Difficulty:

Hard

Time Spent:

40 to 100 Hours

The Bottom Line:

"Masterpiece"

I used to play turn based military strategy games repetitively until I discovered a grand strategy game called 'Making History', I became hooked on it and it soon became my one of my all-time favourites, but 'Europa Universalis 3 just blows it all out of the water.

I won't go into too much detail about how the game works because that would take about as much time as it takes to play the game. I found the game for only £10 on amazon with all four of the expansions and I thought I would buy it. Turns out it was more than worth the money, I feel like I ripped Amazon off!

To begin, you can start anywhere from (providing you have the expansions) 1399 to 1820 and play as any nation from the incredibly historically accurate map, such as major medieval players like England and smaller rather insignificant nations like Qara Koyunlu (I had never heard of it before and I am a historian) all the way to the first beginnings of the USA and the Qing Dynasty. The game is amazingly accurate in terms of government types and historical rulers. The game follows the dynasties of practically every country that existed from those time periods such as the Lancastrian Dynasty of England to the Romanovs of Russia and beyond giving you a good feeling of immersion.

As for gameplay itself, the game puts you right into the workings of your government. It takes a while to get used to and requires a bit of patience but once you know it all you realise it is in fact really easy to understand. Within your government you control your Court, the Economy, the Military, Religion, the government type itself, Culture, missions and overall national decisions.

Within your court you control your 'Great Men of the Court' these men give you certain bonuses (for a price and monthly wage) such as monthly stability investments.

Within the economy section, it gives you the choices to take loans, modify how much spending goes into improving technology, raising war taxes and maintenance for missionaries and colonies.

The military and leaders sections allow you to decide on unit types, land and naval maintenance and recruiting Admirals and Generals.

The religion section allows you to make religious decisions and claim the 'Defender of the faith'.

The government section allows you to decide on domestic policies, form of government and national Ideas.

The culture section allows you to hire great men and make cultural decisions that affect things such as legitimacy and culture of your regions.

And finally you get missions; missions are given according to the direction your country is going. After a long war it may give you the mission to simply allow your manpower reserves to recover, the section also allows you to make national decisions (these vary depending on the country, for example as England or Scotland (providing you have met the terms) you can form the United Kingdom.

As I mentioned before this is not a complete explanation, there is so much more to it and each decision has a consequence that tie into the other decisions.

The workings of your country however are not so much governed by resources such as iron or coal like in other games, but more in the people, after time you will gain colonists, magistrates, diplomats, merchants, spies and missionaries each of which are spent on different aspects of your game.

Of course money is involved however it doesn't play the biggest part but it is integral as you need to pay for a lot of things. You gain cash from a fixed monthly and yearly taxation rate, you can't change the taxation rates but they are affected by the morale of your people. You gain most of your money from trading by sending merchants to many centers of trade to compete for certain resources (my favourite being tea), this can bring you a massive monopoly in many markets which in turn brings in more money.

You are also effected by your world prestige, infamy, stability and legitimacy of government. A low prestige means you are not so well known and high infamy means other nations hate you and would be willing to attack you. With a low legitimacy you might suffer a rebellion from a pretender challenging your right to rule. And stability is affected by how much abuse you give to your people or to other friendly nations etc. This may cause a rebellion to break out over different things, you might acidentally incite a nationalist revolt or a peasant's revolt and trust me, they are not easy to put down at times.

Diplomacy is one of my favourite aspects of this game, there are so many options and they are not always as easy as just clicking the button and waiting for a response, for instance you can't just declare war for the sake of it (you can but other nations might side with your enemy), you need a reason, such as the reconquest of a province belonging to your culture or religion.

And finally, warfare is very complex, it focuses mainly on manpower, morale and supply. Unlike a lot of games, waging war in Europa Universalis 3 should not be taken lightly, it is very costly and damaging depending on the intensity.

Overall this game will take up a vast amount of your time and social life (like this bloody review) because it is just so in depth it is unreal and with a bit of patience, guaranteed you will not stop playing it. However don't buy it if you are looking for a Total War experience or something simiar, it is a different type of game altogether.