History simulator. Map simulator. Spreadsheet simulator. When I first saw Europa Universalis at a friend’s house in 2009, I think I laughed. I knew it pandered to the super-hardcore history nerd fanbase, full of the types who could list every Gothic tribe and every Byzantine emperor without batting an eye; 14 year old me was far too concerned with being as skater-boy cool as possible to be drawn into this world. And to be honest, I just thought it looked boring.
Almost a decade later, I’ve become exactly what little Aidan didn’t want (sorry dude), and I’m 600 hours deep in Europa Universalis 4. But, I still believe the game is fundamentally boring, and that has rarely wavered. Even on days when I play eight hours straight, my empires ceaselessly and voraciously consuming provinces, cultures, and continents, I never doubt my imminent loss of enjoyment. Why?
Is it the game’s lack of a victory condition? EU4 is one of the very few games out there that you cannot win; you just play until your time runs out. Yet, Minecraft had no wins or losses, and I’ll stand by it being a truly riveting game to the end. Is it EU4’s lack of creative map options? Unlike its grand strategy competitor Civilization, EU4 features only one geographic stage: the earth as we know it. But for me, this was perhaps its greatest selling point; I fell in love with the study of geography because I could draw connections to the colors, cultures, and countries from EU4.
No, the game falls short because, beneath the fluff, it’s utterly simplistic.
On paper, the game lets you go any direction you want: play as a Manchu tribe, you’ve got Ming China to the south, Siberia to the north, and the ruins of the Mongol empire to the west, all waiting to be scorched and pillaged by your horde. Play as Brandenburg-turned-Prussia, and your soldiers have the discipline to conquer the whole world and get home in time for supper. As the Mamluks, you’ve got Arabs at your three o’clock, Turks at your 12, and Ethiopia at your back; with a little finagling, you can absorb them all pretty quickly.
But there’s a pattern here, one that quickly becomes apparent with each successive 30-hour game: Manchurian, German, or Egyptian, it’s all the same. Whoever has the most soldiers wins. Given a tie, whoever’s soldiers have the most discipline wins. The game throws 50 other complex and interrelated systems at you (each one hidden behind a $20 paywall, to boot): trade, estates, development, government types, the Holy Roman Empire, et cetera. But all these affect is how many soldiers you can field, how quickly you can field them, and how rapidly you can suck up the other guy’s land.
There is no development for development’s sake. There is no prosperity for the pure satisfaction of giving your subjects prosperity. And there’s no sustainability for the simple, old-fashioned fun of sustainability. In EU4, if you’re playing tall, you’re playing wrong; that is to say, if you’re not rapidly expanding, you’re probably not having fun, because there are absolutely no rewards set up in the gameplay for anything but voracious territory consumption.
After 600 hours, Europa Universalis IV basically feels like an iPhone game, and it goes like this:
Click three buttons to improve your lot. Do you have more soldiers than the guy next to you? If so, steamroll him. If not, click three more buttons. Rinse and repeat.
And you might say that after 600 hours, any game would be boring. Not so; I have 1100 hours in Civilization 5.
But in the end, I suppose there is there’s a reason I sunk 600 hours into EU4 before really getting bored. Despite all my complaint, a great part of me does love this game. It’s nice to look at, in that inimitable way all maps are. It allows for strategic role-playing covering a nearly unmatched span of time (November 11, 1444 through January 3, 1821). And most of all, the love the developers put into it shows through clearly, in the massive variety of those minor yet complex systems the game features (as trite as they sometimes seem: trade leagues, Holy Roman and Chinese empires, governments from theocracy to dictatorship to mercantile republic, religions from Tengriism to Islam to Nahuatl). The historical realism and background the game provides you truly make the game feel educational, in the a more textured and engaging way than I ever found in a history class (spoken as a history major).
Thus, it is only with great sadness that I say I’m bored of the game after 600 hours. I envy those who have played twice or even three times that much, and still have years of enjoyment left in them. All I can hope is that, if I shelve the game for a couple months, I can ignite that exquisite flame of unbridled history nerd love again.
midnightstatic 