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Abe Sargent · 07-30-2006, 04:41 PM

Let's get this next one out of the way so that all we'll have left is the top ten.

11. Europa Universalis II
Paradox
2001
PC
GameSpot Review - 8.5
Strategy

GamersGate - Buy and download games now!

EU2 ruined it for me. Up until 2001, my favorite strategy games were turn-based Civ and Civ clones. Then I played EU2 after someone here posted a dynasty.

Nothing was ever the same again. EU2 and FOF2k1 completely changed my gaming, but EU2 more than any other game really did. Europa Universalis II was so epic and so detailed that it erased from my mind my previous love. I plum forgot anything else.

Europa Universalis II is a real time strategy game but the real time is so slow that is has the effect of a turn based game. I hate real time strategies because they always seemed like button clickers, but EU2 is different.

Here's a look at Spain:

I played an entire dynasty written here on just this peninsula. Some people remark that the map looks a bit like a gameboard, and I think they're right.

One of the things that I always appreciated was the simple fact that the game, despite tons of detail, has three military units - infantry, calvary and artillery. The emphasis of the game is elsewhere, and I love that.

Let's begin with the world. You play on the most detailed and exact version of the World Map that I have ever seen in a video game. It is amazing in its detail. Even with its European focus the game still has plenty of time for a highly detailed Nippon (Japan), SE Asia, Russia and Siberia, China, India, Middle East, North Africa and South America. Many felt that Southern Africa, North America and Indonesia needed some work.

The map creator decided that areas of the world that were completely inhabitable with 18th century technology (the highest in the game), would be written in as Terra Incognita - places you could not go (like, for example, the Sahara Desert)

Here you can see that Inland Greenland is completely Terra Incognita.

The game is built around an event engine. This is a highly detailed event engine that helps to simulate some of the real world issues involving various states.

For example, suppose you are playing China. At some point in time, you are going to have to deal with the White Lotus Rebellion. In fact, you'll get an event with several choices, and the one you choose will show how your country is guided by your leadership. When you script an event, you can make one choice the likely choice for the AI, so the AI will usually follow the historical path, but will deviate occasionally so that each game is different.

China, to continue the example, will have an event early in the game where they choose whether or not to fund their Treasure Fleet under the guidance of Zheng He. Fund it, and you get Zheng He, one of the earliest explorers in the game but it costs you money. Choose not to, and you don't get Zheng He.

Areas of the map you don't know can be explored by an explorer at sea or a conquistador if by land. Zheng He, in the above example, would open up sea lanes for later trading, exploration or war. (Explorers have a small chance of discovering coastal land as they sail by)

The game's technology was very simple. There are a variety of techs and each are from level 1-5. Some are military, some economic and some social. You can have your people working on a tech, but it is very uncertain when you'll get it. As neighbors get techs, you'll get them slowly. You have techs by provinces. If you discover, for example, cathedrals, you can only use that tech in your base province and as it moves throughout your country you can use it in your provinces. Likewise, a tech a neighbor has will start at the edges of your empire adjacent to that neighbor and move in. It's very realistic.

The economic system is based around trade. Each province has a good it specializes in. Let me see if I can remember them all (Naval Goods, Spice, Copper, Iron, Gold, Coffee, Tea, Slaves, Ivory, Fur, Chinaware, Fish, Sheep, Salt, Wheat, Cloth - but gold is not a traded good). Goods have a production value and a trade value. Production is how much you make from them and trade is how much in made in the local Center of Trade. Production is also affected by factors like population, but trade isn't that much.

The local Center of Trade is the place that all nearby goods go to be traded. An example of a Center of Trade is Tago, the capital province of Portugal. Nearby goods are shipped to Tago and, as a result, a ton of money is made in Tago by Portugal.

You can send off merchants to a CoT to set up shop and siphon off some of the profits. The more merchants you set up, the bigger a slice of the pie you have. Big CoTs, like Byzantium, have a lot of competition for spots so your merchants get squeezed out a lot.

New CoTs will occasionally spring up, some from random events and some from set events (Flanders, for example, will pop up as a CoT if the Netherlands form as a country).

In order to expand, one option is colonization. You send out colonists to unclaimed land and there's a chance based on climate, previous colonizing attempts, conquistador presence, number of natives, and hostility of native as to whether or not the colonizing attempt will take. Once you get six successful attempts, any local natives will join your colony. In the meantime, natives could burn down your colony with a higher chance of it occuring the more aggressive and numerous the natives are.

The Carribean:

You can also expand by war. In this game, you have to have a Casus Belli o go to war with someone. You have a permanent Casus Belli on a country if they have land that you have a claim to. For example, at the start of the game, Wallachia has a Callus Belli on Moldova because of an ancient claim Wallachia has on the province. Anytime Wallachia wants, they can go to war with whoever has the Moldovan province. If they claim that province in war, there is much of a problem with the international community.

However, if you start gobbling up neighbors and land that you do not have a claim to, others will get antsy and start attacking you. This concept is called your badboy rating. Over time, your BB rating will get better, so you can expand occasionally but not significantly. If you take land in a defensive war, as opposed to an offensive war, your BB isn't hurt as badly. Annexing land politically as opposed to war is also not as bad. There are other examples, but those illustrate how the principle works.

As a result, although you will get into wars, wars will not drive the game. There will be periods of prolonged peace, for example, interspersed with a lot of blood. It's very historical in that respect.

In your provinces, you can build a ton of improvements over time as your techs increase. You can even specialize your provinces with various improvements.

You'll learn to love/hate the random events. Some are great, while others include such events as plague and civil unrest.

There are a handful of game events that change the nature of the game and effect everyone. They are; Treaty of Tordesillas which divides up the New World, the Protestant Reformation which creates Protestantism as a new religion, Jean Calvin which creates Reform as a new religion, and Counter-Reform which created Counter-Reform Catholicism as a new religion - all offshots of Christianity, and then later, Religious Tolerance which reduces the disagreements between religions.

As you control your empire, there are a variety of sliders that affect how you organize and treat your people. Do you want to be more centralized or decentralized? Do you want your military to be more offensive or defensive? Do you prefer free trade or mercantilism? And so forth. These sliders will adjust happiness of the four castes in your society (peasants, nobles, clergy and burghers) as well as increase merchant, colonist and missionary production, change tax effectiveness, and so froth. (Missionaries can be sent, at some cost, to try and convert the masses of a province to your state religion.)

You'll also have to worry about tax rate, keeping people in a province happy, revolts, and more.

As you can see, the game is quite complex, but many of its complexities make sense, like the badboy rating simulating the need to not appear too much a tyrant or else neighbors will come down on you.

The game is highly moddable, and in fact, I scripted many of my own events for a fantasy Granada in my dynasty. Players have added hundreds of events, tons of countries and more in a player made mod called the AGC-EEP which is a combination of two previous mods.

The company patched the game long after it has passed its shelflife, much like Jim does, only these patches were much more grandiose. They are still tinkering with it, trying to fix little things and make the game work much more smoothly.

As a result of all of this, EU2 is my eleventh game and came very close to cracking the top ten.

-Anxiety

07-30-2006, 04:41 PM	#93
Abe Sargent Hall Of Famer Join Date: Dec 2001 Location: Catonsville, MD	Let's get this next one out of the way so that all we'll have left is the top ten. 11. Europa Universalis II Paradox 2001 PC GameSpot Review - 8.5 Strategy GamersGate - Buy and download games now! EU2 ruined it for me. Up until 2001, my favorite strategy games were turn-based Civ and Civ clones. Then I played EU2 after someone here posted a dynasty. Nothing was ever the same again. EU2 and FOF2k1 completely changed my gaming, but EU2 more than any other game really did. Europa Universalis II was so epic and so detailed that it erased from my mind my previous love. I plum forgot anything else. Europa Universalis II is a real time strategy game but the real time is so slow that is has the effect of a turn based game. I hate real time strategies because they always seemed like button clickers, but EU2 is different. Here's a look at Spain: I played an entire dynasty written here on just this peninsula. Some people remark that the map looks a bit like a gameboard, and I think they're right. One of the things that I always appreciated was the simple fact that the game, despite tons of detail, has three military units - infantry, calvary and artillery. The emphasis of the game is elsewhere, and I love that. Let's begin with the world. You play on the most detailed and exact version of the World Map that I have ever seen in a video game. It is amazing in its detail. Even with its European focus the game still has plenty of time for a highly detailed Nippon (Japan), SE Asia, Russia and Siberia, China, India, Middle East, North Africa and South America. Many felt that Southern Africa, North America and Indonesia needed some work. The map creator decided that areas of the world that were completely inhabitable with 18th century technology (the highest in the game), would be written in as Terra Incognita - places you could not go (like, for example, the Sahara Desert) Here you can see that Inland Greenland is completely Terra Incognita. The game is built around an event engine. This is a highly detailed event engine that helps to simulate some of the real world issues involving various states. For example, suppose you are playing China. At some point in time, you are going to have to deal with the White Lotus Rebellion. In fact, you'll get an event with several choices, and the one you choose will show how your country is guided by your leadership. When you script an event, you can make one choice the likely choice for the AI, so the AI will usually follow the historical path, but will deviate occasionally so that each game is different. China, to continue the example, will have an event early in the game where they choose whether or not to fund their Treasure Fleet under the guidance of Zheng He. Fund it, and you get Zheng He, one of the earliest explorers in the game but it costs you money. Choose not to, and you don't get Zheng He. Areas of the map you don't know can be explored by an explorer at sea or a conquistador if by land. Zheng He, in the above example, would open up sea lanes for later trading, exploration or war. (Explorers have a small chance of discovering coastal land as they sail by) The game's technology was very simple. There are a variety of techs and each are from level 1-5. Some are military, some economic and some social. You can have your people working on a tech, but it is very uncertain when you'll get it. As neighbors get techs, you'll get them slowly. You have techs by provinces. If you discover, for example, cathedrals, you can only use that tech in your base province and as it moves throughout your country you can use it in your provinces. Likewise, a tech a neighbor has will start at the edges of your empire adjacent to that neighbor and move in. It's very realistic. The economic system is based around trade. Each province has a good it specializes in. Let me see if I can remember them all (Naval Goods, Spice, Copper, Iron, Gold, Coffee, Tea, Slaves, Ivory, Fur, Chinaware, Fish, Sheep, Salt, Wheat, Cloth - but gold is not a traded good). Goods have a production value and a trade value. Production is how much you make from them and trade is how much in made in the local Center of Trade. Production is also affected by factors like population, but trade isn't that much. The local Center of Trade is the place that all nearby goods go to be traded. An example of a Center of Trade is Tago, the capital province of Portugal. Nearby goods are shipped to Tago and, as a result, a ton of money is made in Tago by Portugal. You can send off merchants to a CoT to set up shop and siphon off some of the profits. The more merchants you set up, the bigger a slice of the pie you have. Big CoTs, like Byzantium, have a lot of competition for spots so your merchants get squeezed out a lot. New CoTs will occasionally spring up, some from random events and some from set events (Flanders, for example, will pop up as a CoT if the Netherlands form as a country). In order to expand, one option is colonization. You send out colonists to unclaimed land and there's a chance based on climate, previous colonizing attempts, conquistador presence, number of natives, and hostility of native as to whether or not the colonizing attempt will take. Once you get six successful attempts, any local natives will join your colony. In the meantime, natives could burn down your colony with a higher chance of it occuring the more aggressive and numerous the natives are. The Carribean: You can also expand by war. In this game, you have to have a Casus Belli o go to war with someone. You have a permanent Casus Belli on a country if they have land that you have a claim to. For example, at the start of the game, Wallachia has a Callus Belli on Moldova because of an ancient claim Wallachia has on the province. Anytime Wallachia wants, they can go to war with whoever has the Moldovan province. If they claim that province in war, there is much of a problem with the international community. However, if you start gobbling up neighbors and land that you do not have a claim to, others will get antsy and start attacking you. This concept is called your badboy rating. Over time, your BB rating will get better, so you can expand occasionally but not significantly. If you take land in a defensive war, as opposed to an offensive war, your BB isn't hurt as badly. Annexing land politically as opposed to war is also not as bad. There are other examples, but those illustrate how the principle works. As a result, although you will get into wars, wars will not drive the game. There will be periods of prolonged peace, for example, interspersed with a lot of blood. It's very historical in that respect. In your provinces, you can build a ton of improvements over time as your techs increase. You can even specialize your provinces with various improvements. You'll learn to love/hate the random events. Some are great, while others include such events as plague and civil unrest. There are a handful of game events that change the nature of the game and effect everyone. They are; Treaty of Tordesillas which divides up the New World, the Protestant Reformation which creates Protestantism as a new religion, Jean Calvin which creates Reform as a new religion, and Counter-Reform which created Counter-Reform Catholicism as a new religion - all offshots of Christianity, and then later, Religious Tolerance which reduces the disagreements between religions. As you control your empire, there are a variety of sliders that affect how you organize and treat your people. Do you want to be more centralized or decentralized? Do you want your military to be more offensive or defensive? Do you prefer free trade or mercantilism? And so forth. These sliders will adjust happiness of the four castes in your society (peasants, nobles, clergy and burghers) as well as increase merchant, colonist and missionary production, change tax effectiveness, and so froth. (Missionaries can be sent, at some cost, to try and convert the masses of a province to your state religion.) You'll also have to worry about tax rate, keeping people in a province happy, revolts, and more. As you can see, the game is quite complex, but many of its complexities make sense, like the badboy rating simulating the need to not appear too much a tyrant or else neighbors will come down on you. The game is highly moddable, and in fact, I scripted many of my own events for a fantasy Granada in my dynasty. Players have added hundreds of events, tons of countries and more in a player made mod called the AGC-EEP which is a combination of two previous mods. The company patched the game long after it has passed its shelflife, much like Jim does, only these patches were much more grandiose. They are still tinkering with it, trying to fix little things and make the game work much more smoothly. As a result of all of this, EU2 is my eleventh game and came very close to cracking the top ten. -Anxiety __________________ Check out my two current weekly Magic columns! https://www.coolstuffinc.com/a/?action=search&page=1&author[]=Abe%20Sargent Last edited by Abe Sargent : 05-01-2022 at 12:14 PM.