It’s been more than I year since I checked on Project Caesar, but Paradox officially announced it as Europa Universalis V… with the tagline Be Ambitious
Johan Andersson put together Paradox Tinto studio in Barcelona specifically to take over and build EUV from the ground up, and with this announcement it looks like all hands are on it. EUIV was basically a money printer for Paradox, 12 good years with big DLCs every year or two. When Tinto took over the roadmap in 2020, and their first release out of the gate, Emperor, was really well received but then they delivered some buggy sub-par feature-poor DLCs during COVID and lost a lot of the good will. I don’t think I’ve picked up EUIV since 2021-2022 personally, but I understand how impossible of a task it is to support such a gigantic simulation for so long while also being beholden to a DLC model that demands transformative but stand-alone changes. I think they were severely limited in the kind of ideas they could implement and bogged down by tons of technical debt that starting fresh is exciting. The game never really ran well in the late game, and to be honest it became a micromanagement mess in a lot of ways.
But starting over seems so daunting. They have to serve a lot of different audiences, like people who will absolutely tear apart every mechanic to find exploits or people who want a deep realistic or alt-history simulation experience. It needs to have enough depth for people who will spend thousands of hours, but also not scare away casuals who might only spend 500 hours or less. It needs to have hundreds of achievements and enough historical flavor to make every micronation in the holy roman empire feel somewhat unique. But Paradox did it recently with Crusader Kings 3, and I thought they did a great job with the launch of Victoria 3. EUIV will not have a long honeymoon and a bad first impression like Cities Skylines 2 could possibly be catastrophic for Paradox, so I can imagine they’re feeling a lot of pressure to get this right.
If EUIV was for strategy freaks, EUV’s foundation promises to be even more freakish. They pushed the start date back a hundred years to 1337 and end date forward to 1837. 500 years of gameplay is going to be like 100 hour campaigns where the world gets radically transformed. They’re replacing a lot of the board-gamey mechanics with sim mechanics. Most notably pops are replacing the dice rolls and governance points. You have to feed people and build a robust political economy to advance. I thought the estates system in EUIV was a good way to constantly have tradeoffs and manage particularist rebellions but it did feel a little tacked-on 6 years into the game. Now, it seems very fundamental to nation building. We gotta keep the polish peasants pacified.
They are also promising new ways to play ‘tall’ rather than just have the game centered around endless conquest. This makes me very happy as someone who never really bothered with stuff like trade leagues or found naval empires more trouble than they’re worth. I’m kind of fond of the convoluted way that trade worked in EUIV but the output was always just money. Here they are promising that trade has some kind of supply line aspect to it, which could get super overwhelming, or be amazing. Check out this long list of tradegoods.
All this before we even get into changes in warfare, colonization, tech trees, government types, religion, culture, diplomacy, characters, and a lot more. It’s just going to be absolutely gigantic. Be Ambitious indeed.
