It’s almost always been the case that you have to wait a good long time between grand strategy and 4X sequels, but those gaps have stretched longer and longer for Paradox Interactive’s most notable series. After the 12 year gap before the much meme’d Victoria 3, it’s now almost 12 years from EU4 to the announcement and reveal of Europa Universalis V as well.

Of course, the tone of that wait is different, when EU4 has had a steady flow of expansions over the years, but with a numbered sequel comes the opportunity and the expectation of great changes.

The first thing to note is that EU5 shunts the starting date of the game even earlier than before, going back to 1337 and capturing more of that transition from the late Middle Ages and into the Renaissance. More importantly, it also brings a few truly seismic world events into the game’s opening few hours (depending on how much you pause the game, that is). The Hundred Years War kicks off between England and France literally months after you hit play, and then just a decade or so later the Black Death rolls through the world, adding an early game crisis point that you’ll feel the ramifications from for decades to come.

As the Black Death is first reported, you’re given a few choices for how to react. You can just keep going business as usual, keep up trade, allow migration and for people to just do their things, or you can enact various isolationist policies. Spending influence you can try to source cures, you can draw all the Nobles to a little retreat that tries to keep you away from the riff-raff, you can close down cities, exile the infected, make scapegoats of the healthy, and more. It’s difficult to know what the best path to take here is – obviously there’s no actual cure or vaccines at this time, so you will feel the pain, and it’s almost just about how long you want to drag this out for. Playing as Portugal, I got the plague fairly late on, but with my choices, I still had that wash of green within my borders much longer than Spain, Morocco or England did. I clearly bungled it…

And that flushed my economy right down the pan, to be honest. With trade massively impacted, production all starved of workers, and my coffers completely dry, I needed a slew of big loans from my nobles, which were then being traded back and forth to foreign banks, and my attempts to micromanage this were barely keeping my kingdom afloat.

Thankfully this is where I could lean on one of the major areas of improvement within EU5. There’s much more automation available to you which, in the long run, will give you more freedom to play this game in the fashion that you want. Initially I was micromanaging trade, putting in deals to meet the needs of the pops and production, quickly clicking through on individual deals, but then seeing them quickly become unprofitable as supply dried up – this can be applied to trade in general, as well as to specific markets. Similarly, I was somewhat fearful of raising taxes across nobles, burghers, and the common folk, lest they get all angry and rebel, but got into such financial straights after the pandemic that I told the AI to take over and rake in enough cash for me to start recovering. There’s further automation for other areas, with the Automation AI based on the same AI leading computer-controlled nations, so you likely will want to keep key areas under your control or supervise, otherwise you could end up in a pseudo spectator mode – albeit one where there’s regular events to make decisions on, where foreign policy and wars are in your control, and so on.

Of course, each of these areas has also been revisited by Paradox Tinto to reconsider how they work, whether you put them in the hands of AI or furiously click your way through menus yourself.

Let’s stick with trade for the moment, which is defined not by your cities, ports or nation as a whole, but rather by markets that can cross country divides and regions. For Portugal, my two markets were both based in Castile, both of them with their own tendrils of supply and demand. To a certain

At the heart of any nation is its people, and EU5 has population units more similar to Victoria 3 or Imperator: Rome. There’s some core demographics to pay attention to here, as they’re broken down by their class and working status – from Nobles down through Laborers to Slaves, if your nation’s laws allow them – while there’s also their religion and cultural background to consider for the harmony within your country. When looking at your government, these are broken down into Estates for Nobles, Clergy, Berghers, Commoners, which you’re trying keep their broad approval and happiness. Often times, you’re having to make concessions, especially if (as a monarchy) you hold a council and need their approval to push a new agenda. Approval gradually shifts in a given direction to a neutral position,

Those decisions that you’re making will tie in with the Societal Values system, reviving the policy sliders from older titles in the series and replacing the Ideas of EU4. This breaks particular issues down into polar opposites – Spiritualist vs. Humanist, Land vs. Navy, Aristocracy vs. Plutocracy – and measures along these scales. Naturally, you enact policy and make decisions that nudge things one way or another, but there’s tons of these elements to keep in mind.

One of the ways you can affect societal change is with your Cabinet, a small cadre of officers that you can send out to perform tasks for you. One key tenet is the notion of Control throughout your nation. While your ruler or government presides in the capital, the further away from the seat of power you get, the less it really matters to the people living there, the more like Monty Python’s Repressed Citizens skit it might feel like, and the more difficult it is to exert your influence (and gather taxes). Building roads improves Control as the time to travel and the kind of closeness to cities is improved. They can also be set to work restoring your country’s Stability after a period of upheaval or with a looming threat, work to develop a province, try to convert a region’s populace, and much more. They’re an extension of your will and gradually get things done.

In general, there’s a step away from having certain traits and skills be treated as resources. Instead of having to save up points before you can send your advisors on a new task, instead they have a particular skill rating that affects how well and how quickly that job will get done. This does mean that their impact feels much more gradual, but also gives you more flexibility to pivot as world events take place.

We’ve barely scratched the surface of many elements of Europa Universalis 5. For example, we didn’t get stuck into a war, so didn’t try out the revamped military systems, which borrow ideas from Imperator: Rome for having formations, while requiring you to have logistics and resources to keep an army marching. Meanwhile, there’s a new antagonism rating that could see alliances spring up against you if you’re too aggressively expanding through the world. Then there’s playing through the longer passage of time, as technology works through individual trees for the starting Age of Traditions, through the Age of Renaissance, Discovery, and beyond.

Europa Universalis 5 remains a deep and complex historical grand strategy game, and it certainly looks to build and integrate, not only idea that came from a decade of updates and expansions to EU4, but also to some of the more fundamental shifts and ideas that we saw in Victoria 3 and Imperator: Rome. Importantly, there is that on-ramp for newcomers, with the deeper automation set to lift some of the burdens of leaning the ropes, at the same time as lifting some of the micromanagement that can become a chore deeper into a campaign.