Something different this week! The folks at Paradox Development Studios were nice enough to give me a review copy of the upcoming Europa Universalis V (releasing Nov. 4) ahead of release so that I could share some thoughts! For the unfamiliar, Europa Universalis is a series of strategy games covering the early modern period (traditionally 1444 to 1836, but now 1337 to 1836). While the series title implies a European focus, these games have become over time increasingly global and really represent an effort as global historical strategy. So this is a game where you play as a state (or state-like entity) from the end of the Middle Ages through the Age of Exploration through the rest of the early modern period to the period of the American and French revolutions, though obviously as your game develops, those revolutions may or may not happen as historically they did.
First, I should note that if you have not read it, I did an extended series on this game’s predecessor (I, II, III, IV) as part of my Teaching Paradox series – indeed, as the very first of the Teaching Paradox posts. You don’t need to read that series to understand this post, but I will be referring back to it.
Now while I have had EU5 for a couple of weeks at this point, due to teaching and research demands and such, I have only been able to give it a limited amount of time – about 30 hours – so I’m going to call this post a ‘first impression’ rather than a ‘review’ or ‘analysis.’ It should, of course, tell you something about this game that “about 30 hours” is a “limited amount of time.” In particular, I play these games relatively slowly (with a lot of automation turned off so I can make granular decisions), so those hours have only gotten me in one run to about 1450 (more on that below) which is hardly all of the game – hell, it is barely past the start date of EUIV. So what I want to do here is first present very briefly my answer to “is it good?” (yes) because if I don’t, I will be asked about it endlessly, and then get into the real meat of the question which is how the historical assumptions of Europa Universalis V differ from those of its predecessors.
And finally, in the interest of full disclosure, I did receive a review copy of the game and obviously I have interacted with the folks at Paradox before and will continue to try to bully them into making Imperator II.
Is it Good?
Yes.
Now, I should do some table-setting here: I am the kind of player who, as you will recall, really enjoyed Victoria III on launch. That title was divisive, in part because of a heavy emphasis on relatively indirect systems (building factories changes your demographics which changes your interest groups which changes your politics, that sort of thing) and because it de-emphasized the ‘war-game’ aspect these games often have. So please understand that in the battle between ‘more spreadsheets’ and ‘less spreadsheet’ when it comes to Paradox games, I am firmly in the ‘more spreadsheets’ camp. With that said then, let me qualify my previous ‘yes’ with:
Europa Universalis V is likely to be divisive: it is much more systems driven, much less ‘gamey’ in its design, much more granular (and thus slower) and substantially more complex. I also imagine that, once the game hits the general public, players will find ways to break those more complex systemic interactions in amusing ways – I imagine there will be a lot of balance patches and tweaks. But I think it needs to be stressed that this is not EU4.5. One of the things I really like about Paradox is that they do not tread water in design from one iteration to the next: HoI4 takes some big risks compared to HoI3, VickyIII is quite a jump from VickyII and so on (Crusader Kings has experienced perhaps the least of this from II to III, but the gap between CKII (2012) and CKIII (2022) is still a lot bigger, design wise, in my view, than, say the gap between Total War: Rome II (2013) and Total War: Pharaoh: Dynasties: Colon (:2024)).
The word I am going to keep using for this “lots of complex interacting systems summarized by charts of charts with charts and charts” is ‘crunchy.’ It isn’t soft and smooth, it fights you a little bit, but there’s a lot of texture and complexity there.
The design is relentlessly crunchier: monarch points (“mana”) are gone, but this isn’t a full switch back to EUIII‘s ‘gold does everything’ system. Instead, monarch points have been replaced by a bunch of interacting systems that blend Imperator and VickyIII‘s approach to pops and buildings. Estates, an add-on mechanic in EU4 are now central: buildings and pops contribute to income but also estate power which shapes politics and cultural values. Culture-Value Sliders are back (something I missed from EUIII) but they now move gradually rather than in clear increments and are shaped by policies and privileges. In short, abstract game mechanics have been mostly replaced by interwoven systems which the player influences only slowly and often indirectly: if you build a lot of burgher buildings (like, say, fabric guilds in your towns) you will slowly empower your burghers and as they become more powerful keeping them happy will demand shifting your government in ways they want (but their increased power will enable you to do that). In a process that might take, you know, a century or two to happen, if not longer.
The game is also unapologetic about its complexity and frankly suffers a little from a UI that is clearly straining to do what it needs to. Basically all of the major country screens (‘diplomacy, economy’ that stuff) have sub-screens (usually 2-3), some of which open sub-sub-screens. Every ‘location’ – the ‘sub-province’ territorial unit – has its own buildings and economy and pops which all have their own screens. I never found it too hard to find what I was looking for, but if you are the kind of player who cordially hates that sort of thing and likes how minimal it is in CKII and III, well it is maximal here. I imagine that we’ll see over the course of this game’s post-release development, some stream-lining of UI and a few more tooltips (some of the economy tooltips take a minute before you understand what all of the icons mean), but unless they streamline the systems – and please do not streamline away the systems – this is always going to be a crunchy, complex game.
The developers are clearly aware of that because they’ve added the ability to automate most of these systems. If you don’t want to individually set trade priorities in every trading center, you can automate them. If you don’t want to individually plan out your economic buildings, you can automate that too. If you don’t want to set estate-by-estate tax rates to crush the wealth of your aristocracy so that they can’t stop you when you tear away their feudal privileges, you can set a ‘keep them happy’ automation on that as well. The clear intent here is to let players, especially of large territorial empires, focus their attention as they like.
I can’t say how well these automation systems worked because I did my run as the County of Holland, which can’t really afford to automate its economy, because economy is all it has. I fiddled a bit with trade automation and found it worked well enough prioritizing profit in my market, although I did end up reserving a chunk of trade capacity (you can do that!) so I could make sure specific industries got the raw materials they needed (the trade AI seems, reasonably enough, to focus on the profit of the trade but can’t consider the downstream economic effects of, say, a purchase of wool that makes a small profit, but the wool then goes through two production buildings to come out as dyed fabric where the big profit is in production. But again, easy enough, as the player, to notice the warning up at the top of the screen telling you your market is short on wool and to just reserve some trade capacity to buy wool). To judge by the performance of AI countries, the automation seems to work OK, but I imagine players will find exciting ways to break it shortly.
So that’s the ‘review’ part: this is a much more systems driven approach, which blends some of the best ideas from Victoria III, Imperator, and EUIII and EUIV and I think it works really well. I suspect it will turn off players who prefer less systems-driven, less-crunchy experiences, but the automation may soften that blow. There are some rough edges, some systems that clearly need balancing and refinement and such, as you’d expect for a game this complex at launch. But it works pretty well, I had no stability issues, it ran well for me (shocking, given its complexity) and for the folks who want a crunchier, systems-driven approach, this will be your jam. And France is a monster which must be destroyed.
I suppose if we must do number-scores, we ought to do them in true ACOUP fashion, so I give EUV a rating of Part Vc out of a ‘three part’ series.
On to the history part.
The Historical Viewpoint of Europa Universalis V
Perhaps the defining conclusion in my series on EU4 was that it was, fundamentally, a game about states. The state was the primary actor and frankly non-state actors – people, estates, non-state peoples, companies and so on – didn’t figure in very much. This was a reasonable frame for a game about the early modern period to take, but it was a frame and like any frame, some things must be left out.
Europa Universalis V is a game about nations – that’s the closest ‘single word’ I can get to in English. It’s better to say Europa Universalis V is a game about the place where people and polity meet. And indeed, the game actually specifies this: one of my repeated complaints with Paradox games not named Crusader Kings is that there’s often a lack of clarity as to exactly what the player is playing as: the ruler? the state? the people?
EUV specifies, at the beginning of the tutorial: you play as the “spirit of the nation.” Again, nation is an awkward word, but there’s none better. I admit, when I saw that, I laughed out loud because it was such a direct response – intended or not – to one of my critiques (particularly of Imperator, which shares its director, Johan Andersson with EUV). But the game sincerely means it: you are not the state, but the point at which the state and its people meet.
This is a game about the conjunction of people and polity, regardless of if those people make up a ‘nation’ or even a ‘state.’ It thus embraces more kinds of polities than EUIII or IV did: non-territorial companies, nomadic polities and so on. But it also embraces more about polities than they did: this is not just a game about states but also a game about people. ‘History from above’ is not gone – the state (or polity) – is a major mover and shaper of culture and events and Big Men can do Big Things in this game, but EUV introduces ‘history from below’ in dramatic fashion.
I think this is clearest in how it handles estates. First, a bit of background in my experience: I was playing as the County of Holland, with the aim of forming the Netherlands (to include all of the Low Countries) and eventually becoming a Republic. But Holland doesn’t start out as a plutocratic republic because this game starts in 1336: it starts out as a ‘feudal’ aristocratic imperial prince like dozens of others, albeit with a bit more ‘town’ orientation. But to hit the ‘become a republic’ button, you need to crank the ‘plutocracy’ value really high and to do that, you need a bunch of privileges and reforms that prioritize your burghers (the rich townsfolk) over your aristocracy and to do that you need to break the power of the aristocracy.
And doing that is a mix of bottom-up and top-down systems and what is really neat and new is that the aristocrats will try to fight you. The economy of your country is shaped by buildings. You build most of the buildings, but your estates build them too and not all of the buildings they build are helpful: most of the estates (aristocracy, clergy, burghers, everyone else) have a building which does basically nothing but increase their political power. Meanwhile, their chosen economic buildings add to your tax revenue, but also add to the estate’s revenue, and thus their power – power that in turn makes it more and more costly to tear away their privileges or preferred policies. And those privileges and policies in turn lock in the ‘values’ sliders (which now change gradually rather than in increments) so as long as you have a bunch of old-style late-medieval privileges and policies, you are never cranking the sliders from ‘decentralized’ to ‘centralized’ or from ‘aristocratic’ to ‘plutocratic.’
So you have to tear away those privileges, which costs a scaling amount of stability based on how powerful the estate that has them is. And of course ripping away the privilege of a powerful estate is going to both infuriate them (they each have an independent approval meter) and tank your stability (which lowers the approval of every estate) which is very likely to trigger some exciting unrest. What I like is that those privileges are not just “the aristocracy gets more powerful and the state gets nothing” – they almost invariably represent a tradeoff. The aristocracy gets more powerful but their levies are larger (because they’re expected to do vassal service) or the clergy gets more powerful but you get a bump to literacy (because they’re running your schools) and so on.
It creates a system where you can see why a country might become ‘trapped’ in a stable but stagnant situation, because change means losing the advantages of stability and the upsides of those tradeoffs immediately, but realizing the benefits of reform only gradually.
This is further emphasized with the control mechanic. Every ‘location’ has a control rating, which scales the manpower, tax revenue and other goodies you can get from it, representing how deeply that location is actually penetrated by your government. Control scales with travel distance from the capital (by sea or land), which in part incentivizes vassal states (better a vassal with good control paying tribute than you with zero control). But it also creates this quite granular feel of how state control radiates from the capital and from cities and towns, so while states have formal, rigid borders, you can absolutely have hinterlands in which state power barely exist (replacing the very binary core/not-core distinction from EUIV).
Beneath those systems people matter a lot more and you engage with them more directly. Buildings have to be staffed to work, which means they need pops of the correct social status to run them. If there’s demand, pops can promote between social statuses (somewhat slowly) to fill workplaces, so a modernizing country is going to be draining out its peasantry to fill growing towns, which in turn is going to change social, cultural and political balances. Warfare is also more closely tied to pops: levies are drawn from your pops now (professional soldiers come from the manpower pool, now generated by buildings which must be staffed) based on their type: burghers show up as heavy infantry, aristocrats as cavalry, peasants as peasant levies.
The new early start date (1337) gives the game a chance to just hammer you out of the door with the importance of population in its new systems because just about as you’ve got your economy humming the way you want, the Black Death comes along and kills a ton of your pops, causing absolute havoc in your economy, a potent, forceful reminder that your economy is run by people and those people fundamentally matter.
Pops in turn have needs (they want certain goods) and get angry if they don’t have those goods and that frustration links back into the estate system and influences control which in turn impacts how much you can gain in resources from a given place. Pop satisfaction, based on estate opinion and if they are getting needs feeds not just into unrest but also into control, so it is important not to just keep your pops alive, but increasingly as the game goes on to keep them happy.
Pops matter so much, one of the ‘country types’ is a society of pops: a polity that is a people without a defined territory, used for a lot of non-state peoples. I was initially really concerned when I loaded up the map and saw that much of the Americas was ’empty,’ but then realized, looking closer: no, it is nearly entirely filled by societies of pops, with whom you can still do diplomacy, declare war and so on. They’re just non-state polities that don’t have hard defined territories (but do exist in places – there’s a mapmode to see where they are). There are also ‘countries’ which are businesses with a collection of buildings. I don’t think either of these are playable (yet?) – I couldn’t seem to select them to play as – but even just interacting with them creates a really interesting texture to the game and a reminder that there are historical actors here that are not states.
Which I am definitely, in this screenshot, using to better the safety of the Empire, by which I mean build out my economy.
Conclusions
One of the things I appreciate about Paradox’s development style is that they take risks: while there is certainly a Paradox ‘house style,’ the numbered sequels in their core lineup always take big swings at trying something new. Sometimes it works great (Crusader Kings II and III), sometimes it needs a bit of refinement to find itself (Victoria III) and sometimes it doesn’t ever quite come together (Imperator, Sengoku). But each time they are pushing, trying something new and embracing new viewpoints on what history can be in the process.
And I think Europa Universalis V is a substantial step in that direction. It is still EU – a bit more state-centered than CK or Vicky – but the historical vision here encompasses a lot more. It’s also clear that EUV was built from the ground up to really be a global grand strategy game. It’s not perfect at that (the institution system returns, with a better design but maybe not a perfect one), but now that not only non-European states, but non-European non-states are actors in the game with their own agendas and interactions, it’s made pretty great strides.
I’m excited to see where this one goes. Now, to be fair, I am a guy who really likes Victoria III, which is also very ‘crunchy,’ so Europa Universalis V is pitched right at my kind of player. I do think that Paradox is going to have to think, in terms of future development, what their ‘introductory’ game is, because I’d imagine someone coming in with no experience of a Paradox game is going to find Europa Universalis V pretty challenging to pick up (but rewarding).
But I’m also excited to play more and see how these systems interactions change over the various ages (the game breaks its tech tree into chronological ‘ages’). There are a bunch of key variables – crown power, control, market prices, and so on – which I can see get significantly tweaked either by technologies or modifiers linked to specific periods, which I can imagine really shake things up pretty dramatically.
But beyond just the ‘more systems’ approach, I’m really impressed by the effort, in a game that remains on some level fundamentally about states, to bring in a broader vision of history, which encompasses the historical agency of far more kinds of people and their competing interests and visions. I think I’ll have a lot more to say about this game as time goes on, both as I have more time with it and as it gets tweaks and more content.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I still need to figure out how I am going to cut France down to size.
Neato. My wife has it on pre-order, so I expect we will be losing quite a bit of the next year or two to this game.
I guess the one thing that fills me with apprehension, and this is more game-as-game than game-as-history here, is complexity worries. I’ve been involved with paradox games for a very long time. I remember when Peter Ebbison posted his World Conquest as Trebizond all the way back from EU2. And the more complex the system is, the more ways players find ways to really break the game, run rings around the AI which can’t keep up. You can up the difficulty settings to compensate, but that only works so well.
More crunch usually leads to more broken games. In some ways, I still like the ultra-railroady systems that Eu2 had, where THIS is your culture and THESE are your cores and if you want to expand beyond that, have fun with all the unsolveable unrest. You could still break the game, but you had to work a lot harder at it.
I share your concerns. I’ve already heard about the tactics like collapsing the prices of basic goods in your market to make construction much cheaper or destroying every non-capital fort in your country because foreign occupation is not as bad as having a rebel-controlled fort. I don’t know if they are valid in the current version, but there should be more of them lurking in the systems.
Possibly not inaccurate in a narrow sense? Perhaps whatever it is which motivates it mechanically should stay unchanged, and instead the in-game deterrent should consist of a massive collapse in popular and elite confidence afforded to the clearly mad sovereign who is intentionally wiping out years’ worth of hard toil and the only protection people outside the capital have from pillage.
https://acoup.blog/2021/12/10/collections-fortification-part-iii-castling/
To be fair, this is at least fairly realistic as well. One of the main checks and balances against people deliberately collapsing the price of things in the real world to cash in on the results (i.e. insider trading) is that people tend to get royally pissed off by it.
That isn’t really insider trading. Insider trading is using private information to make a profit – like, hypothetically, a member of the court knowing in advance that the king is about to declare war, buying a load of swords, and then selling them again when the news gets out and the price of swords goes up.
Thinking “I need cheap timber to build more forts. I will therefore import a load of timber, which will reduce the price” is really just good sense.
insider trading is a bit narrow of a term – it notably, in reality, doesn’t cover government policy. As technically all, say, parliamentary debates aren’t inside information – they’re broadcast on live TV after all- it’s just that very few traders who aren’t actually sat in the room as part of their second job pay enought attention to actually judge which way a debate is going far enough in advance that they can bet on the market in the same way that, say, the chief whip can.
I’d argue that the difference between what I’m describing and ‘true’ insider trading is narrow enough as to be virtually indistinguishable to the general public.
Most people tend to hold a dim view of politicians that use their position of privilege to enrich themselves at the expense of the people they’re supposed to be serving (though I will concede that there seems to be a significant proportion of the population who seem to think this is a-ok).
“destroying every non-capital fort in your country because foreign occupation is not as bad as having a rebel-controlled fort”
– something similar though not identical to this has actually taken place, though – thinking about the 14th century campaign of Robert Bruce against the English occupiers of Scotland, which consisted of Bruce taking one English-garrisoned castle after another and then destroying them, because the value of keeping a castle with his own men in it was less than the risk of the English retaking it.
It doesn’t strike me as an inherently weird or unrealistic strategy.
That may be a good strategy with castles you’ve captured from your enemies, but if you start destroying the ancestral homes of your allies and loyal subjects you will soon have neither.
They were royal castles mostly, not aristocratic strongholds.
I believe the French at least attempted to pursue a similar castle destroying strategy during the early years of the Hundred Years War, and in this case they were absolutely targeting the manor houses of minor nobility, small fortified monasteries, and so forth, because they were much harder for the original occupants to defend than they were for English troops or brigands.
thinking about the 14th century campaign of Robert Bruce against the English occupiers of Scotland, which consisted of Bruce taking one English-garrisoned castle after another and then destroying them,
I wonder if that was a strategy the Mongols ever used? Since one of the issues that the Mongols faced is that they were a lot less populous than many of their adversaries. (And yes i know they addressed that to an extent by recruiting Turkic peoples into their military, but still, seems to me they would have been at a population disadvantage taking on the sedentary societies of China, the Middle East, Central Asia or Eastern Europe).
I’ve certainly read that claim made before; that Chinggis was well aware that they did not have the numbers to endlessly be circling back to deal with rebellions in prior conquests and this was the motivation for their policy of destroying any region (usually by completely annihilating the urban population less a few useful artisans) that defied them on the first offense.
Bruce was fighting a campaign against a foreign occupying force, though – I don’t think the Mongols ever faced that situation. The English had better siege craft, a bigger army, and were, in general, better in pitched battles. And as OGH keeps saying, the object of mediaeval military operations is to deliver the siege.
So if Bruce had decided to garrison, say, Roxburgh after capturing it, rather than slighting it, what would that lead to? He’d have to split off part of his force to garrison it, and as soon as the news reached England there would be an army on the way to retake it, which would lead either to a siege or to a pitched battle to avert the siege, both of which Bruce wanted to avoid. The one situation where he didn’t manage to avoid it was Stirling; instead of capturing it by surprise, as Bruce had Roxburgh and Edinburgh and all the others, his brother Edward laid siege to it and agreed with the garrison commander that he would surrender if not relieved by midsummer. This was common practice in war but absolutely contrary to Bruce’s doctrine, and he was reportedly furious about it. And it did indeed lead to a pitched battle – Bannockburn – though Bruce won.
I don’t know if the Mongols ever deliberately slighted castles once they’d taken them, to avoid giving future rebels a potential stronghold. The Mongols didn’t take many castles IIRC. They captured a lot of walled cities, but they did not then destroy the city walls, and I suspect this was partly because it would have been a huge effort – city fortifications in China and the Middle East were colossal compared to the typical castle.
Those seem pretty historical, though? Importing a ton of some good you need in quantity was a pretty normal thing to do (the medieval English had a wine import tax payable *in bowstaves*, for example, to ensure a massive and ongoing supply of a critical military item).
And it was very normal for kings to limit options for fortifications in their territories, or even destroy forts outright, to prevent excessive rebellion. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slighting
seems fun, I dabbled in vicky 3 but my computer was just not strong enough for it really so im still at heart a mostly Crusader Kings Man.
Border Gore For life!!!!!
Been doing Manor Lords recently which is fun, Finally Got myself stable enough to actually beat up the Bandit Raids.
If It ever gets to fully Complete your take on it would be nice but hey You are always a Delight.
Still Im happy to hear that you are happy for it, might have to try it out eventually. Thank you for the Review.
Does this count?
https://acoup.blog/2024/04/19/gap-week-april-19-2024-manor-lords-first-impression/
When you talk about paradox’s willingness to make big swings, I can’t help but think of Stellaris, where they have made multiple big swings in individual patches to rebuild major parts of the game.
As for eu5, while it looks neat, I probably won’t go for it, mainly due to the complexity.
Can’t wait to have a computer powerful enough to run this. The interest groups giving me the run around is easily my favorite part of Victoria 3.
It runs slightly better, I think, than Victoria III.
Oh really? I thought it was way more complex than Vic3.
If it does run better than Vic3 then I am in luck.
As a guy who does not have an access to the game but spent far too much time following pre-release: it is still crazy demanding regarding CPU (lots of people enjoying good performance on HoI IV or Stellaris with all the newfangled systems added over the years are worried that they will not be able to meaningfully play EUV) and for some inscruitable reason it needs 8GB of video memory (it is fine if GPU itself is relatively weak, just needs to have VRAM). But on the other hand it seems like the current build does not have huge slowdown in 1800s compared to 1300s so if you can start it comfortably you can play till the end
That’s the dream, but I can’t meet the minimum specs for EU5 atm.
OK, I know that I’ll eventually play this, and based on what you’re saying here, I might do so rather sooner than I thought. More importantly, this is a game review that made me laugh out loud several times (“I give EUV a rating of Part Vc out of a ‘three part’ series”), so kudos on that!
Your impressions is honestly the most positive I’ve seen. I *like* most of what I’ve seen of the game, but honestly, my concern is the start date: EU4 already suffered from what I think was a problem that everything was “solved” by the 1500’s and the “good bits” (IE: the 1600’s/1700’s) worked much worse, and I don’t think that will be better by picking an earlier start date. (which honestly feels as much a “change for change’s sake” as anything else)
Also the cost, and I’m not sure my computer can handle it. But I’ll probably buy it… god knows I’ve bought every other Paradox game. (yes, even March of the Eagles)
That change in start date is one of my main concerns as well, especially given Paradox’s system of DLCs which tend to add ways to make the player more powerful thus potentially making it possible to “win” the game even earlier
Was your aim “eventually becoming” a Republic, or “staying” a Republic?
Did your aim to “form” the Netherlands include keeping the Netherlands, or not?
“But Holland doesn’t start out as a plutocratic republic because this game starts in 1336: it starts out as a ‘feudal’ aristocratic imperial prince like dozens of others, albeit with a bit more ‘town’ orientation. But to hit the ‘become a republic’ button, you need to crank the ‘plutocracy’ value really high and to do that, you need a bunch of privileges and reforms that prioritize your burghers (the rich townsfolk) over your aristocracy and to do that you need to break the power of the aristocracy.”
That quote I read in the blog post, but it did not answer my question. This is why I asked the question.
The scope of the game is 1336 to 1836.
Holland did become a republic sometime in 1580s, without actually making a big deal of it – but stopped being a republic in 1806, and has never since been one.
Holland expanded to Netherlands, twice, but lost them both times – 1579 and 1830.
Did Bret set the goal to prevent Holland from ceasing to be a republic in 1806?
I like spreadsheety games a lot but there’s *one* thing in EU5 that worries me. The amount of automation that the devs are proud to have included. That, to me, screams that there tons of systems that were included “just because”, but not made fun to play with, so the devs hid them behind a layer of automation. That this can be turned on-or-off doesn’t reassure me, because it means the devs are aware this systems aren’t fun to play with – and I tend to take devs criticisms of their own game seriously. Trying to make a game that pleases all audiences is going to end up pleasing no one.
Rather, doing this screams like a failure of abstraction to me. Note that abstraction isn’t about realism, but about which things in a model are simulated explicitly, and which are represented via other concept. Having a “population growth rate” stat for a province is an abstraction of keeping track of what proportion of it is couples between the age of 18 and 40 who don’t already have a baby under 2 years old.
So many modern games eschew abstraction in favour of keeping track of thousands of variables that are all too indirect and too minor for the player to deal with without overwhelming micromanagement, so the game automates management of those in some way, so the player is left with as few details as if the game had abstracted things properly, but with a layer of automation in the middle that makes it far more obscure and unpredictable.
I agree, though i do note that theoretically one advantage of a computer game is that you can to some extent use the computer to keep track of various variables and so don’t have to rely on abstractions and the loss of fidelity that implies…
But OTOH, simulating those things have a tendency to run away in silly directions anyhow.
True. If the simulation is built such that you only interact with the top layer (call it A) but then A impacts stuff in layer B, which impacts stuff in layer C, which over time changes B and that also changes C then you have a simulation of “depth” 3. If you can never tweak B or C directly then this is “restrained” and could lead to interesting emergent behaviour. If you don’t get it quite right, it could also get very “silly” and have the optimal strategy diverge wildly from what’s realistic or intuitive. Aka, it breaks.
But even worse (IMO) are simulations that are both deep and unrestrained; ie, where you can directly intervene at layers A, B, and C. But doing that is tedious (and the devs know it) so you have the option to automate it. Now this has all the problems of the the restrained simulation, plus an additional one where the player has to choose between respecting their own free time, and endless micromanagement for a small in-game reward. To paraphrase Sid Meier: don’t give players an incentivise the fun away.
And this is the common problem with poor abstraction abstraction. It leads to micromanagement which masquerade’s as complexity, but without being anywhere near as satisfying. “Ara: history Untold” basically fell into this trap. I hope EU5 doesn’t, but I’m fearful they did just that.
>> To paraphrase Sid Meier: don’t give players an incentivise the fun away.
That should have been: “Don’t give the players an incentive to optimise the fun away” but I lost a verb in the middle….
Sid Meier never reckoned with a gamer as powerful as me, who can optimise the fun out of any game.
I think PDX know it already. HoI3 is the example of players have to choose between micromanaging everything like an almighty god, or just let the game play itself. HoI4, and now Vic3, strike the balance between player control and automation, and all players like that. I think the devs get it and they will continue it in EU5.
I think it’s more of a “pick and choose what you think is fun” approach? I’ve been watching gameplay from a lot of different folks and they all seem to be picking different things to automate versus manage manually based on their interests.
Well, part of the logic that Paradox uses here is that a thing can be fun to do at a small scale but then once you have a lot of it it can get overwhelming and/or tedious, so you want to do it manually at a small scale and automate it once you scale up.
That’s still a failure of abstraction! Have the mechanics be tied to something that doesn’t scale as the game progresses then. Eg, have setting trade priorities by something that’s controlled over your whole nation, not on a sub-province-by-sub-province level.
Tbf some things have to be harder when the country gets bigger, otherwise playing Ireland will be as simple as playing China. I guess we can have automations for whole China, but able to focus micro Shenzen for various reasons.
Why do they have to be harder? *As a mechanic* it makes sense that (eg) maintaining cultural uniformity over a multi-continental empire should be harder than in a small nation. But that’s not the same thing as making it more laborious *for the player* by vastly increasing the number of clicks required. Having a simulation with a good model (with appropriate abstraction) is precisely how you make some goals harder in some circumstances without making it more monotonous.
In fact, this seems to be a direction that EU5 is already taking with the “control” abstraction. I hope that they use this (or something similar) as a limit to player autocracy and, as a consequence, the number of clicks needed for effective rule in larger polities.
Take the parallel situation, where one plays as the ruler. Player-counts very much involve themselves in the running of their individual holdings, just as real counts did — whereas player-emperors either delegate these tasks to vassal kings/dukes/counts, or significantly delegate them to the automation the running of their demesne, much as real emperors were overwhelmingly absentee landlords, delegating to officials.
But there’s no reason why this delegation can’t be simulated with abstraction. Rather than relying on AI powered “automate” button which will always be frustrating and suboptimal. And I don’t mean suboptimal because it values its own goals over yours, I mean that it’s supposed to act for your own best interest but fails to do so as well as you could.
Indeed That’s exactly how CK handles things. There’s no “automate” button for constructing buildings in your vassal’s vassal’s holdings. For the most part you simply can’t do it, or its so disadvantageous to do that you don’t want to do it. That’s a much better way to model delegation than giving you the option between either building everything yourself for peak efficiency, or completing the game within one lifetime. I’m having flashbacks to EU3 where the optimal way to play was to click on every province in your colonial empire one-by-one to build canals (or was it post offices?) for a string of minor bonuses.
Okay but like, that approach is itself robbing the agency from players who DO want to take an uncommon level of interest in specific points and locations, no? What if you have a specific area you want to focus effort in on – suddenly you’ve ended up with the awkward horrid victoria 3 war system again, where you have an unenjoyably limited and hampered ability to direct events that you NEED directed.
Do you really *need* unlimited ability to direct events? Player autocracy is problematic. Do you need to manually control where every soldier aims in a battle? No, at some point a cut off and an inability to control every detail is a good thing. Because it means that success depends on you coming up with a better plan, rather than outplaying the AI by microing better tactics in the fine details of that plans implementation.
Where should that cut off be? Letting players choose sounds good in theory, but in trying to make something that appeals to everyone you risk making something that appeals to no one. If I’m buying a game, it’s because I want to play the dev’s vision of how that game should be, not just be given a bunch of tools and left to make my own game. I already have Unity for that.
Based on the dev diaries it seems like some of the “non-state” country types are playable at launch, specifically building based ones like the Hansa, some Italian banks, and Japanese samurai clans, army based ones like some of the mongol empire successor states, and navy based ones which I think only exist as pirate nations that can spawn in the 1600s which you can switch to if you choose. Societies of Pops aren’t but they have said they plan to make them playable once they figure out how to make it work with the core systems, which I am really looking forward to. Overall they’ve built in a lot of systems to represent non state actors or less traditional types of states, and even if they’re not heavily utilized at launch I really hope they use those as a foundation for future development. I’ve seen some suggestions that the Mamluk Sultanate in Egypt might be better represented as an army based country that also happens to control territory, for example.
Spiffing Brit has a Hanseatic league playthrough up on his channel. Naturally, he breaks the game in a pretty satisfying way, so it looks like those non-land-based entities might still be fun to play.
sickos.png
It’s so refreshing that, after 15 years of so of Paradox making their games simpler and simpler (to the chagrin of many ‘hardcore’ fans), the last few years they seem to have made a conscious decision to crank up the complexity again. I really hope it pays off
If you like Vicky III then you should check out the better politics mod, it really makes the intersection of state and people come to life. It adds a lot of granularity to interest groups and their ideologies which gives a ton more room for politics to evolve over time.
This is good news. My primary concern is still having to go through the Black Death every game. I did one last binge of EU4 and constantly riding out the semi-random events and situations were part of what killed it for me.
I think next time you see Johan, you should suggest Imperator II as the Paradox Starter game. You have pops, trade, economy, characters, and politics but all at a less complex level than Vicky, EU, or CK. If they improve the war side a little bit, you could even add HoI to the set.
The setting makes it unlikely for a starter game IMO. Too many unknown factions to play as for the “lay” gamer. Everyone’s heard of France, England, and Russia; and even precursors like Prussia and Castille have wide name recognition. Pergamum or even Ptolemaic are far more obscure names to a general audience (the crowd that reads this blog obviously leans the other way). The closer to contemporary a setting is, the more people find a natural hook. Or you go for the RPG angle like CK did, because having a focus on people rather than ideas (like states) is also an easier hook.
I assume there will be other primary (i.e well researched and tested) start dates.
Yeah, something like 1587 (right in the middle of the playable era) should be great. The Spanish Armada, Russia’s Time of Troubles, the Jurchen unification, the finale of the French Wars of Religion and of the Sengoku Period, the Thirty Years’ War is just around the corner. The Mughals are at the very beginning of their golden age, while the Ottomans are at the very end of theirs. In Persia Abbas the Great is ready to reverse the decline of his country, while in the PLC Sigismund Vasa is defending his throne from the Habsburgs.
Devs so far are hostile to the idea of multiple start dates – that means double the amount of map to update each new patch and their telemetry shows only a small proportion of the campaigns is played in anything but the default start date. So it’s just a bad business decision – at least from what they can see.
I wonder if the game’s systems allow one to approximate a preemptive quarantine by being as autarkic as possible when you start out, and if that actually meaningfully curbs the plague’s spread by the time it arrives.
In order to make it worth it, of course, it would have to save a sufficient fraction of the casualties (i.e. since it had killed a third of the population on average, then, say, halving the toll to 1/6th should be noticeable) to make it worth foregoing a century or so of wealth accumulation via trade – and the theory that the social disruption from swathes of the population dying off had actually been the building block of future prosperity would have to not be true. If you are not aware of that theory, here’s a recent example in a teacher’s manual.
https://teachingsocialstudies.org/2025/01/14/the-black-plague-a-positive-spin-on-death/
As I understand it, I have an interest in economic history and read a bit about it in my spare time, the Black Death appears to have only had long term positive per capita effects in parts of North Western Europe like England or the Netherlands.
For example, I had read here ( https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/accounting-great-divergence ) that:
On other places I also encountered the claims that in Eastern Europe the Black Death had led to an intensification of serfdom, the nobles did not like changed land labour ratios reducing their bargaining position on the labour market and thus resorted to coercion; and that in the Middle East there was not much evidence for such things as wage increases despite that they suffered so heavily it took centuries for their populations to recover.
Note, I am not fully sure how robust all of those studies are. I know of a few economic history studies which had later been overturned by new data or better methodologies; though, as at least the European portions of the Black Death appear to me relatively well studied, I suppose they are likely correct*.
Either way, I doubt a Paradox game would accurately model potential long run positive effect plagues could have upon income by such mechanism as indirectly raising the average age at marriage for women by raising female wages.
* Or at least outside of that part about ‘people working more days per year’.
I don’t know where that assumption comes from; I recall that Pseudoerasmus on his blog had mentioned that this was invented as a solution to explain why that the estimates of daily wages and annual production diverged from each other, I don’t think we have enough certainty about such estimates to reject the possibility that this divergence is the result of uncertainty in estimated daily wages and annual production.
Though, it could be there are other reasons to assume that ‘people started to work more days per year’ after the Black Death which I am unaware of.
Though the role of the black death in particular wasn’t mentioned, my understanding of the history of Russian serfdom was that it indeed followed the opposite course as in Western Europe, having relatively strong customary rights and freedom of movement for peasants in the medieval period which were subsequently eroded by increasing aristocratic power.
This view has been contested by Anton Howe with respect to England in the following post:
https://www.ageofinvention.xyz/p/age-of-invention-the-century-long
I haen’t played them, but a friend who I trust on such things said that EU5 was “A better sequel to VIcky2 than Vicky3 was”
I’ve thought a lot about what is it that PDX games are about.
I’ve come to land on the term “governmentality” as what you play. The concept might be too broad to be useful, but I like it. I guess a polity is another word to use, but I like governmentality as it emphasizes its function as a way to govern and to direct resources.
EU5’s high level indices, like control, stability, legitimacy, the capacities are about the power to govern.
In CK, Vicky, Imperator and HoI… it’s all about the player trying to steer the governmentality and to apply their own agency into it somehow.
> a rating of Part Vc out of a ‘three part’ series.
The best kind of rating 😀
> what is really neat and new is that the aristocrats will try to fight you.
Neat! The one thing that most bother me about (early release?) Victoria 3 is that you can strip landowner’s privilege willy nilly. As if all countries in the world were able to just go straight to industrialization without even considering existing structures, but they just… Didn’t. I think you have even praised that struggle in Vic2 and I’m glad it’s back in EU5.
> I am the kind of player who, as you will recall, really enjoyed Victoria III on launch
What touches me wrong about your reviews on modern (post 2018) Paradox games is that you seem to only touch what the game is platonically trying to do, instead of what it’s actually doing. I mean it’s fitting when you’re talking about history that inspire decisions for that game’s design, but my impression on reading it is that you say that the game IS like that. It’s quite a whiplash after seeing other people’s reviews on the game, and YOUR review on other games, which seems to criticize actual implementation more closely.
“frankly suffers a little from a UI that is clearly straining to do what it needs to”
That worries me. All the Paradox games I’ve played are like that, trying to cram in way too many buttons and never properly polishing the UI. The strategy for EU4 was honestly pretty simple- take out some loans, build a big army, conquer a weaker neighbor, then use the plunder from that to repay the loans and prepare for the next war. The game just throws a bunch of little things hidden in the UI that make it seem more complicated than it is. EG, you have to know that the tiny little red dot on the units represents attrition and will kill them massively if you have too many on a tile. you also have to know where to click the button to reduce inflation, and where to click the other button to reduce unrest in conquered provinces. None of this is any kind of brilliant deep strategy, it’s just a tough learning curve to even get started.
It’s the difference between complex and complicated. Complexity is simple rules interacting in myriad ways that make it to predict the future, the learning curve is gentle but goes on for a long time, and is where interesting strategy lays. Complicated is a myriad of systems that all do simple things, but overwhelm through sheer numbers and obfuscation, and has a learning curve that’s brutal at the start before quickly plateauing out. Bad UI/UX can just be bad design, but sometimes complicated games just have too many disparate elements for good UI/UX to even be possible.
So, I’m not sure if this was quite what your talking about as a faction that is just company that you couldn’t select, but the Spiffing Brit has released a video where he plays as the Hanseatic League.
And as per usual, he’s broken the game, reaching #1 in the rankings before it’s even 1400.
Actually, previous games only spanned till 1821, not 1836. This I declare this review literally unplayable.
EU2 was 1419 to 1819, EU3 was 1453-1789 at release, then -1821 with Napoleon’s Ambition, and then 1399- with In Nomine.
On Perun’s gaming channel there’s a video of Victoria 3 called ‘Fixing Russia with human rights and paperwork’ – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S6dLby0zt58. It involves introducing a modern bureaucracy, education, and ending serfdom. It looks like it’s going to be a disaster until the last moment, when Russia goes into one of the biggest economic booms in history.
OK, I have never played a Paradox game before, but up until now, I was under impression they were considered “gold standard” in terms of historical authenticity and such for this genre (and for gaming in general) – in no small part because of our host’s repeated praise. Yet, it’s only taken me 6.5 minutes to pause the video, mouth agape – at the point where he opens the Politics screen, which shows that, according to Paradox, Russian Empire in 1836 had “No Migration Controls” (perhaps true for external migration, but not internal – just look up “the Pale of Settlement”) and also had no education system, no healthcare system, no internal affairs and no police force. The short answer is that factually, all of this is completely false.
I suppose the longer, (unjustifiably) generous answer is that as far as the education and healthcare systems go, the effective coverage of either by 1836 was low enough that for the majority of the population they might as well have not existed. However, that is still gravely misleading and erases significant efforts (if belated and insufficient) efforts already made by then. I.e. smallpox vaccination had been introduced into the Empire by Catherine the Great in the middle of 18th century, and the imperial bureaucracy began funding widespread vaccination efforts from 1800s – finally managing to make smallpox vaccines mandatory by 1885. The first Russian union of healthcare (“sanitary”) workers was formed in…1820.
Likewise, education system in the modern sense (with schools administered by the state rather than the churches, and open to everyone rather than military-related personnel, as was the case in the middle of 18th century) was also introduced by Catherine the Great in the 1780s. Of course, it was badly underfunded (receiving about 1/6th of the funds the Imperial Court had at the turn of the century) and only achieved ~5% literacy by 1800, but still, 550 various schools (including a dozen or so universities) across the empire is not “No System”!*
Meanwhile, the idea of a lacking police force or “Home Affairs” in 1836 is just ridiculous. The latter was (re)founded in 1826, in the wake of the Decembrist Revolt, as the Third Section of His Imperial Majesty’s Own Chancellery. As for the police force in general, well…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police_of_Russia#18th_century
The English Wikipedia cuts off after that for the 18th century, but the Russian one notes that this 1733 decree established police in the 23 largest cities, while town and rural police were established in the 1770s. In the 1810s, Ministry of Police was even separate from the Ministry of Home Affairs! (The same one which the game, as shown in the video, says didn’t exist at all.)
Finally, I’ll say that in general, the idea that the early 18th century Russia did not have enough bureaucracy is kinda ridiculous. One of the best-known stories by the best-known Russian-language writer amongst Russian speakers, Pushkin, (in contrast to foreigners preferring Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and Chekhov, in part due to comparative ease of translation), The Queen of Spades is primarily about unscrupulous ambition, but to a modern reader, it also gives an insight into the insanity of late-18th/early-19th century Prussian-based Russian bureaucracy, where every single military rank was duplicated in the civilian bureaucracy. Thus, whenever the villain protagonist enters the hall, the narration notes that the lieutenants played cards with their civilian counterparts in rank, colonels with theirs, generals with theirs, etc. (I know you technically said “modern bureaucracy”, but considering that the video has him go from “No Schools” to “Religious Schools” in 1840 – when 46 of those are recorded in 1727 – I don’t think the game understands the difference.)
*Obviously, it was almost entirely for the urban population, as education could hardly work with serfdom in place – after it was abolished, the 1897 census recorded ~35% average literacy – going up to an estimated 54% for men and 26% for women by 1913. By then, though, Britain, Germany and Japan have achieved near-universal literacy, with France and the USA slightly behind in the low 90%s and Austria in the high 70%s.) The stunning work done during the early Soviet era to largely close this gap and achieve ~90% military-age literacy by 1939 is one of the major reasons as to why almost no modern Russian is willing to fully condemn the USSR or the early Communists. Monarchists and other reactionaries aside, the implications of WWII breaking out in an alternate-universe (post)-Tsarist state with literacy still improving at Tsarist rates are not hard to imagine.
P.S. I know that this video is from late 2022, and I dearly hope all of the above got patched promptly after that. Otherwise, this really seems to be a “perils of verisimillitude” thing, to quote our host’s take on Expeditions: Rome – where “Ha ha, of course stupid Russians did not even have religious schools in 1836” fits the expectations of the majority of the audience and plays into the “saviour desire” of those like Perun by pretending introducing the absolute basics would have changed everything – as opposed to the much less satisfying reality of how much work was already done in reality, and how much more effort it would have needed still.
“*Obviously, it was almost entirely for the urban population, as education could hardly work with serfdom in place”
Eminently false. It could and it did!
In Baltic provinces, serfdom was “abolished” in 1816 in Estonia, 1817 in Curonia and 1819 in Livonia. “Abolished”, because this was actually only a law announcing that serfdom would be abolished in future. The actual limited rights of migration were given in late 1820s, early 1830s, in several steps – several arrangements; one was to allow first migration to a neighbouring manor in the same parish, then a few years later migration to a different parish in the same county, then several years later finally to any county of the province. Migrating to a town or out of province remained banned for a long time (IIRC going to town was allowed somewhere in 1840s, leaving province only in 1860s).
Well, general ability to read was achieved mostly before 1800. By education system backed (though not run) by the state. Parish churches operated schools affiliated with the church; manor lords were required to run schools and by end of 18th century… they did comply with the low standards demanded.
Note that I don´t say “literacy”. A popular educational goal in Nordic Lutheran countries – like Finland and Baltic provinces – was teaching the masses to read. Just read. Without the ability to write. In some schools in early 19th century, teaching of writing was explicitly forbidden. People who had managed to learn just reading but stopped without learning to write did exist in Russia and elsewhere in the world, but were usually much less numerous than people who had learned to both read and write – in Baltics and Finland, they were common. Do you count them as “literate”?
And by late 19th, early 20th century, the rural population of Estonia and Livonia was more literate than urban population. The reason was education system.
Yes, secondary level schools (and university) were in towns. And there had long been primary schools in towns – including some for the poor.
However, countryside had an education system. Village schools were run by the rural communities, which were headed by wealthy peasants. General compulsory education was enforced – homeschooling was allowed but children under homeschooling were liable to regular exams.
Whereas towns were bigger and more anonymous. And freer. The leadership of the towns was rich merchants – who had bigger social distance to the urban poor than the rich peasants had from the rural poor.
As a result, the rich urban people had primary and secondary education (at home or school) and part of the poor chose to take advantage of the charity primary schools – but it was easier to stay out of school in town.
Stating it in other way… education is a labour due to Crown enforced on the children. There is nothing in serfdom as such that prevents the Crown from demanding a share of the extraction from the serfs (whether it is the serfowner showing up in army to do military service, serfowner paying a cash tax, serfowner giving a certain share of serfs for life as soldiers, or serfowner giving serfs for limited time) – and the arrangement of “each serf working a limited time for Crown and the rest of his or her life for the owner” includes “each child labouring a couple of winters in the village schoolhouse”. To the contrary, the regimentation and social control involved in extracting labour dues from reluctant serfs simplifies extracting education from serf children! It is the mobility, diversity of ways of life, anonymity and freedom of urban poor which makes it easier for them to evade labour dues such as education.
If 18th century Baltic provinces that had serfdom undertook to build education system and actually got a majority of serfs to learn to read, and 18th century-first half of 19th century Russian interior provinces that also had serfdom did not make learning to read one of the labour dues to Crown/Established Church, it has nothing to do with serfdom.
So, that stat I mentioned which compared the recorded 1913 literacy rates for major WWI participants also notes that Russian Empire’s available surveys had specifically used this laxer standard – measuring the ability to read but not looking at the ability to write. It was the only one of those nations to do that – though as you have said, most people who learn to read can generally be expected to sooner or later learn how to write.
Hmm, this wiki page (only in Russian) says that the aforementioned 1897 census had recorded 79.9% literacy in Estonia, 77.7% in Livonia and 70.9% in Curonia. Much better than in the other parts of the Empire (Governorate around then-capital of St. Petersburg was at 55.5%, Moscow Governorate was at 40.1%, and much of the rest of the top 10 was in the present-day Poland and Lithuania, with Kovno (Kaunas) Governate slightly ahead of Moscow, and Warsaw + Suvalki Governorates in high 30%s), but based on that, it’s rather unlikely year 1800 literacy was as high as you say it was – not unless there was then stagnation for an entire century.
https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%93%D1%80%D0%B0%D0%BC%D0%BE%D1%82%D0%BD%D0%BE%D1%81%D1%82%D1%8C_%D0%B2_%D0%B4%D0%BE%D1%80%D0%B5%D0%B2%D0%BE%D0%BB%D1%8E%D1%86%D0%B8%D0%BE%D0%BD%D0%BD%D0%BE%D0%B9_%D0%A0%D0%BE%D1%81%D1%81%D0%B8%D0%B8
“Hmm, this wiki page (only in Russian) says that the aforementioned 1897 census had recorded 79.9% literacy in Estonia, 77.7% in Livonia and 70.9% in Curonia.”
Please compare this
https://www.digar.ee/viewer/et/nlib-digar:888933/449535/page/213
(only in Estonian)
which quotes for the same 1897 census 95% for Estonia (aged 10 and older) and 92% for Livonia, against 28% for Russian Empire total.
And checking it up, it was not as general in 1800. It was actually a stagnation and decrease from 1780 to 1820 – from a level that widely exceeded 60%.
“Please compare this
https://www.digar.ee/viewer/et/nlib-digar:888933/449535/page/213
(only in Estonian)”
Actually, the 230 page Estonian dissertation has a 5 page abstract in Russian. See page 232:
https://www.digar.ee/viewer/et/nlib-digar:888933/449535/page/232
In short, of peasant male conscripts who were school aged in 1790s, the level of reading ability was just over 40%. It dropped to 31…37% in 1810s, but from 1820s steadily rose, to 88% in 1860s. The urban and privileged classes tended to have higher literacy – and get exempt from conscription.
I see, and thanks for these efforts! Rereading the wiki page, I see that it only cites the 1897 census for a “high-level” table (European Russia, “Near-Vistula” (i.e. Poland, mainly), Caucasus, Siberia, Central Asia and “Total across empire (excluding Finland)”. The Governorate-by-Governorate values were not from there, but the 1884-1890 statistical reference handbook.
I might as well mention another remarkable historical artefact on the wiki page – this graphic (or rather, a pair of them) taken directly from a 1907 “Encyclopedic Dictionary”. The lower one actually depicts a very similar recruit reading ability trend as the a) line – but for 19th century France, rather than Russia. b) and c) lines are quite clever, as they track literacy-as-ability-to-write by looking at the fraction of grooms and brides who managed to sign their own marriage contracts. d) represents the increase in pupil numbers from below 3 to nearly 6 million (again, in France). a) and b) graphs are similar, suggesting only a small drop-off from reading-only to full literacy in France. (Though of course, the just-concluded series had already told us about the “surplus” who never got to marry, and their exclusion from the marriage record sample would skew that sample a bit.)
Meanwhile, the upper graph compares recruit illiteracy rates amongst recruits in the 1870s and 1880s, both in Russia (divided into Asian, European, “Near-Vistula” and total) and some European rivals – Austria, France, Holland and Bavaria. Predictably, the latter are all in a much better state, with Bavaria managing effectively 0% recruit illiteracy by 1880s, France and Holland going from ~15% to below 10%, while Austria achieved a drop from ~73% to 25% within a decade. On the other hand, recruit illiteracy in “Near-Vistula” is recorded at >80% levels – slightly higher than in the European Russia, and even at times exceeding the levels in Asian Russia. (Enough to make one wonder how this data collection treated being literate in Polish but not Russian.)
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/35/Brockhaus_and_Efron_Encyclopedic_Dictionary_b18_538-3.jpg
P.S.
I assumed the same thing as you – that readers would necessarily learn writing in due time, but apparently this wasn’t always the case. I.e. another table on the wiki page cites 1892 statistical handbook for Grand Duchy of Finland, and there, 64% of men and 70% of women could read, but only 10.6% of men and 6.5% of women could both read and write. Perhaps this represents a snapshot in time before most of the readers-only transitioned to learning to write as well, but still, food for thought.
P.P.S. There is also a number of further statistical tables from the wiki which dovetail quite a bit with the recent Peasant series. I.e. one table tracks the correlation of literacy with the amount of land available in peasant communes and how it was allocated. If it was allocated per person, then there was a marked increase in literacy correlating with increased size (though not for low-quality land), but there’s a small but opposite effect when land was allocated per worker. Other tables even attempt to correlate literacy with the increase in workhorse ownership, although the effect isn’t particularly dramatic.
“Enough to make one wonder how this data collection treated being literate in Polish but not Russian.”
In Estonia, there was a period of 1850s or so when comparable data for conscript literacy are missing because for a change what was reported was literacy in German or Russian but not Estonian.
Also I wonder about the interesting way how the reported literacy in both Estonia and Finland converges at below 80 %, while other sources from same period report it as over 90%. Perhaps a key is that one quote of literacy specifies literacy among people older than 10….
“I assumed the same thing as you – that readers would necessarily learn writing in due time, but apparently this wasn’t always the case. I.e. another table on the wiki page cites 1892 statistical handbook for Grand Duchy of Finland, and there, 64% of men and 70% of women could read, but only 10.6% of men and 6.5% of women could both read and write. ”
Which are counted exclusively. 10,6% of men could write, 63,9% of men could read but not write – total 74,5% of men could read. 2,1% of men were “uneducated” and “older than 10” – with total of 76,6% were older than 10 or could read or write. And 20,8% of men were uneducated and “younger than 10” – totalling 97,4% and leaving 2,6% unaccounted for.
“Perhaps this represents a snapshot in time before most of the readers-only transitioned to learning to write as well, but still, food for thought.”
I think it was a fairly long period – which happened in some regions of world but not in others (perhaps most).
For contrast, see papyrology. I read a book on schoolwork from Roman Egypt. There are a number of writings which are very clearly written by illiterate people – as in, written by people who could not read. Example is a schoolwork exercise. From the mistakes made by the learner, it is clear that the pupil did not at that point understand how the letters he or she was copying formed the meaning (whether or not the pupil had been told the meaning). Which means that in a primary school of Roman Egypt, learning to eventually write was a major target even before achieving the ability to read. Whereas in a school of 19th century Finland, learning to read only was a separate main target, and writing an entirely separate advanced level which less than one in ten girls ever reached.
@chornedsnorkack,
In Estonia, there was a period of 1850s or so when comparable data for conscript literacy are missing because for a change what was reported was literacy in German or Russian but not Estonian.
This really interesting digression sent me down a little Wikipedia rabbit hole (since it got me curious about when Estonian started to be a written language: earlier than I had realized, presumably since it was a Lutheran culture that highly valued religious literacy in the vernacular).
One interesting thing that I learned: Estonians *today* seem to have the highest average rate of book ownership in the world:
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/oct/12/the-more-books-in-a-house-the-brighter-your-childs-future-study-finds
“One interesting thing that I learned: Estonians *today* seem to have the highest average rate of book ownership in the world:
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/oct/12/the-more-books-in-a-house-the-brighter-your-childs-future-study-finds”
I read that study and snorted. Turkey at lowest? World average at 115? Really?
Please give the average numbers for Africa. And of the countries with lower average household book ownership (exclusive of any public, school etc. libraries) among them.
“I read that study and snorted. Turkey at lowest? World average at 115? Really?
Please give the average numbers for Africa.”
That’s an article in the Guardian, not a study. It doesn’t link to the study, because the Guardian does not link its sources (possibly because the Guardian lies about its sources from time to time, and a link would make those lies easier to spot), but here’s the study itself:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0049089X18300607
Sikora, Evans & Kelley, “Scholarly culture: How books in adolescence enhance adult literacy, numeracy and technology skills in 31 societies”, Social Science Research 77:1-15 (2019).
Reading the actual study shows that the Guardian has deliberately falsified its findings in order to seek attention. The study’s Table 1 includes a line for “Pooled data” – because the study only looks at data for 31 relatively wealthy countries. “Pooled data” is the average for those 31. The Guardian, when it reprinted the table, changed the heading of this line to “world”.
Looking at the study, the figure for Singapore jumped out – average of only 52 books per household, with 40% of people owning 5 or less, seems unusual for a high-earning society that values education extremely highly – but my Singaporean friends have often complained about the two problems with having a proper library in Singapore, i.e. very small flats, and hungry insects. Italy (75) and Korea (91) may also suffer from the first of these.
@ajay,
Ugh. Thank you for calling attention to that, and my apologies for linking to an article when I hadn’t read the original study. I did check to see where the study was done, and I know that ANU is very highly regarded, so didn’t really go further into it from there. I should have known better, since the news media is notorious for (probably usually by ignorance, but sometimes by design) misinterpreting or misrepresenting the scholarly articles that they’re supposed to be describing.
That said, even if we’re only talking about 31 developed countries, it is interesting to me that Estonia is at the top of that smaller list.
“Predictably, the latter are all in a much better state, with Bavaria managing effectively 0% recruit illiteracy by 1880s,”
Of course, it is “recruit” illiteracy, not “population” one.
It is easy to convert low population illiteracy numbers, or low literacy numbers, to zero numbers among the recruits by exempting/rejecting the nonstandard condition.
When your adult illiteracy rate is down to low percents, a large fraction of illiterate adults will be adults with significant physical or mental disabilities who you may not want to recruit even if they do have literacy despite the disability. And you may then classify illiteracy even in absence of other disabilities as itself one. You will also have issues defining and reporting the true rate of illiteracy. (For instance, adults who could read when they could see but have lost sight later in life clearly “cannot read”. Most Braille learners are young – few elderly blind learn Braille!)
So this is a very common thing with Paradox, where people see an abstraction that has been given a legible label, interpret the label as representing a non-abstracted real-world case, and declare everything terrible.
A alt-timeline non-Communist/Stalinist Russia likely did not suffer through the Great Purge, which was one of the most self-defeating moves in the history of the world. I suspect a Russia that has a literacy rate of 75% but did not go through the Great Purge does better against Germany than the USSR did in OTL.
It is difficult to overstate how disastrous and frankly idiotic the Great Purge was. When I lived in Russia I noticed how many praised Stalin for his leadership in the war without realising that perhaps the greatest reason the start of the war was such a disaster is because of Stalin.
The Great Purge was not the only reason the Union struggled at the start of the war, yet it remains a salient and relevant enough factor that even had Stalin not committed other blunders we’d still expect to see the Red Army struggle. It is no coincidence that nearly the entire Red Army officer corps changed during the war. Even those who in command at the start of the war and who survived were not in the same position by the end of it.
And had WWI and the Revolution not happened, Russia’s industrial output was on track have outpaced its Soviet IOT counterpart, though you’re right we’ve gone so far off the established road that speculating about it is pointless.
Sorry if this is a bit off-topic, but I was wondering why “Life, Work, Death and the Peasant” has not been added to Resources for World-Builders and Resources for Teachers?
Things get forgotten. This is probably also the reason as to why “our series (I, II, IIIa, IIIb, IVa, IVb, IVc, IVd, IVe)” link directory has not been ported backwards. I.e. the first one (all the way back in July!) – still has no links to the subsequent parts.
https://acoup.blog/2025/07/11/collections-life-work-death-and-the-peasant-part-i-households/
Well I looking forward to playing. Been Paradox fan of all their main games for a long time except for HOI never really could get into them. Thanks for a mini preview.
But mentioning “One of the things I appreciate about Paradox’s development style is that they take risks: ” I would like to see them do that and cut the apparent death grip Rome has on the games in that ‘classical’ era. I don’t care how much time men supposedly spend thinking about Rome. If the ever follow up Imperator Rome I would very much prefer a day after Alex did the wold a favor and died. Why just so I can play a Paradox game where Athens and Aetolia (et al) win or something appropriating a win (*) in the Lamian war (and not as a dressed up Roman republic clone).
* I dunno manage to kill Antipater and last long enough for the rest of Successors to get tied up fighting in Asia and Egypt.
It’d be interesting to see a game that uses NPC AI to reflect historical military/political doctrines and practices.
I’d like to see you review on all the updates that have been made to CK3. The Byzantines and the Steep got new government mechanics and East Asia was added to the map, with China, Japan and SE Asia all getting new governments.
Looking forward to this very much. One question I had was about the trade system EU4 had very rigid trade flows, with an interesting but counterintuitive trade game. Can you tell us anymore about how trade works in EUV?
Again, this is from reading dev diaries and watching early access people play, not playing myself, but so far:
World is divided into market areas. There are many more market centres than in EU4 and they are not hard set – you can create new ones and destroy old ones. Market areas radiate from market centres looking like Voronoi tiling at the first glance but it is a Voronoi tiling on a non-flat plane – there is a “proximity” mechanic which calculates the effective distance/ease of transportation so it may prefer assigning location to a market center 3X distance away if it is over flatlands over a market center X distance away if it is through forested mountains. There are many more other modifiers to “proximity” beyond terrain.
Then on the first layer of abstraction all goods from a single market area a piled into that market and define the price of goods in that market – wood is cheap in Russia, dear in Arabia. Goods in the market are not only used for production buildings (consume iron, make tools) but also for pop wants (commoners consume some amount of cloth every month, nobles consume everything from fine cloth to spices to books).
Then there is trade between different markets – goods are bought in any market within the trade range and sold on the other market. That takes some amount of “trade capacity” (so you may be forced to choose between making money exporting gold as Bohemia and keeping your people happy importing cloth or wine) and also costs a small amount of money to reflect transportation costs. That can be automated or run manually. Burghers have their own independent trade capacity and ability to conclude trades between the markets but unlike automated state trade which tries within the limitations of AI benefit the player, burghers AI trade tries to benefit burghers.
Overall it is highly praised and dynamic. Though it was terribly broken less than half of the year ago (giving so much money taxes were utterly irrelevant) and I have no doubt it will be broken in more subtle ways for some time to come.
Any hope they are starting to get away from modifier-stacking gameplay?
On the note of “introductory game”, it’s also important to consider that a gateway title needs to hold that status across potentially many years of both DLC and free content updates. Having tried Stellaris again recently – definitely one of the lightest titles in terms of systems – a lot has changed. And it’s not uncommon to revisit a nation in HOI4 to find some new political machination mechanic has been added that confounds the inner min-maxer.
Although for titles that won’t change, I suppose there’s always Imperator…
So Cameralwissenschaft, but with Intel Insider? Sounds fun! I’ll have to check it out in the summer
This does look like an enthralling game, but as someone who hasn’t bought a new game for quite a while I have some questions. Hopefully the commentariat will point me in the right direction.
1. Looking at the website, it would seem my 8 year old desktop is slightly under their quoted minimum specification. I’m not going to buy a new computer just to play one game, so do we know how concrete that minimum is (and/or are there options to play with partial functionality)?
2. Is this a product you just buy, or do we have to navigate one of these never-to-be-adequately-condemned subscription models?
3. The last strategy game I played with any real intensity was Civ5. I’ve looked at several of the EU5 tutorials, and most of the BASIC concepts look familiar, albeit with much more detail and complexity along with a much smarter AI. This I like the sound of, but am I kidding myself about the size of change (and if so, what would be a suitable intro to Paradox)?
4. Is this single-player only?
1) If you plan an buying any new game in the future, you’ll need a PC upgrade sooner than later. This game is pretty forgiving hardware wise, if you turn off the 3D terrain map you can probably go a little under the minimum, but stability might be an issue.
2) No subscriptions. But Paradox releases an endless stream of add ons as DLC. All optional, but if you get them all you might be forking over $500 over a decade.
3) The similarities with CIv5 is that you build an empire on a map using a mixture of military force, economic power, and diplomatic wills. In EU5 I spent 3 hours just reading menus before pressing unpause. Probably took 15h before I had a surface level understanding of the core mechanics and was doing things with purpose rather than pressing on a button because I’d just discovered it. Grasping how all the mechanics work and how to exploit them is probably a 200h+ job.
4) I think it does, but very few people would use it. The game is too slow and drawn out for MP to work well. You’re going to be playing against a (pretty bad) AI, at most you and a friend or two controlling different nations on the same map. Not against hordes of random people online.
Many thanks.
Food for thought over the Festive season. 🙂
Curse you for making this sound so interesting, because I will probably spend hundreds of hours on it.
I had a random thought while playing EU5 [good, but unpolished to the level of being buggy, with so large a scope that it wildly misses many of the historical beats of the early modern period] on what the “Theory of History” could be for an Imperator 2 to make it approachable, unique, and yet have the correct historical flavour for the classical Mediterranean. Make it about cities and how they relate to larger organisations. In would be a bit like Crusader Kings, but with the individuals that are feudal vassals replaced by whole cities. This could be the framework in which everything from the Peloponnesian League in the classical era, to the Successor Kingdoms fighting over Aegean Cities, to the Roman Republic’s soci system are modelled. That would be the focus, rather than ever more finely fractured pops, or each individual pixel on the map, or individual nobles.
As a great power, you’d have to manage your capital as its own city (Rome, Carthage), but you also have to relate to a web of smaller cities that make up your empire that all have their own own character and specialisation (Athens is a culture specialist, Rhodes is better at maritime trade, etc…). The strategic choice the player would have is how bind them to you, how you extract resources from them, and whether you take gold, manpower, raw materials or something else from them. Even soft-power things like the Olympic games or the amphictyonic council of Delphi fit neatly in this model. For the Achaemenids or the “barbarian” west this might not work so neatly. But if you model tribes as another sort of city, then everything could probably be shoehorned well enough. The Persians would be simulated as an empire of cities and tribes. Vercengitorix would be king of a federation of tribes.
Obviously, this isn’t a design for a whole game, but making cities and how they interact with larger institutions the bones seems like a solid skeleton on which to add classical-era meat onto.
“traditionally 1444 to 1836”
Eu1 start date was 1492, Eu2 start date was 1419, eu3 start date was 1453, then 1399. Only eu4 had the 1444 start date