Europa Universalis 5 Review: I spent 20 hours in the 14th century and still haven't truly started playing

Europa Universalis 5 is Paradox's most ambitious strategy game — and almost certainly their most unfinished at launch. You can see the scale of what it wants to become. You just can't feel it yet. After dozens of hours trying to save Castile from the Plague — and ourselves from boredom — here's how the same game can be both a breakthrough and a letdown.

Europa Universalis 4, released in 2013, was a complete game from the start. You began in 1444 — the age of expansion. Wars of succession, trade rivalries, colonial races — all of it kicked off almost immediately. Monarch points, national ideas, trade nodes: everything worked within the first few hours and gave you a clear direction: expand, grow stronger, take risks.

DLCs added layers — government reforms, deeper diplomacy, regional mechanics. The game kept growing outward, becoming more complex and occasionally bloated, but its foundation never shifted. The pace stayed brisk, and the opening decades of any campaign almost always gave you something worth talking about.

EU5 starts differently. Instead of momentum — nothing. Instead of a scramble for power — waiting for the simulation to get out of first gear. It's not infuriating, just... numbing. Time moves so slowly that by the time you reach your first meaningful event, you could have lived an entire personal life: fallen in love, gotten married, gotten divorced — all between two in-game years. Each month on screen stretches into real minutes of waiting.

And yet, from the very first hours, EU5 doesn't feel like "the next installment" — it feels like an attempt to reconstruct the idea of a grand strategy game from scratch. Population is no longer background noise — it's socially stratified, reacts to your decisions, gets sick, revolts, and demands representation. The economy isn't built on abstract "province income" but on production chains and market access. Politics stops being a button-press exercise. Even war has become a last resort and an enormously expensive one at that.

The problem is that in the early game, all these systems operate somewhere off-screen. They're running, recalculating, feeding into each other — but they don't ask anything of you. Your nation won't collapse if you wander off and do something else. You're not managing processes; you're watching them run themselves.

Unlike EU4, which tracked time in days, EU5 runs its calculations by the hour. Every second, the game is recalculating thousands of parameters — from army positions to the movement of individual merchants. The computational load has grown non-linearly.

Where a game-month in EU4 would fly by in 5–7 seconds, EU5 takes half a minute to process one — even on high-end hardware. By mid-campaign, as population grows and the economy deepens, a single month can stretch to two minutes. One comment from a forum thread stuck with me: in the time it took someone to reach 1550 in EU5, they could have played through two complete EU4 campaigns.

The new start date makes it worse. The game opens in 1337. Just to reach 1444 — the familiar starting point from previous entries — you first have to survive the Black Death and put in 15–20 real hours. What could have been a rich tutorial period, full of systemic depth and entertaining chaos, has instead become a blunt, immovable wall. Things got bad enough that the community released a mod called Daily Ticks, which restores EU4's day-tick logic.

My twenty hours were spent as Castile, from the start through 1438. The early stretch I can summarize in one word: dead. The state is weak, the treasury is empty, and the game offers no real direction. For a while I just wandered through menus, trying to figure out what to grab onto. Eventually I decided it was too early to fight and leaned into diplomacy — defensive alliances with Aragon, Portugal, and the Pope. On the economic side, I was building and developing here and there... but seeing the results of those decisions fifty years later is, honestly, a test of patience beyond reason.

The one moment that felt like actual content was the Plague. It was genuinely dramatic: half the population wiped out in two years, the economy in ruins, the army gone. I never fully recovered from that nightmare even over the next fifty years — but at least I had to think, had to act.

Everything else was just the calendar turning while I did other things in the background. Over a hundred years I had a handful of distractions: a couple of civil wars (one over a pretender, one from the nobility) and attempts to make sense of the quest system. Yes, there is one — but it's built around long-term objectives with no satisfying "arrive, see, conquer" loop like you'd find in other strategy games. And switching your goal resets all progress toward it.

The core idea of EU5 is replacing abstract "monarch points" with a living population simulation. Instead of magical buttons, there are five social classes: nobility, clergy, bourgeoisie, workers, and peasants. Each has its own role and its own path upward. Workers, for instance, can climb into the bourgeoisie by developing cities, while the conservative nobility barely shifts over decades.

These people are what drives the economy. The more developed a province and the higher the standing of its residents, the more complex their demands: peasants need grain, the bourgeoisie want spices and luxury goods. Upgrading a market raises a region's attractiveness, and specialization pays off better than spreading thin. One strong textile center outperforms a dozen small workshops — especially when the raw materials (wool or flax) come from the same region. The logic is clean: silver goes to the treasury, olive farms go to the people.

The problem is that the game barely explains how to steer any of it. The interface becomes a black box. What exactly generates "trade potential"? Which buildings contribute to it? Why are you only paying interest on loans with the principal never going down? You find out everything through trial and error. EU5's economy runs deep and, from what I can tell, honestly — but the developers couldn't be bothered to present it in any coherent way.

Control is the parameter that limits your expansion. It radiates from your capital and fades with distance, and terrain and weather directly affect it. Conquering a far-off province can be pointless: control drops to 15%, and tax income approaches zero. Integrating a distant territory into your administrative system is a decade-long project even with a capable official in place.

Building roads gives a real, numerically visible boost to Proximity. A well-developed road network tightens your grip on regions and extends your trade radius, letting you connect inland markets to distant foreign ones.

Interestingly, the interface layout draws less criticism than you'd expect. The real issue isn't structure — it's volume: there are simply a lot of moving parts, and early on that's overwhelming. But that's a complaint about EU5's complexity, not about how that complexity is organized.

The military system models the transition from medieval levies to professional standing armies. A soldier dying on the battlefield is a citizen lost in his home province. EU5 follows through on that premise. Provincial populations decrease during wars and mobilization; when levies are dismissed, survivors return — exactly as many as made it back.

With advanced military technology and tradition, light levies handle rebels and raiders just fine. Regular troops retain experience between battles and training; levies are raised fresh each time and need retraining from scratch. That's sound design. But there's no tactical control over armies — this isn't Total War. Everything comes down to passive and active stat calculations.

There's one glaring oversight: you can't disband your levies with a single click while keeping your professional army intact. If you have five regular units and twenty levies, dismissing forces disbands all of them. That's not a design choice. That’s a flaw. Or maybe I just missed the button buried somewhere in the feature avalanche.

The prestige system is a textbook example of a mechanic abandoned without the tools to use it. Mine sat in the negatives constantly, and events that could raise it appeared once every three to five years with no explanation attached. As it turns out, this is a universal problem: the mechanic made it into the game, but the management tools didn't. That's not hardcore design — that's unfinished work.

Paradox has always had a habit of dumping everything on the player at once, but EU5 does it without even a gentle ramp-up. Technically, the barrier to entry looks low — a fifteen-minute tutorial and you're off. In practice, the difficulty curve goes vertical immediately. It's no surprise the most common question on forums right now is: "So what am I actually supposed to do in the early game?"

And here's the real trap: in the early game, there's simply nothing to do. Forget modern titles that try to hook you with content in the first two hours and keep you busy for the next six. EU5 asks you to accept that the first 15–20 hours aren't a "game" — they're an agonizing lesson in how to coexist with the game. Only once you've made peace with that might things start to get interesting.

EU5's performance isn't just a technical issue — it's part of the experience itself. The Clausewitz 2 engine has been reworked for DirectX 12 and multithreading, but hourly simulation takes its toll: at launch a game-month takes 40–60 seconds, stretching to a minute and a half to two minutes by the 1500s, with a noticeable freeze at month-end while population, market, and tax calculations run. Owners of top-tier hardware report CPU temperatures hitting 90°C in performance mode. No hardware upgrade will fix it — it's an architectural choice, and you pay for it in time.

Visually, EU5 is tidy in that understated Paradox way. The map is noticeably richer and more alive than EU4's — improved lighting, more locations, 4K support. It's not a technological leap; it's solid, genre-appropriate craft where the map matters more than spectacle.

The music is one of the few areas with nothing to complain about. Former Paradox lead composer Andreas Waldetoft left the studio in 2023 and was succeeded by Håkan Glänte, who had already worked on the Victoria 3 soundtrack. The result is 26 orchestral tracks spanning every historical era — from medieval plainchant to Baroque symphonies — developed with input from ethnomusicologists and music historians. One of the tracks is an arrangement of the first prelude from Bach's Cello Suite No. 1 (Johann Sebastian Bach) — unexpectedly fitting, and worth listening to outside the game entirely. The soundtrack is on Spotify and Apple Music, and it's one of those rare cases where game music holds up on its own terms.

Players used to the pace of Europa Universalis 4, the explosive openings of Stellaris, or the personal stakes of Crusader Kings 3 will feel a vacuum in EU5's early hours. Instead of growth — inertia. Instead of expansion — waiting. Instead of a tense opening — slow preparation for something that might happen eventually. It's no surprise the community increasingly calls it a "paid beta," with cautious predictions that the game's "real" state won't arrive until 2026 or 2027. Some regions were outright broken at launch: Japan's Sengoku Jidai was described as "unplayable" due to bugs; China sat frozen in permanent stagnation instead of its historical dynamism.

The paradox of EU5 is that after twenty hours, there's still not much to say about it. Its thematic core — the Age of Discovery — begins in the 15th century. But you have to live to see it. Not in-game time. Real time. I didn't build an empire — I got stuck in the prologue to one. Everything worth experiencing is somewhere ahead, buried under dozens of hours of simulation that offers neither density of events nor any real sense of forward motion.