#Eu4 the cossacks series#
#Eu4 the cossacks free#

In perhaps EU4вЂ™s smartest move, countries will collect currency in three abstract categories: diplomacy, administration, and military. The trade interface looks interesting, but its secrets are difficult to unlock.The same concepts apply to managing your empire's internal affairs. At that point I decided that maybe it was time for a few decades of peaceful internal development вЂ“ and so Europa Universalis was able to successfully head off the typical snowball pattern that turns grand strategy games into a foregone conclusion. At one point my Russians had expanded so quickly that not only did my neighbors hate me and form an alliance against me, but the officers in my army kept resigning and my merchants kept getting expelled from their trading posts. If you try to turn a military advantage into world domination in EU4, you'll start incurring an вЂњaggressive expansionвЂќ diplomatic penalty every time you conquer new territory. Europa Universalis IV also discourages unrealistic play with penalties. My Russia started with rivalries against local powers, like Sweden and Crimea, but once I got to the New World, I added Spain to that list, which led to a hundred years of, yes, colonial rivalry occasionally bursting into world wars. But the rivals mechanic also makes wars more likely, because those countries know you're a rival, and like you less. Winning battles against those nations will grant more benefits than other nations, so you'll want to attach it to the countries you're most likely to be fighting against. For example, a new diplomatic rivals system allows every country to choose three nations to target. Instead, Europa Universalis IV cleverly uses game mechanics to encourage players to behave in ways that keep events within the realm of possibility and reason. Events such as civil wars and revolutions still exist in Europa Universalis IV, but they're largely randomized instead of pre-programmed.

#Eu4 the cossacks series#

Previous games in the series tended to encourage us to follow reality via event systems that ended up making it feel like history was on rails. What makes Europa Universalis IV particularly interesting is how it tries to build plausible alternate histories. Could Russia have, perhaps, focused more on western expansion and less on European conquest, as in my game, and would that have led them to more completely colonize the west coast of North America? Those mild initial divergences from history, with major later effects вЂ“ my world wars against Spain вЂ“ are the sort of interesting alternate histories that define Europa Universalis. You wouldn't ever expect a game of Civilization to have a historical outcome-its scope is far too broad-but EU4 makes accurate outcomes seem plausible. What separates Europa Universalis from most other strategy games is its intense focus on being historical (for example, you can only play on the real-world map). The real-time aspect isnвЂ™t entirely necessary, but Paradox has been using the system for nearly 15 years now, and it works well enough. This is all done at a real-time pace, but it's much less StarCraft than it is Civilization вЂ“ you'll be slowing, pausing, and accelerating time while making grand strategic decisions about what provinces to target, or where building trade will be most efficient, instead of the tactical choices of most RTS games. ItвЂ™s mostly liberating, if occasionally lacking in validation when it wonвЂ™t acknowledge my total domination with a вЂњYou Win!вЂќ screen. And because there arenвЂ™t any victory conditions apart from a nebulous point system at the end of a game, EU4 is all about self-defined goals within historical settings. From rising empires like France and Russia on one hand, to the Creek in North America, or Ming China, or the merchant republic of Venice, the wide selection provides a solid amount of variety. My colonial wars with Russia comprise a perfectly normal set of events in EU4, which lets you take control of any nation on the map, as drawn in the age of the Renaissance and Enlightenment (from 1444 to 1820).

#Eu4 the cossacks free#

What makes Europa Universalis IV special, in a way that most sandbox-style strategy games fail, is that itвЂ™s unusually free of annoyances and contradictions that get in the way of enjoying alternate histories.