. Even if I know I may never truly understand how this whole thing comes together, I’m having a blast trying.

The Paradox game series where I’ve clocked the most hours are Crusader Kings and Hearts of Iron. Truth be told, I’ve never played Paradox games for the military side of things. CK3 is all about the medieval politicking that constantly reminds me of Game of Thrones, and Hearts of Iron IV is about trying to change history in some insane, fun way. From the looks of what I’m seeing here, Europa Universalis V won’t be changing that any time soon, and that’s perfectly fine. Average readers of this most illustrious website will know that I’m a tactician at heart. If I cannot be on the field commanding my units, chances are, the military system won’t interest me much.

What does interest me in Europa Universalis V’s military system is how it’s simulated and how it interconnects with the previously mentioned population and economic aspects. In EU5, your levies (the initial troops you start with before transitioning to a professional army) are raised directly from a province’s local population, which immediately impacts your workforce and, by direct inference, your economy. If these troops die on the battlefield (or from starvation and disease), they won’t return to work when the war is over and they are disbanded. This makes warfare a major strategic consideration that moves beyond the simple logic of ‘Do I have a bigger army? If so, let’s conquer.’ Starting a conflict without proper gold reserves and a strong economy can lead to disastrous consequences very quickly. Add to this the limitation imposed by the arbitrary integration time for each conquered province, and military adventurism is highly discouraged in EU5.

I don’t know how well this military system compares to the most recent iterations of EU4, but it’s clearly taking inspiration from the very successful formula of Hearts of Iron IV. By adding the ability to assign major strategic objectives to your armies, it removes a lot of the unnecessary micromanagement required for annoying, simple tasks, like splitting your troops to siege multiple locations at once. You can simply order them to carpet siege those locations, and your virtual commanders will organize themselves to make it happen. You can give your armies several types of operational missions, ranging from more aggressive ones, like attacking and sieges, to more passive activities, like patrolling a certain location. It’s great stuff, and from my experience playing as Castille, it works well enough.

The only aspect I didn’t necessarily enjoy in this army system is the way the levy-raising mechanic works, as levies can only be raised after war has been declared. War requires preparation and often demands the element of surprise, especially if you’re the underdog. Not being able to have my levies ready to strike as soon as I declare war is something I’d love to see changed. I understand this might be for balancing reasons, but instead of limiting when I can raise my banners, the developers could implement a warning system that alerts neighboring countries to suspicious military movement. This idea could also lead to new strategic options, such as pressuring a nearby country to keep their armies at the ready, thereby putting further strain on their economy. Just some ideas to play around with.

To round this section off, I want to briefly touch on diplomacy and colonization. While I haven’t spent extensive time with colonization, both systems are easy to interact with and straightforward. Diplomacy plays out exactly as one would expect, offering several diplomatic maneuvers whose outcomes are determined by a combination of variables. Colonization is a cool mechanic, and if you play a naval nation like Portugal or Castile, you can accrue enough money early on to start sending expeditions almost as soon as the game kicks off. This involves preparing expeditions to first uncover what lies beyond the horizon line, then beginning the slow process of colonization, which includes migrating people and ensuring they have the necessary supplies to survive. They will then send goods back to your markets at home. The same economic and population mechanics we previously discussed apply here as well. Speaking of which, I just want to note that Europa Universalis V has over 20,000 locations.

Now that we’ve covered the major aspects of Europa Universalis V, it’s time to discuss the game’s complexity and its relationship with the automation systems. Let me preface this by saying: while I generally enjoy and encourage complexity in games, I expect that this extra layer of ‘stuff to deal with’ must be matched by the game’s execution. Specifically, the systems should be extremely intuitive and easy to grasp (essentially, by behaving as they do in real-life), and the game needs to provide an excellent tutorial and an amazing user interface. Europa Universalis V delivers and fails simultaneously on all these points. Let me explain, starting with the tutorial.

The game’s tutorial is lackluster, making me feel like an intern being taught by a very busy manager who assumes I’ll learn as I go. While that approach might be true to life, it does the game no favors in onboarding new players. I may have played very little of Europa Universalis IV, but I am very familiar with other Paradox titles, so the User Interface was never a personal challenge. However, I can easily see a new player with zero experience struggling to even make sense of it. The UI itself isn’t bad and generally does a reasonably good job of conveying necessary information, but it has some minor flaws. For example, some buttons aren’t immediately perceived as clickable, and others, when clicked, can be confusing. The most annoying instance is when appointing commanders, where two superimposed buttons (one for the commander’s portrait and one for the army it leads) perform entirely different actions. These are minor annoyances that might only apply to me, but they were worth mentioning.

Two features are sure to help players manage the game’s complexity:

Detailed Maps: Europa Universalis V has map modes for literally everything you can imagine. (All jokes aside, this is great, and these maps are crucial for decision-making.) I just wish the game wouldn’t remove my active map when I want to build something. For instance, when I wanted to place a building and needed to know the available population at a given location, I constantly had to cycle between the map and the UI. When you’re managing hundreds of locations, this can be confusing. That’s my only complaint about the maps; everything else about them I love.

Automation Capability: Players can decide which parts of the game they want to automate. Don’t feel like dealing with the complex economy? Hand it over to the computer. Diplomacy? Internal politics? Warfare? Exploration and colonization? Everything can be delegated, allowing you to focus exclusively on the mechanics that interest you most. You could even roleplay as a mighty King or Emperor, touching only on broad strategic decisions and letting your ministers handle the rest.

Before we jump into the conclusion of this review, I need to discuss the game’s graphics, sound, and performance. I’m glad to say that I have nothing bad to point out, so far. The game is gorgeous; the map is detailed, and the movement of cities and armies makes the whole thing come alive. It truly feels like you’re watching World History unfold with the reverse side of binoculars. Sound-wise, it’s what you’d expect: nothing particularly noteworthy, but good enough to be enjoyable. Is it the Age of Mythology soundtrack? No, but it doesn’t have to be. As for performance, I haven’t noticed any crashes or severe instability, but I would be lying if I told you the game runs at a smooth frame rate all the time—it simply doesn’t. Whenever it’s running at maximum speed, it sometimes hiccups for a bit before presenting pop-ups, or occasionally at the end of the month. While this doesn’t happen constantly, it’s frequent enough to be annoying. I’m not sure how much of this can be attributed to my PC versus the game’s optimization, but be warned that it did happen to me (you can see my specs above).

Final Verdict and Score

8.5/10

I don’t think I’ll ever be in a position to definitively write a proper review of Europa Universalis V, given how vast, complex, and engrossing of a game it is. I could spend all week writing about all of its systems, their strong points, and their flaws. However, after spending the last couple of weeks with it, I’ve come to a few conclusions that I’d like to end this review with:

I think Paradox has something special here. Europa Universalis V feels like a ‘greatest hits’ list of their most impactful and beloved mechanics from each of their previous titles. While everything on display is very solid, I feel that EU5 still needs to lend a helping hand to its players by incorporating more in-depth tutorials that cover each of the game’s more intricately designed systems, especially the economy. By automating this system, players are missing out on a major part of the experience.

The best way to describe Europa Universalis V is ‘enormous,’ ‘grand,’ and ‘complex’—all the things I expect when playing a grand strategy game. In this regard, EU5 delivers in spades. Best of all, it took risks when it could have easily stayed closer to the proven formula of Europa Universalis IV. So far, those risks have paid off.

For me, the ultimate definitive mark of what makes a game worth playing after I’m done reviewing it is my answer to this question: ‘Do I want to keep playing it, even though I probably won’t be creating any more content for it?’ I’m happy to say that the answer is a resounding ‘Yes!’

It’s a ‘Yes’ not because I think Europa Universalis V is some kind of transformative grand strategy experience that’s nearly perfect and going to change the genre the way Europa Universalis IV did over a decade ago. It’s a ‘Yes’ because what’s on display here is a very rich mix of features that pleases the historian side of my brain. It’s a game full of possibilities to play around with History in a very loose manner, which is something we don’t often see in more realistic wargames. It’s also a ‘Yes’ because I want to keep going back and see how tweaking some strategic decisions will impact the way I’m playing a given country.

I hope you enjoyed this review. Let me know what you think, and if you will buy Europa Universalis V!”

Game Score Breakdown

• Core Gameplay & Mechanics: 9/10
• Content: 9.5/10
• Graphics & Artstyle: 8/10
• Sound & Music: 7/10
• Technical Performance: 7/10
• Replayability & Value: 10/10
• Monetization & Business Mode: 7/10

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