An intially complex and fun RTS set on a global scale

User Rating: 8.1 | Europa Universalis II PC
EU2 is a grand real time strategy game, you can take control of pretty much any state or nation although some of the world is blanked out (terra incognito) and cannot be revealed, other areas are blanked out at the start but later on can be revealed, you control your nation in the grand campaign from 1419 to 1820, needless to say alot can happen in this amount of time.

Graphically, EU2 is solid, nothing spectacular, it does the job and thats fine enough, like the other paradox games it might not look good but you can run it on a low end PC which is a plus for alot of people.

The sound in the game is great, a huge soundtrack (over 2 hours) with a plethora of musical styles which changes over the course of the game , for example it starts with renaissance sounding music (upsala and falalala!) which will eventually change into classical music that is quite popular even today with the likes of the four seasons etc, cannot fault its sound track and the soundeffects do the job.

Gameplay, this game is very complex compared to your standard RTS, the idea is to take things slow, instead of rushing , building a huge army and declaring war on anyone you can. The game is played out in real time and every few seconds will pass as a single day in the game, you can offcourse raise the speed and thankfully pause the game and issue commands.
The game reflects what perhaps is the realistic capability of the nation/state you might choose to play, for example if I go the Byzantines who are in their death throes its just a challenge to stave of the Ottomans, venetians or Hungarians let alone retake the old territories of the empire.
And even if you go one of the 'big boy' nations such as the Ottomans,Mughals, English ,French ,Spanish etc you will have difficulty taking over the majority of the world due to a 'bad boy' rating which is imposed for any aggressive wars you might fight or extensive demands such as demanding lots of territories, the more BB score you have the more likely the AI is to attack you, or even form alliances against you which can be very troublesome to deal with.

As I mentioned the game is complex, you have to look not only to preserving your nation/statess borders, but raise armies , build navies, your army/navies ability to fight well will be dependant on your technology rating (so theres another aspect of the game ill talk about later) the level of maintenance (lower maintenance less combat worthy) leaders (a leader will enable an army to fight better / suffer less atrrition in enemy territories), your monarchs military rating and offcourse troop composition (cavalry, infantry and cannons).
The research aspect of the game is done via sliders in the budget, you manipulate the sliders to direct how much gold will go into what area, if your a landlocked empire say, Austria you'll want to invest heavily in land tech instead of naval tech to gain a better land based army to deal with your neighbours should any wars arrise. There are also other bars in the research to consider, these are infrastructure (determines how far you can promote tax officials and so on to increase tax base and lower revolt risk) trade level (helps with Merchants determines how many can be sent to a centre of trading) and stability.

Stability is a hugely important part of the game, the max is 3 but it frequently drops through events and if you start wars with people sharing the same faith or lacking a casus belli.(cause for war)
Once your stability drops revolt risk shoots up and if your stability gets to -3 expect some serious revolts and maybe civil war with provinces perhaps rejecting your rule and establishing their own identity by breaking away from your empire.
To increase stability you can up funding into stability slider but still it can take up to a game year and usually longer to get back a single point of stability for your realm.

The final part to the budget is how much gold goes to the treasury , its best I find to consider this to mean how much gold is minted, because you may think oh ill just put this slider really high but this can devestate your economy by increasing inflation which is very difficult to get rid of (later on in the game with a high infrastructure rating you can promote officials in each province to lower inflation by a single percent!) which can mean much higher prices for everything thus nullifying the reason to have a huge income.

Quite complex compared to the standard Civ style game!

Not only this but in the realm settings you can choose to develop your countries ideals, for example you may want to go from a aristocracy to a plutocracy or if you wish to acquire missionaries to convert heathens within your borders you can adopt a more narrowminded approach by moving the slider in that direction, however you can only make these changes sparingly througout the game and it causes a drop in stability each time!

Also you gotta look after your countries merchants, you acquire these (the amount dependant on realm sliders which i just briefly mentioned) and send these off to Centers of Trade, the more you have the more money you get, but it costs money to send them and each time one is sent it has the potential to knock a rival's merchant out of that center of trade, and if you have a high trade research level you can acquire a monopoly and get a huge amount of income, but damage the trade of that center, if a center has too little competition it'll disappear!.
The further a Center of trade is from your realm the more profitable it is, but the more costly to send a merchant , and even then a rival can if they have sufficient trade tech block your merchants from using that Center of trade if it falls within their borders!!

You also need to look to religious aspect of your realm, provinces which have a different religion to your state religion are more likely to revolt and dont give much to your state as a province with the same religion (most provinces are likely to be both different religious wise and culturally which can mean a low status province) so you may wish to convert them, this takes a very long time and costs a bundle, and if the missionary fails there'll be a riot.

Next up theres the colony aspect to the game, you'll probably desire to create your own colonial empire and most likely will if you're playing France, Netherlands, Portugal, Spain and offcourse, England.
You get a certain amount of settlers each year dependant again on realm settings, and you can send them of to a province you wish, but they only account for 100 people and you'll need to send many over time to get at least 1k population to make that province a state in your empire which is beneficial because it means you have expanded your tax base, you can promote another official to lower inflation, and its both your state religion and culture!
However it can be difficult to acquire a new province for your empire, especially when the conditions arnt right, you might have to instead 'grab' a province with a trade outpost (instead of colonising at 100 pop each time via 1 settler) due to high level of native unrest or just to stop rivals claiming that province.
If natives are bothering you though you can send in your army to slaughter them, although this will mean that there will be little to no population bonus onto your 1k state so you may have to keep on sending more and more settlers to up the population to an acceptable amount.

The war aspect of the game is played out by creating your army (size of which can be dependant on the total manpower in your empire), merging it all together, if you have a casus belli (a reason to go to war) against a potential target (for example byzantium has a permenant casius beli against Ottomans and Duchy of Athens) then declare war on them, you do get other casius beli's throughout the game via events or people leaving alliances,refusing to honor pacts etc, then you can march your units into that territory, but you can linger because theres attrition in enemy provinces which gradually destroys your army (usually 1% a month but can rise exponentially in winter), so you're forces will start besieging a fort in the province, the smaller the fort quicker it is to overcome, eventually it'll be replaced by your flag, but you dont own that province yet, you gotta tke over many provinces , But you may bump into an army in a differnt province and the two armies will duke it out, usually an army is not destroyed but demoralised and retreats and will have to wait before attacking again.

Eventually you can make a demand or get a offer dependant on your war scoare, more province and battles won higher war score, and usually the better conditions and maybe even a province or two extra for your empire.

And theres diplomacy, you only get a certain amount of diplomats a year (again dependant on religion and realm slider settings) you can make various standard proposes (alliance, improve relations declare war etc) and offcourse like most strategy games its an important aspect.

Another interesting part to the EU 2 game and the paradox games in general is the use of events, these will pop up at specific dates depending on nation/state presenting a few choices and each with its own consequences, for example as the Byzantines you get an event quite early on were you can create better relations and in a desperate attempt to get allies against the Ottomans convert state religion from Orthodox to Catholicism! And there are the random events which can mix things up quite nicely, such as colonial revolts (which may in turn lead to creation of USA if unchecked) or even beneficial ones such as a province converting to state religion.

It may seem afterall this that theres not much of a purpose, well there doesnt seem to be much of one after you dominate the game which is a flaw, but you can choose to acquire 'victory points' for a final score by undertaking missions with various scores and difficulties such as 'no france in north africa' as a difficult one or a 'keep xyz province for 5 years' as a easy one.

As you can see , EU2 like the paradox games is complicated but extremely indepth and fun, my faults with the game are, after all this time its still prone to crashes, and there can be some strange bugs such as a crash on a specific date whcih will require editing the save game file to have past this date, and after a while the game can get a little boring if you're in such a position that you cannot be challenged by the AI, but at the end the score is a nice touch with the graphs but so much more could be done (its a better touch in EU3 with a timeline and summary of the major events under each monarchs reign within your realm). Another fault is that newbies to the game are going to have a rough time, its intially complex and thus overwhelming with the amount of things you need to do in the game, but after a few goes its somewhat simple compared to alot of the other paradox games (heres looking at Victoria revolutions and the combat mechanics of Hearts of Iron 2/doomsday/armageddon!)
All in all, a very very good game.