After years of wanting to and after finally getting a gaming PC, I started up my first game of Europa Universalis 4 recently. And what an awesome game it is.

In my first try I played as Castile, apparently one of the easier countries to play. Easier but still rather overwhelming for a complete beginner, and I guess it didn’t help that I didn’t feel like using any kind of tutorial — I just threw myself into the thick of it, pedal to the metal style. All that data, all those resources and possible actions, all those ways to display the map, all that diplomacy and those other countries and their relations to you and each other, and so on. It’s a lot even in a single frozen moment of the game, but even more as time is flowing and events unfold simultaneously around the map, most of which you aren’t even aware of because it’s way too much to keep track of. But it’s there and it’s happening and you may or may not notice the developments later (as, say, a nation that earlier was a minor power turns out to now be a serious threat and at your doorstep — someone’s been growing while you didn’t look), unlike games like Skyrim where there actually are no events going on in the background though it’s trying to give you an illusion of otherwise. 

So I was exploring the game trying to make sense of it all. After some time I performed the reconquista and later my ally Portugal got into a war with the much weaker Morocco, so I got to play around a bit more with war against a relatively safe and easy enemy. 

I kept getting reports about the risk of getting into a civil war but I didn’t care too much as I didn’t really know what it would mean or how I could prevent it, I suppose I was thinking I should take it as it comes and deal with it if or when it actually happens. Well, it did happen and it was lot tougher than I thought it would be. The enemy army was far bigger than mine even after training several new armies using multiple loans. I kept reloading to try out new things but kept losing. 

Eventually I stopped playing the game for a few weeks, but as I got back into it with a few new ideas to try I could no longer (without risk) open the save game because I had updated to a later version of EU4. Whoops. Probably a solvable problem, but I wasn’t too invested in that particular game anyway so I opted to start a new game as instead, this time as Portugal.

That didn’t go too well at first, I was allied with England who got into (or was already into) a war with France and Austria, who both sent big armies to my homeland and kept attacking until I couldn’t resist any longer, and then France gave me a peace offer it would have been most unwise to refuse. That whole ordeal really set me back, I probably should have surrendered early (if that was possible), instead I kept taking loans to build new armies (did someone say deja vu) that was just getting slaughtered anyway. And that damn England didn’t send a single unit to my aid. I’m willing to forgive England and even Austria (the lesser aggressor), but I will exact revenge on France later on, just he wait.

Eventually I got back on my feet and became powerful in areas such as colonization and trade (much like Portugal in real life at the time, and in fact the game provides certain bonuses if you play in accordance with history, which is an interesting design idea), but that’s a story for another day.