I’m ignorant, but I love the genre. Please, give me more info.
Yea, but the problem with those is the same problem you had with the events in Crusader Kings, the events were so generic that the countries were interchangable. The country specific events gave you the feel that you really were representing that country.
http://forum.paradoxplaza.com Look for the one on Europa Universalis III
Europa Universalis II was an awesome game. It spans 400 years of world history, with essentially any and every country that existed in the world within that time frame, including several quasi-native American tribal nations, playable. You literally could spend forever playing the game and never end up seeing everything that could happen.
It’s downside was that it was relatively easy to “master” single-play, once you understood the economy and the basics of how battles worked. But that just lead to playing Multi-player, and what a fantastic kick THAT was. 
I may have to get this game. This sounds like what I’ve been looking for.
If you get EU3, make SURE you have the appropriate hardware first. It takes a pretty high-end graphics card, and it will not run on notebooks with integrated Intel graphics. Won’t run on desktops with only Intel graphics chipsets, either. MUST have card.
By comparison, EU2 had VERY low end requirements. Wonderful game that way AND you didn’t need to have the CD in to play it! Always loved Paradox for that aspect. 
Ah, but that only changed with 1.06 (or thereabouts)
Anyway, I pre-ordered the Collector’s Edition on the first day it was available, and got it a couple days before release. I haven’t actually finished an entire game yet (too busy modding), but I have been enjoying it. I’ve gotten used to the 3-D graphics. While they’re not pretty, I think that the ease with which they allow modding alleviates the visual problems somewhat.
I have confidence that, like with the IGC back in EU1, the community will make EU3 into a much better one than what it is now.
So, is this like Civilization?
Not really. Civ is turn based, but EU3 and its ilk are real-time. Also, the borders of the countries are set out in advance based on historically correct borders. It’s up to you whether you want to play historically or forge your own history.
It is like Civilization in that both games are about guiding a country through a couple centuries of growth, exploration, expansion, and conquest. But Civilization is a very abstract game in comparison. EU covers the age of exploration, from the fall of Byzantium to 1800, about 400 years. So it is able to model things like religion, colonization, and international diplomacy in less generic way, and instead try to model the way things worked during this particular time.
So in Civ IV you have religions, but they’re very abstract, by design decision all religions are identical to each other. In EU religion is modeled to reflect the religious wars and conflicts between catholic and protestant, between christian and muslim, between christian conquistadors and pagan natives.
In Civilization you have early sailing ships that move 2 or 3 squares every turn, and a turn can be anywhere from 100 years to 10 years to 1 year, which means it can take centuries for a fleet to travel from one end of your empire to another, plus a “ship” is a very abstracted fleet of undetermined size. In EU you build fleets of ships, keeping track of individual hulls, and ships take a historically accurate amount of time to travel. So it might take a year for a ship to sail from Spain to the Americas. Of course, traveling to unexplored areas was handled differently, and IMHO not modeled very well in EUII, I don’t know if they improved it in EUIII.
And so on. EU is more finely grained and is more of an attempt to model a particular historical period than to create a game that just gives you the impression of passing history.
Thanks mobo and Lemur. That really helped me understand it a lot. The reviews weren’t as informative, oddly enough. If it’s RTS, do you have to be fast? How long is a game? I didn’t like RTS because cpus were insanely fast, though my only experience in this was Age of Empires.
A game is as long as you want- you can play up until the end of the timeline or until you get defeated, or give up and start over as another country or in another time period. In EU3, you can choose the starting period- any day in any year from 1453 to the early 1800s. There are about seven speeds from “Extremely Slow” to “Extremely Fast.”
The game only goes as fast as you want it. You can set the speed for how long a day takes, and use the pause button to stop time whenever. You can configure the different events (like a peasant revolt) to automatically pause the game, too.
(Speaking about EUII here, but I assume EUIII is similar.)
Yes, it is similar. Pausible real time.
It’s not an RTS. Yes, it’s real-time, yes it’s a strategy game. But it’s nothing like Age of Empires or Warcraft. You can set the clock as fast or as slow as you like, and, importantly, PAUSE. And give orders, check out the dozens of pages of statistics, take a look at the map, check over all your provinces, check status of your armies, initiate diplomacy, and so on. Then unpause and see what happens, pausing whenever something happens that you want to pay attention to or think about.
It is, in fact, the port of a board game, or at least the original EU was.
Would a ATI Radeon 9250 do the trick?
Yes, a game I went out and purchased. FASCINATING game, damn near impossible to play in anything less than a month of dedicated gaming.
One advantage to EU3 is that Paradox purchased the full rights to the board game, so that they no longer have to make the computer game match the mechanics of the board game. This should make some aspects of the new version much better than they were in EU2 (I specifically hope naval battles are much better).
I cannot access that without registering. Could you perhaps convey some information from it?
To summarize, you need a minimum of 1024x768 pixels, 128MB of graphics memory and PixelShader 2.0 support. It looks like nVidia cards after the 5200 and ATI cards after the 9500 and X300 will work. I don’t see the Radeon 9250 on the list, so you may be out of luck.
As always, up to date drivers are highly recommended.