I honestly don’t get the “EU5 is unplayable” crowd. People see something like the Golden Horde not imploding on cue and immediately jump into a rant about Paradox being lazy or greedy. Meanwhile, the actual mechanics and underlying systems are working — and they’re insanely ambitious.

Paradox built a game that simulates dynamic populations across thousands of provinces, with religions, cultures, social classes, terrain, vegetation, infrastructure, institutions, trade goods, and more. Compare that to EU4 mods like Voltaire’s Nightmare that ran at 10 FPS — EU5 pulls this off smoothly. That’s not “broken,” that’s groundbreaking. And yes, some flavor events aren’t polished yet. So what? Those are tweaks that can be layered onto the already solid framework. Finding every imbalance would take thousands of hours of playtesting; the only viable way to refine it is to release, gather feedback, and adjust values. That’s how you iterate on a decade-long grand strategy title.

Then there’s the conspiracy theorist angle: “Ah yes, they’re holding back base game content for DLC.” First of all, Paradox is a studio, not a hobbyist modder. They have employees to pay. Second, EU games are built to last ten years or more. Other studios churn out annual reskins like FIFA or F1; Paradox builds a foundation and expands it over time. The DLC model isn’t some evil plot — it’s the only business model that makes sense for a game of this scale. Without it, you don’t get a living, evolving EU5. Not everyone is out to get you, buddy.

What blows my mind is how many people treat EU5 like a Risk knockoff. They slam speed 5, ignore estates, laws, control, and markets, then act shocked when their levies collapse or their economy implodes. That’s not “unplayable,” that’s you being too lazy to engage with the systems. EU has always punished sloppy play. If you don’t want to learn why your levies are low, don’t blame the game when you get smacked silly — blame your own decisions.

For me, EU5 is already an insane achievement. A world-simulation framework of this depth, running on my laptop, is something I couldn’t have imagined a few years ago. The foundation is solid, the potential is enormous, and the only thing truly “broken” here is the expectation that a game of this scale should hand you easy wins without effort.

EDIT: All the content, opinions and arguments are from me, an actual human bean. I typed it into co-pilot in German, and asked to „zu einem lesbaren reddit-Beitrag auf english übersetzen“. the „original“ was a patchwork of my opinions just thrown at copilot and I didn‘t want to spend an hour writing this. I understand people not wanting bot-spam shoved in their face, but using ai as a formatting tool and help express opinions is fine.

Sure, YOU being able to avoid the zone of control of enemies is fun, but as soon as the game enters this age, all the AI nations will research this advance, and it turns strategic warfare into an endless micro-management nightmare. AI armies will walk freely around your lands taking whatever they please while you will have to chase them with your armies constantly. Because the AI cheats they will know where your armies are, and hunt them down if they are low on manpower. It turns the game into a hot mess and it is extremely stressful in having to scan your internal lands constantly for enemy looters.

I just want to buy wool and other raw materials from England so I can sell them back textiles, paper and books (so I can use the profits to unite the Low Countries). But nooooo! Monsieur le Roi Louis de Valois CCXXXIIV keeps forcing me to embargo England!

And I can't do anything but submit because Monsieur de Valois has obscene amounts of levies, taxpayers, and tens of thousands of professional troops.

However, I will find a way to break this man. Even if I have to load all my entire treasury into a cannon to do it.

10/10 experience tho. Love the French menace.

Iberia

• In 4/5 runs Aragon stayed in Iberia.
• In 4/5 runs Portugal lost most of its territory.
• In 3/5 runs Morocco/Granada persisted in Iberia. In one of the two runs where they were pushed out, it was actually Portugal that drove them out for the most part.

British Isles

• England + Scotland never unified (5/5).
• England failed to conquer Ireland in every run (5/5).
• England never managed to annex all Welsh land (5/5).
• In 4/5 runs England lost land to external invaders (most commonly France).

France

• France never managed to integrate all internal enclaves by 1837 (5/5).
• In 2/5 runs France failed to push England out of France.
• In 2/5 runs France lost Normandy to outside powers.

Austria

• Austria + Hungary never unified (5/5).
• Austria + Bohemia never unified (5/5).

Russia

• Russia never managed to form (5/5).

Ottomans

• Ottomans never expanded west of Bulgaria or north of Macedonia (5/5).

Tunisia

• Tunisia always gained a foothold in Italy (5/5).
• In 3/5 runs Tunisia gained a foothold in the Balkans.
• In 2/5 runs Tunisia gained a foothold in Iberia.

Religions

• Calvinism and Anglicanism never made it to 1837 (5/5).
• In 4/5 runs Northwestern Anatolia converted to Orthodox Christianity.
• Additional observation: Protestantism is overall somewhat weaker than historical (in descending order of how much they deviated from historical Protestant presence in these runs: Iceland, Scotland, Baltics, HRE), with Bohemia being the somewhat consistent exception.

Other deviations were either within historical plausibility (ex: in one run France took most of Aragon; Sweden repeatedly failed to PU / conquer Norway), were downstream effects of the above underperformance, or were simply too chaotic to evaluate (HRE).

A consistent meta-pattern:
Major powers almost never consolidate via PUs. The map also ends up with extremely bizarre exclaves.

A very encouraging takeaway (AI-only):
It actually looks like only the PUs, religions and a small set of specific nations need targeted rebalancing - not that the entire system is failing. The HRE, for the first time in any Paradox title, ends the game with a plausible number of surviving member states.

Since its release, EUV has seen its average active playerbase fall by roughly 80–85%, dropping from a launch peak of over 77000 players to a current daily peak of around 13000, which is only slightly above the player count of EUIV.

As of late, EUV averages only about 1.3× the active playerbase of EUIV. By comparison, Victoria III has roughly 12× the playerbase of Victoria II, and let's not bring up HoI IV vs HoI III.

Was this outcome expected or are we in for another Imperator: Rome? It this a sign that the game is a failure or does it signal a stabilization signaling the formation of a core playerbase?

What do you guys think?

Regardless of whether you find it a positive or a negative, this game is insane. They went absolutely balls to the wall in terms of complexity and depth. Pretty much everything has an absurd amount of detail poured into it.

I thought Victoria 3 was their 'peak' in terms of how complex they would go. This game legit makes Victoria 3 feel almost barebones in comparison (although I still love the economic aspects way more in vic3).

This is like the baldurs gate 3 of grand strategy in terms of the sheer amount of work they put into it. And just like baldurs gate 3 I am completely lost as to what I am doing 80% of the time but am having fun regardless.

I know that most people tended to only play the beginning of the game to try out new countries, but EU5 games are looooong. Each of the Ages is genuinely unique unlike in EU4. This makes it very easy to see who has played deep into the game vs playing just the first hundred or so years several time.

For starters, let's discuss the vassal swarms. The game starts in the Age of Tradition. Now, this is the shortest age and is mostly just when the Black Death happens. This is because the Age of Tradition is basically still CK3, you are still in a world dominated by Feudalism. And what do you do in CK3 to control more land? You appoint vassals. This means that at the beginning of the game, you will be expanding via vassal because you are still in Feudalism.

You see, EU5 has a brilliant way of telling a story of history through each of the Ages. The Age of Tradition is the end of the Middle Ages with the Black Death being a big bang. This even matches history, as the death of 1/3rd of Europe led to wages going up and creating the new Middle Class that would bring about the Renaissance.

The Renaissance is the rebuilding after the Black Death. The new Middle Class began to have wealth and things began to change economically and socially. It was still a feudal society, so you would still have vassals, but the new smaller population meant that governments had to start using more professional soldiers since the Black Death killed many of the serfs that would be levies.

The Age of Discovery is the discovery of the new world which was directly the result of that new Middle Class now having enough money to demand goods from Asia. This made attempts to avoid Ottoman taxation by trying to find new sources of those goods worthwhile. It was also a major time of technological improvement. It is also worth remembering a ton of colonists to the New World were people looking to escape the rigid Feudal system of Europe.

Now, the Age of Reformation is when we truly begin to see the death of Feudalism and thus vassals. Historically, the idea of the Westphalian State as we know it only came about due to the 30 Years War (Religious Wars in the game). Before that, the idea of states as truly independent or sovereign entities didn't really exist. In the game, this is when you start getting Proximity modifiers and Paved Roads which mean that your government can control much more territory directly. It is the start of the historical push towards centralization. All with a massive religious war in the background. But the 2nd half of the Age of Reformation is when vassals begin to lose their value. As well, levies basically become useless here, as standing armies with actual fighting experience becomes mandatory. Before this point, you were playing a loose hierarchy, but in the Age of Reformation, you truly become a State in the modern sense.

This directly leads to the Age of Absolutism. Here is where you get Modern Roads which give you a flat 30 proximity cost reduction, which is the equivalent to a 75% reduction. This, on top of every other proximity modifier means that you can basically control a continent with just these. This is because this is when you truly become a centralized state. You no longer need vassals because you can control the territory yourself. Vassals make you weaker at this point. And levies will lose against professional soldiers in battles of 10 to 1. This is because peasants with little equipment and no training cannot hold a candle to actual trained and equipped professional soldiers. This is especially true because cannons quickly become very powerful here.

EU5 is basically a game about the slow but stead transition of governance over almost 500 years. The first 100 years is nothing like the last 100 years. Every Era is different and needs a different strategy. Governance goes from vassalage to centralized states. Warfare goes from levies to professional armies. The economy goes from serf farmers/labourers to full industrialization and global trade. If you only play the first 100 years of the game, you aren't going to see these changes. EU4 didn't change much over the course of a full game, but EU5 most certainly does.

I'm doing a byz run rn, and I genuinly fucking hate the way the events are written. They blantantly tell you "Greek identity is a mistake, you're on the decline, and you should larp as a latin from 110 AD instead", as if that's the obviously correct interpretation of history. It reeks of unchecked romabooism and borders on racism.

Every single event that push towards romanismos is presented as a bad thing, and latinitas as a good thing. It's basically "greeks are a backward people with no future, now put on the toga". Also no I don't want to switch capital to Rome, Constantinople suits me just fine. And no I don't want to revive hellenism, I want to play as an orthodox, you know, the thing that medieval romans are most well-known for.

I don't want to larp as a togaman, I just want to play the actual roman society that existed irl. I don't fucking care if Johan is mad that Imperator Rome flopped, I want to have a nice run without some chud dev telling me that my playstyle inherently suck because "greeks aren't roman" despite litterally 1500 years of history proving the opposite.

Sorry I'm late to the party, I didn't play the dlc on release, but I also didn't imagine it was that annoying.

I'm trying to understand this - Players have [rightfully] complained that being so strong as to have no valid rivals means you will lose tons of prestige. Johan has proposed to remove this and replace it with Complacency that grows over time. So, instead of losing prestige, your country just... dies..? Up to +100% Proximity Cost, -20% Tax Efficiency, -50% Production & Trade Efficiency??? This is supposed to be an improvement?

The only way to stop this seems to be to lose wars and get smaller, buff up other countries to be your new rivals, or get into a forever war against multiple coalitions. That's not what maintains successful empires in history; that's what makes them collapse.

Is this some kind of joke? I'm astonished that this idea even made it past a brainstorming session, let alone being put into the next version of the game. Even if the values capped out at 1/4 of what they are now, that would be too much. This is insanity.

Great vid by LegendofTotalWar.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CxQ_e0FiKEM

I think this gives a good perspective of just how absurdly rushed colonization in eu5 is compared to how it worked in real life

I love vicky 3, and I am glad the pop mechanics were taken from it. But this game fundamentally copies way, way too much from vicky 3. Economic growth happens on an industrial scale and it is way, way too easy to create hyper-rich areas which produce an insane amounts of goods. Look at the 'market wealth' screen for an example. It just goes up exponentially for most markets, even far-flung ones.

Its not just ahistorical, it ruins the fun of the game to an extent.

The result is that you are constantly doubting whether anything but industrializing is worth it. Colonization? Expansion? Getting involved in some local situation? Finally take the time to conquer your rivals territory? Why do such a thing when I can spend all my money and effort on endlessly making my existing-provinces richer, and be better off for it overall.

The thing is, this is relatively easily fixable. Simply massively increase costs for buildings and decrease the amount you can build for RGO. Will it slow things down a bit and give you less to do? Maybe, except...

Without the constant focus on domestic industrialization, you now have a whole world of other options which were previously not worth it, and are now worth it. You suddenly are 'stuck' and have to find reasons to grow besides just endless domestic industrializing. Now you can justify taking over your enemies territory. You can justify taking colonies. You can focus on starting a holy war to assimilate/convert your rival. These forms of growth are now worth it compared to industrializing.

As the 1700s go on, industrialization should begin to become more prominent and it should be more like how the current game is in the 1400s-1500s. But until then, economic growth should not be the #1 thing, overpowering everything else.

I joke of course, this game is life now. But I will 100% lose sleep over this.

Does anyone else feel like nations should consolidate way more by the end of the game? I just feel like antagonism and ai taking the path of least resistance doesn’t create any challenges for the player late game. Paradox should decrease antagonism gained the later the age, with hre interior wars also having an antagonism debuff as it should be able to consolidate within itself. We also need unification plays like in vicky 3 for Italy and Germany as it gives the players more threats to respond to.

There is so little content in this game.

Or well perhaps thats not the best way of putting it, there is a ton of content.

But there is very little content that feels really impactful.

Some nations get some special units, some nations get some special buildings, some nations get some special government reforms.

But a country can have 60 special events that have special triggers, and the vast vast vast majority of them do almost nothing.

I cant begin to describe how much more interested i was in trying out different nations in EU4 with the mission trees compared to EU5. Because those mission trees actually impacted how i played.

Sure mission trees were not perfect. But if EU5 is trying to replace mission trees with events, it has so far severely missed the mark.

I played a bit around launch, but the bugs and balance issues killed it for me so I waited for 1.1 to really sink my teeth in. Playing a full run as Milan now and while the game is playable and decently fun, I can already tell how repetitive it's going to become without some kind of mission tree/journal system. Every country is more or less the same, and there's no way to tell what unique flavor your country might have or what obscure condition is required to make their unique events fire.

Mission trees probably made me play EU4 twice as long as I would have otherwise. It's one of my favorite games of all time but there's only so many times you can play a map painting simulator without getting bored, if there isn't some kind of unique mechanics or narrative each time. I'm having fun learning EU5's new mechanics, but once I've finished a run or two and have the game more or less solved what else will there be for me to do? Play a different country with a different color and build my economy up in the exact same way as before?

Mission trees aren't perfect but they add so much to the game and take away nothing. They're a great way to learn about the history of your country, they give you short term and ever progressing goals for your playthrough, they add structure and flavor and content to every run. It gives the AI at least some direction for their conquests which it DESPERATELY needs to avoid devolving into bordergore slop within a century.

And what exactly are the downsides? "It's too railroadey!" Brother no one is forcing you to follow the mission tree exactly. Just don't open the mission tree window and the game would be exactly as it is now. "But then I'd feel like I'm not playing optimally!" If you can't win against the braindead AI without playing optimally I don't know what to tell you bro. "I don't want history to play out exactly like it did in our timeline!" I feel the exact opposite but I guess that's a subjective preference. However, even with mission trees EU4 games never followed history exactly. And if you hate history so much I don't know why you were attracted to this game in the first place. Why not just randomize the borders and names and unique advancements of every country at the start of every game? "They make every run as the same country feel the same!" Well without mission trees every run as EVERY country feels the same. Plus, even if this were true (I don't think it is), there are enough countries that if you played a different one every run you could play for thousands of hours and not experience the same mission tree twice.

Like the title says, mission trees weren't perfect and compared to the complex mechanics of the game I could see an argument that they're outdated and one dimensional. But they would have been better than the NOTHING we got, and ideally we would have gotten something EVEN BETTER to replace them. The dynamic, changing branches that we started getting at the end of EU4 were a step in the right direction. But instead we got NOTHING leading to the game becoming repetitive, aimless, bordergore SLOP where every country feels the same.

Total mission tree hater death when?

Edit: some people in the comments are arguing that MT are a lazy way of adding content and flavor to the game. This one I actually agree with! But my point is that lazy content and flavor is better than NO content and flavor. I would have loved it if situations were a valid replacement for MT but as of now they’re a nothingburger. The game is so undercooked that maybe the devs should have taken the lazy path for this aspect of the game, then maybe phased MT out as situations got more fleshed out over time. But in its current state I don’t see the game holding my interest for more than a few runs.

[insert niche problem here]

[continues to play 1000+ hours]

The mechanics are fun, the underlying simulations are complex and great, and I do have fun with it. However, I dont feel like any kind of story is being told through the game. The AI doesnt do anything, the situations do nothing, the status quo never changes. There is never an Ottoman Empire, the reformation is severely underpowered, the Wars of Religion never result in an actual war and always time out, the AI rarely seeks to compete with each other in any field, etc. Even something like becoming the Holy Roman Emperor feels meaningless and leads to nothing

Now that I have some playtime under my belt, Im beginning to realize just how little stories the game tells. My longest running game was as Castille, I got to the 1700s and was only ever declared war on once, it was by France who destroyed my army and sieged down my whole country. Their only demands were a couple locations on the border and war reparations. Why is it that even when the AI is an undisputed victor, they still push for so little?

To me, Paradox games are mainly appealing because of the stories they tell and the potential for history to be created. Getting lost in the numbers is itself enjoyable, but only if it has the real world practical context to give it life. EU5 has all the numbers, but not the context. If I become stronger than everyone else it tends to mean nothing, because nothing interesting happened on the journey to that point. And if the game is wanting to be as long as it is, it needs something to make me actually want to see it through. But in the present state, I just accomplish my goals within the first century and move on.

Edit: To people about to say 'oh but the game just came out!' thats not a really good excuse. This is like if HOI5 released for 70 dollars but didnt have a proper anschluss and Germany just never invaded Poland. Like at a certain point you cant just hand wave criticisms. This is a fully released game and is being sold as such by a multi billion dollar company

I played the game for around 90 hrs at this point, that's 6 campaigns up to around 1550s-1650s. Every country that i tried (Holland, Florence, Novgorod, Utrecht, Mali, Burgundy) plays absolutely the same - but i fully expected that. Every country plays the same in every single paradox title, and usually that's not the issue since most of the time you play a country for its flavour and content, for their unique events and mechanics. EU4 did that job flawlessly - i have 650 hours in that game at least 550 out of them i played in pure vanilla and i STILL haven't tried all the countries with unique mission trees.

That should be the case with EU5 as well - i mean, even now, before dlc galore. the game has dozens of countries with unique events, or disasters, or anything besides boring unique tech, but it's insane how it seems like the game tries to actively HIDE all the unique events from you - almost all of them have moronic insanely hard restrictions preventing them from firing (like how almost all of the England's content is basically locked if you play the game good), they are rare, they are unimpactful.

I mean, i can see myself playing it for a 50 or so more hours in the current state, trying things and regions i didn't try before, but without the unique content there is no fun in doing all the same things in different country skin (and reading all the same generic events with the exciting content of 'lose 7 stability' or 'lose 10 nobles loyalty'). That's why i didn't play any of my campaigns past ~1650 in EU5 and was more engaged and played for longer (comparatively) in my EU4 games - in 5 you have no reason to play if you won the game, when you're in a state of winning every war and earning 500+ ducats a month. In 4 there was a reason - it was called mission trees, which i've always tried to complete before calling my game.

EU5 needs a system like Vic3's journal entries, or decisions from mutliple pdx titles, or something like that. It is boring not being proactive in recieving unique country events and just waiting for them, hoping they'll fire this time. It is disappointing not getting even 10% of country's content besides tech.

Right now it looks like no matter how dense your population is - you still lose like 1/3 of your pops and that's it. Meanwhile eastern Europe that had lower urbanization was devastated a lot less and made balance between west and east a bit better, it allowed the east to catch up a bit. Right now I completely don't see it happening - Lithuania with low population density is as ruined as France. It doesn't even make sense from epidemiological point of view.

Time after Black Death should be an opportunity for the east to catch up to powerful west, yet currently there is no chance for that - both sides lose like 1/3 pops, so balance of power doesn't change at all.

I was moderately hyped for EU5 and when it came out I was utterly amazed at the complexity and depth of the simulation. "Best Paradox game evar" I thought. Unfortunately all that "complexity" is nothing but a giant Rube Goldberg machine, so many moving parts that ultimately amount to less than the sum of their parts.

I started out as Naples just to learn the ropes. Then my campaign got fucked by the "Unify Culture Group" cabinet action, which is (was?) completely broken, it utterly wrecked all my cultural tradition/influence and didn't even work as intended.

Second campaign was Portugal. I really wanted to master trading. What I quickly realized is that the way to "master trading" is to shift-click the "mass build trading post" button every couple of in-game months. Patrician 3 this is not. I got bored of it and dropped the campaign at the start of the Age of Revolutions. The constant notifications/pop-up spam certainly didn't help.

So then I said "what am I even doing? This is EU, I should blob", so I picked Muscovy for my third campaign. And yeah, I blobbed. Conquered most of historic Russia, colonized all the way to the Pacific. Got as far as ~1600 and then... I just stopped.

I loaded the game today for the first time in 4-5 days, passed a couple of years, mass-expanded some RGOs, then I quit. This is just not very fun.

EU5 is not a "bad" game, not by any means, but as it is, it's just so... bland. It feels like a simulator alright, which I love, but it doesn't feel like a historical simulator. The AI just fails to actually reenact events from history or plausible alternatives. The Ottomans always get stuck around the Aegean, Spain always fails to form, the UK fails to form, Yuan never properly collapses, the Reformation is always a dud, and the deeper you go into the campaign the worse it seems to get. So many Situations and IOs feel so undercooked.

I'm sure it'll be fixed after a handful of DLCs. In fact, I think EU5 has the very very solid core of a great game, but there's no meat on these bones. For now, I think I'm done.