Europa Universalis- Why haven't you played this yet?

[Strategyking92]

That's right, I'm talking about the Europa Universalis series.

The series is basically the map conquest of the total war games without the interactive battles. Watching how the world evolves, which nations collapse and which rise up over the chaos is very exciting. Also since this is a real time pausable game it's a game that you can even play when you are too tired to think clearly.

The game has gotten deeper with the expansion-patches paradox have delivered, but the truth is that the game is very simple: you decide how you want to lead your country. Want to conquer germanica through arms or diplomacy? Your choice. Want to ignore it altogether and research technologies to invade the new world? You can do that as well. Once the mechanics of the games are learned to can time royal marriages and other things. But alas, you can't predict everything. That's the beauty of this game: no experience is the same.

Even observing other players' experience's is fun, as is made evident by the sheer number of AAR's I've read and how many have been created. Fans haven't just created AAR's though, the modding community has become so large and important that paradox decided to start giving modders the options to sell full games based off of their games' engines. Hell, a mod is the only reason that I started playing EU: Rome because the vanilla game sucks.

 

Anyway, if you can creating a world and seeing it evolve through your and the AI's actions, I reccommend you give this series a shot.

This is the Europa Universalis series, but if you would prefer a time period different to the medieval through powdered wig era, there is also the Victoria series (Victorian age, world war 1) and then there is hearts of iron (WW2)

Here's a link to the AAR's:  http://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/forumdisplay.php?360-EU3-After-Action-Reports-%28AAR%29

You can find plenty of screenshots in those as well, mostly why I read them

(I'm a picture book type of guy)