Popping out of hiding just to say that I’m playing Europa Universalis V and I’m so hooked. It’s my first Paradox strategy game and yes, they’ve earned their reputation for being complex. I did the tutorial campaign with Naples and I felt overwhelmed the entire time. It felt like every five minutes I was getting asked to vote on something impenetrable in Latin that the Catholic church was arguing about or I was getting minute-to-minute updates about the random crap my extended royal family was up to (wow, my third cousin just came of age).
I decided to do a new game someplace out of the way so I picked the city-state of Maynila in what’s now the Philippines. That’s when things finally clicked for me. There’s less content for this area of the world so there’s not as many interruptions about the Baltic crusades or whatever. My ruler is the founder of his dynasty so he doesn’t have a million uncles trying to interfere in his life. Since it’s a single location I don’t have to worry about how the Control and Integration game mechanics work, and everyone is 100 percent the same ethnicity and religion and speak the same language so I also don’t have to worry about how to keep a multi-ethnic polity happy. Plus, my immediate neighbours are just as weak as me and the big boys (the Yuan Dynasty, Ashikaga Shogunate, and Majapahit empire) are too far away to give much of a crap about me.
So I spent the first fifteen years just learning how international trade worked as well as getting into the special options for Hinduism. I still don’t entirely get how buildings and development work – frankly, I think the UI is too confusing for this – but I think I’m slowly getting the hang of it. I finally managed to overthrow my sovereign, Brunei, and as part of the peace settlement I annexed a couple of my fellow vassals and greatly expanded my population and territory, so I’m going to have to learn about how ruling multiple provinces works now.
I do wonder if there’s a mechanic for peacefully ending your vassalage. Perhaps you can negotiate something if you become a lot more powerful than your suzerain?
But anyway, this campaign is really fun for me. I may try to unite the Philippines and perhaps add some of the nearby islands – Taiwan, Borneo, Sulawesi – but I’m not sure if I really want to be the sovereign of Indonesia. It looks like it might be quite a slog. I think I’ll try exploring the Pacific and getting to the Americas so I can do the neat counterfactual history from stuff like The Years of Rice and Salt. I’m so looking forward to all this.