I was thinking about getting a Europe Universalis game. I liked playing the first one when I borrowed it, and I was thinking about picking up a copy of one of the games. There were, however, some issues I had with the first one.
I played the first one, and disliked several things about it: it railroaded you into following its historical whims, which was annoying since some of them were impossible to correct or change no matter how kind/noble/agreeable/generous you were. Second, you could never get mroe colonies, so I wound up desperately spreading my 1st-rank colonise around to deny the AI the land. Aside from that, every other nation in Europe hated me despite my numerous attempts to make friends, simply because I was too powerful. Even when I had no aggressive intent or action, I couldn’t form alliances even with the weaker nations, who might otherwise have helped me against, say, France (who kept snapping up some European territories from me).
I played the demo of Europe 3, except that found the graphics butt-ugly and the control interface incomprehensible, and quit right away.
A big bru-ha-ha on the paradox plaza boards are that there’s a divide between those who like the historicalness of hte game (It’s a word) and those, like me, who are happy the game is a lot more fluid. In 3 you have a lot more leeway in acting how you like.
I liked EU2 the best, played it for years. You can always get rid of historical events by simply removing the relevant event file from the folder; one of the great aspects to the game is that is is so easily moddable (most of the stuff is simply in text files).
I can’t play EU3 cause my computer doesn’t have the graphics required.
Playing though a historical scenario can be nice, but it does run into trouble after a few years: the conditions no longer make any sense. I was playing the Spanish when Belgium abruptly and for no reason (and with no warning) revolted. ince they had no taxes and had a high happiness rating, I never did find out what pissed them off. It was impossible for me to raise troops fast enough despite my large income, since those locals basically got huge free armies without paying for them. It was all over long vefore I could move an army over there across the Channel.
The point to the game got totally lost on most people who played it. We are so used to empire building games, that we approach a game like EU with the same mindset as we would use for any other game: build it up as big as possible!
EU was never about building a massive empire per se. It was a historical simulator, where you could make minor adjustments to what happened in history, as the “power behind the throne.” You weren’t expected to totally change history; indeed, the game was set up not to allow that to a large extent.
The computer game had its genesis in a table-top wargame of the same name. The computer game pretty admirably executed the original table-top game in design, look, feel, etc. Most of the rules of the original computer game are taken directly from the table-top game, or are very close approximations (such as the combat resolution tables). This is important because the table-top game, like most such wargames, was intended to simulate actual history.
Of course, even Peter Ebbeson, the man behind the computer version, enjoyed playing empire builder. Most multiplayer games are all about reducing the world to the domination of anywhere from 5 to 10 players. But the “historicity” of the game, an admittedly artificial aspect which has little bearing on such games, was what made it different from playing a game like Civilization or Age of Empires.
And, as noted, the game is easily modded, and there were so many mods available that it was hard to choose what mods to use. One of the very first projects was called the Event Exchange Project, where people could add events with the intent of offering a more realistic flavor: treat the Dutch correctly as Spain and maybe they don’t spend the whole damn 16th Century trying to revolt, for example. This eventually merged with the Alternative Grand Campaign, another project attempting to increase the historicity while offering alternative time lines. Playing the AGC-EEP mod is a unique experience as a result.
And, of course, if you don’t like the historical events, it’s not that hard to remove them, as well as removing the historical leaders, etc. Of course, if you do, the game is quite boring. Trust me, I know.
Oh, I “got” the point of the game. It just wasn’t very much fun being railroaded. If I wanted that, I’d just watch a movie. I wanted to see how things would turn out if I were King.
And If I spent all my time trying to do exactly what happened in history, why bother? We pretty much got that one now.
I personally have found the 3rd one to be the most fun. It is easy to skew away from actual history, but the events do still occationally occur to add some spice.
One change I always make, however, is I set all nations on the same Tech handicap. I always found it to ruin the fun of playing anything but Europe to know that in the long run, no matter what I did I would have no chance in technology. Now, if I do it right, those Huron indians are one heck of a fearsome force.
Again, I can’t speak to the current version, but it was well-documented on the Paradox forums that you could accomplish world-conquest (every nation but yours eliminated) with any nation on the map, including the technologically handicapped American Indians. Just a matter of knowing how to play the game.
