Europa Universalis III

I already own #2 and played a demo of #1, is it worth getting #3?

I am not a huge fan of Paradox games, I don't like the real-time/continuous system they have - the pop-ups, having to adjust sliders constantly, slowing down the game to a snail pace during a war - and I find their diplomatic and events systems tedious. I'm not a huge fan of historical accuracy but I want a what-if historical game of game.

What are the improvements have made? I think it was developed after Victoria, has anything been taken from that?

 

Not much have been taken from victoria that was quite different. But if you want an game that is more towards the "what if?" spectra, then you will like EU3 better than EU2. Because the countries are more open books with more ways to specialise. Events are not tied to countries (apart a few cases), Inheritances is not tied to historical events either, you can buy leaders instead of getting historical ones and you can start at any date. most in the design have made it more of a open game than a historical simulation.

check the reviews in TC, I did one for EU3. I must say it is more of a evolution, than a revolution.

 

Thanks, I begun playing it and I must say it's an improvement.

Still, the real-time element is still really annoying. Why couldn't they make this turn-based?

Example: during battles, having to scroll over all the units in different regions and calculate when Regiment X will leave/arrive in this province and having to coordinate your units accordingly. I'm the Teutonic Order and am currently taking over a chunk of West Africa (teaching those niggers some Civilized Values), I only have a few units (of better quality than the natives) so I can't be everywhere so without calculating and remembering travel times constantly. If I didn't micromanage constantly focussed exclusively on that region and on the lowest game speed half my provinces would be lost making it impossible to hold territory.

How realistic is it to know exactly where enemy troops are going and when they'll arrive anyway?

Haven't read the manual yet, but for those who've played this some other questions:

1/ How can I get Generals? I maintain a decent Military Tradition (15-25% range) but I never get Generals, I always have to sell MT to get them and they're usually pretty crappy (randomly one to three stars distributed in different skills). Other countries have much better Generals without fighting as much.

2/ How do I exploit discoveries/achievements/exploration? I discovered a large part of South America being the first to get down to Patagonia/Pacific ocean but I don't see any benefit from having done that, it just saves other countries an advantage (since I can't colonize those places). My reputation/prestige or whatever always sucks and has a negative yearly change (-10 to +0 range). Does prestige even matter?

3/ What's better to focus on troops-wise, higher offensive "Fire" or "Moral" or "Shock" if defence is the same? How should I judge units?

4/ How to balance a budget? Seems there's no way to reduce spending except to starve your troops. It seems the budget management takes a fixed amount revenue and you can only divide it between different research areas and printing money. There's no way to reduce research spending it seems. I have my Treasury spending at zero to avoid any inflation, but the research spending is always something like 70% of my yearly revenue. Taking into account my modest army which with full spending makes me lose money each year the only way to make a surplus is to reduce army/navy spending to the minimum.

I built lots of improvement, workshops in all provinces and some manufacturing centers, I have a bunch of really profitable colonies and good implantation in the biggest trade centers, I have higher revenue than anybody in Eastern Europe but I still hardly make a surplus, my research investment has gone up but I would prefer money to increase my army and invest in infrastructure.

5/ Colonial limits. I have military access to Portugal, England and several other countries, but my colonial limits were for a long time calculated from Gdansk (westernmost port), making it impossible to colonize anything. I now have provinces in Africa but if I can base ships in Portuguese ports why can't they be used to calculate colonization reach?

6/ I want to change governments. Theocracy sucks. I have Government Research of around 12 and theoretically there should be six or so governments I could choose from but they're all grayed out. What do I have to do? I checked a faq and it says there are limits, that Theocracy can only change to Absolute Monarchy, and from that to Despotic Republic, I researched both but it won't let me change to them.

 

I don't know why anyone would play the EU series anymore unless they really like the time period. Victoria is much better in the micromanaging a country aspect and Hearts of Iron is better in the military aspect. So what's left?

Also, province borders in EU3 are really ugly. Otherwise I would have bought it by now.

 

Exterminate the natives. They are useless, and unless it's patched by now, you gain heaps of military tradition from it. That's how in our multi-player game England won, they killed a lot of natives and had 80-100 % military tradition, making their armies almost invincible, at least to the other countries who had been constantly at big, bloody wars and had something like 10-25% tradition.

You don't just get generals. You have to hoard tradition and when it's high, then buy generals, and then they're good (a good general makes spear-wielding indians massacre Spanish Tercios IIRC). The AI plays by diffrent rules, so you could load as a diffrent country and let AI handle your country for a small while and when you're back you will have something like 50 generals of various quality, wether or not you had money for them. But you'll have a huge mess to clear after that, as AI will also buy heaps of troops and you pay bigger maintenance costs for them.

Though diplomatic annexation is a lot easier than war, anyway. In my SP Castille campaign I didn't bother to go to a war with the other countries, as it was just a lot easier to rob the indians of their gold and buy France with it.

High prestige gives some bonuses. You can get it by conquering, winning battles, colonization, being the emperor and so on. Don't bother discovering stuff if you're not going to colonize. And AI nations don't have to explore, so when you're trying to create a massive african empire with something like Mali, the european nations will hate you and you can expect being in war with all of them (while you can't attack them since you don't know where they are. That happens even when you're fighting someone at your border, you can't cross in to Terra Incognita while the AI nations can).

Not all unit information is readily available, you have to dig through that stuff from the files, like that, say, even though your infantry units might have more dots of offense/defense than cavarly, cavarly is still better because of hidden modifiers until very high tech levels. There's a lot of hidden information in this game.

Don't maintain your army unless you're in war or are super rich. And avoid inflation like plague. Try to get by with what you get at the end (or was it start) of the year. Generally I didn't bother to keep but small armies, because the AI isn't really capable of conquering you (and war isn't really profitable compared to colonisation) and if you wait long enough, the AI nations will lag 10 to twenty levels behind in research because of their massive standing armies and will have something like 50+ inflation when you have zero. But anyway, becoming rich takes some time and patience depending on the nation you play.

I'm not wholly sure what are you talking about, perhaps that's a new feature. I don't remember any colonial limits. But anyway, buy or conquer Portugal.

You need to have enough stability. And yes, Theocracy sucks, you can't marry and diploannex countries.

I'm not sure how EU3 is today, with Napoleon's Ambition and all, but the last time I played, the mechanics were broken, the engine was awful, everything was generic and implausible and all in all, it was the worst Paradox game I have played. EU2 was so much better, and Victoria the best of them.

 

Thanks for the replies, that helps and yes, I'm using Napoleon's Ambition and do feel the game is kinda broken. I am hoping to finish this game and import it into Victoria which I remember has more depth and is an era that interests me more anyway.

The colonial limits or whatever is basically a limit to how far away you can send colonists from the nearest 'unblocked port' of your core provinces. For me that's Danzig which meant I was limited to Lapland in Finland initially and the western part of Africa after having put tons into naval research and taken Colonization as my 1st National Idea... I had to wait until that first African colony became a large province before having access to anything interesting.

As for the spending / budget stuff, I still don't understand why I can't reduce research spending. It seems the only way you can create a surplus unless you have very rich provinces is either to go into inflation or cut troop support, the military is the only spending you actually have control. Any why are there no taxation sliders (as in Victoria, Crusader Kings) with consequences to go along with them? In a game with so many sliders it's weird that the only possible tax raise is +50% which can only be done during a war.

 

Yeah, that moderately sucks. Your total monthly income is always divided completely into the various researches/stability/treasury, and that's that. Everything else seems to be an 'extra' or even luxury expenditure...

Well on the other hand, you can always increase income, rather than decrease spending. Place merchants. Lots of 'em. Have good relations with the countries in which centers of trade you operate, sign treaties, so you can't get competed out (but will by comparison generate less profit), and upgrade your officers in various provinces. Lastly, save for a bit of time and then build a manufactory (keeping in mind that the goods your province primarily produces and whether that province contains your main city influences the output of manufatories, to name 2).

Also, you may want to search around for a strategy guide, I found two that are very good and explain lots and lots of things well enough.

Here's one in text form (it's for the 2, but it should be accurate enough nonetheless), and here is one in .pdf.

 

Patched by now, IIRC.

They do need to explore (and always have), but their fleets don't suffer from attrition.

No. All your current tech bonuses are all listed in the ledger. As for the original question: For cavalry Fire doesn't matter, almost not at all, so always go with the highest shock unit available. For infantry, it's a little more complicated.

Both cavalry and infantry start out with a tech multiplier on fire of 0 - so even if some units say they have points in fire (such as longbow-men, before they were patched), those points are multiplied by 0 in combat. Infantry start out with a shock multiplier of 0.5, cavalry with 1. The cavalry tech-shock-multiplier increases quite quickly to 4 by land tech level 19 (average year 1625) after which it stalls - by the end of the game it's still only at 4.5 (with a fire multiplier of 0.1). Obviously, you should only take into account shock for infantry in the beginning, but by the end of the game, their shock multiplier is 2 while the fire multiplier is 2.75. It's not until tech level 19 (1625) that the fire multiplier catches up with the shock one (with both at 1).

What this tells us is that cavalry-only armies (for mobility) with shock-6 generals equals tehwin, for quite a while. With a couple of smaller infantry armies for sieges, of course.

Oh, and by the last tech level, artillery have a fire multiplier of 8.7 (ouch).

Always turn down your army/fleet maintenance sliders when at peace. Don't necessarily avoid inflation like the plague. It is generally recommended to keep a war chest at hand, and a little inflation isn't going to hurt you - you get a better return on your money if you invest them. According to the lead designer (Johan Andersson) the game is balanced around an expectation that the player will incur something like 1% inflation per decade. That stuff about the AI lagging behind in tech levels is also patched - ever since NA's release people have been whining about the player lagging behind the AI instead.

The reason military access doesn't increase your colonial limit is that that would ruin the whole point of the colonial limit (to make a-historical colonization more difficult). Anyway, the easiest way to expand your colonial limit is to conquer some close to shore native nation.

As mentioned, you need positive stability (or just 0, can't remember). Here's a handy government conversion chart, by the way.

Mechanically speaking, EU3 is basically just a superset of EU2 vanilla (not counting the event structure). The only reason to prefer EU2 is the AGCEEP, for the historical flavor. There is the Magna Mundi mod for EU3+NA that improves the historical feel, but it doesn't quite do it for me (it also has different aims than AGCEEP - historical plausibility rather than basically the history simulator of AGCEEP).

Try the Theatrum Orbis Terrarum mod, it's a complete map reskin.

 

Map Painting Simulator. If you love map painting, then this game is for you - all the politics in Europa Universalis III is about one ultimate goal: Annihilate everyone until you are the only one left or you get bored and start all over, preferably as a different country. Some countries are better represented, other are just there to exist and perish, but overall there are enough interesting states to provide a huge amount of gameplay, especially with all the add-ons. Unfortunately, for me this game is a rather bland experience. I would vote "average" if it was possible on Steam, however, it is not. This is the worst series that comes from Paradox studio, because it doesn't provide any internal politics like Crusader Kings, nor any interesting economics and population control like Victoria. The wars are not as detailed and do not require much thinking either, this isn't anything like Hearts of Iron, where the player is challenged and has to adapt to the changing war and apply appropriate tactics. Europa Universalis III is just about attacking smaller country and overrunning it quickly with army, taking it over and repeating the same thing all the time. It has other elements of gameplay, but nothing of importance. Unlike other Paradox games EU III doesn't focus on any particular aspect of running a country, hence it is quite void of content and feels bland.

I would recommend playing Victoria II, Crusader Kings 2 or Hearts of Iron III over Europa Universalis III, depending on what exactly are you looking in such a game, because EU III has nothing special about it.

 

Conductor we have a problem!

 

and that is why EU 3 is still the best paradox game, with death and taxes mod it is better than eu 4 and ck 2 mess.

 

So many people have such an unimaginative way of playing.

Play balance of power helping the little guys out while you take a slice of the pie here and there, then once you get big enough pick another nation and work to topple the empire you spent centuries building. With MEIOU's 1350 start date you can play like 2-4 different nations until the game ends.

Just like real life.