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DetailedGanymede's Experience
EUIV is a simulation of global politics and war. There is a relatively limited set of choices you can make under normal circumstances: hiring advisors to improve your capabilities, hiring troops, about two dozen diplomatic actions in peace, and a number of different peace deal options when terminating a war. However, these interact to produce a large number of interesting decisions that affect your outcomes. If you want to annex a neighbor, do you declare a holy war on them, or do you fabricate claims on their territory and demand that they "return" this land to you? Do you ally a much larger nation that might try to force you to be their vassal? Conversely, do you try to improve relations with a much smaller neighbor in order to become their suzerain overlord, or do you attempt to conquer them directly and risk pulling their larger allies into a war? On top of that, there are hundreds of events that can occur once certain preconditions are met. Some of them are specific to which country you're playing as. Some require you to hire the right set of advisors. And if you don't keep your country's internal affairs in order, you may find yourself on the wrong end of a peasant's war or facing other national disasters. See More
When you start out, it can be overwhelming. You have a country and three thousand infantrymen -- what can you do? You decide to attack your neighbor -- and they cut you down like reeds. You start over as a bigger country and attack a smaller neighbor -- and suddenly you're in a war against several large countries at once. You start again and this time you find a weak neighbor with no allies. You crush them and bring them under your control -- and suddenly you find revolutions popping up everywhere. Even after you've learned the basics, you'll still find yourself wondering: if I declare a holy war, will it cost me diplomatic power to annex territory or not? And it's often hard -- certainly in ironman mode -- to undo decisions, so small mistakes and misclicks can end up costing you a lot. The game does give you guidance in the form of alert bubbles in the upper left of the screen, informing you of the things it thinks are most relevant, and paying attention to those can at least show you what you might want to think about. In the later patches, the user interface has been improving to help reduce surprises -- and the game mechanics as well. For instance, rebel uprising progress can be tracked easily -- you won't be surprised by a sudden uprising of Najdi nationalists, and when you're in for a long-term peasant revolt, the game will tell you why it's happening, how to prevent it, and how to get out of it once it happens. But simply finding all these parts of the user interface takes time playing. Determining what's important takes experience. You can pause the game at any time and find all the data you can handle, but if you're not just extracting the important parts, the deluge won't help. Your best bet is to find videos of people playing the game with a bit more skill than you. Streaming is best -- you can ask questions, and most streamers will answer. See More
Europa Universalis IV allows you to play straight through in real-time, or pause the game for as much micro-management as needed. With this system in place, everyone can play at their own pace without need for rapid play styles or quick rushing attacks to achieve victory, thus giving players freedom to tackle missions at their own, preferred speed. See More
While there are a lot of achievements for doing certain things in Iron Man mode, which runs can be tailored towards, and there is a points system allowing you to focus on becoming the "best" in the world, there is no definitive win condition and therefore a lot of players decide their own target for the campaign and focus on that, whether direct conquest or a trade empire or "playing tall" - highly developing a small nation without expanding geographically. See More
Cities: Skylines makes a decent game if all you want to do is make a pretty piece of art, but as far as making a properly functioning city the game still leaves much to be desired and is overall inferior to the nearly 20 years old Sim City 4 for actual simulation of a realistic city. See More
The game allows for one to make their own choices with there being many "win" conditions in that you can choose to progress how you like. Want to take over all of Europe, that is possible, want to create a successful lineage of family that keeps to themselves, this is also possible. See More
The fact that Stellaris is so modifiable makes a huge difference to the game. There are so many ways to customize the game to your liking. If there's a design decision you dislike, you are always capable of changing it yourself (within certain limits), and you can make the game completely different. You can play as a race from your favorite books, anime, whatever, because so many talented people are making mods for the game. See More
In the game, you can create "sectors" to manage the planets that you cannot manage yourself due to the "core worlds" limit. However, these sectors are managed by the game's AI, and the AI often times makes foolish choices with how they develop the planets under its care, even if the "respect tile resources" option is checked. What the option should do is ensure that the AI builds a building on a tile that has bonuses for that type of building. It will instead build whatever it feels like, from what many in the community have seen. See More
As the game is right now, without mods, the weapons and other ship modules are sorely in need of a rebalancing. Currently, when you hit the end-game, the best way to go is to stack shields, health, and as many Tachyon Lances as you can fit onto as many Battleships as you can muster, then send them in as a blob to murderize every enemy you come across. Compared to other games of this genre, this makes the rest of the research you did before hand seem quite meaningless. You might find yourself asking, "Why did I bother researching Kinetic Weapons when I'll never use them in the end?" Similarly, Ethos and Traits are highly imbalanced as they are. Materialists can get huge research bonuses that nobody else could dream of. Spiritualists can get other races with other ethos to bend to their will ridiculously quickly. Militarists are incredibly good at making war, which is currently the only feasible way to meet the win conditions of the game. As for traits, there are many traits that you may find yourself never picking. Intellectual is always good, Very Strong is always good, Repugnant doesn't matter if you don't integrate other species and Sedentary's malus hardly matters. Hopefully we will see these balanced in the future. See More
Oftentimes, if you play the game without min-maxing everything, you will find yourself with interesting stories to tell. While the coded events themselves may lose their touch after a while, the interactions with the various races nearby will often be different. You might find yourself in situations where the whole galaxy is against you. You also might find a race of primitives who you uplift, who will become fast friends with you. It's possible that you might grow attached to them, only for them to suddenly and violently be taken over by that Xenophobic Militarist on your borders. The reason some stick with this game for so long is because they love these interactions, despite how shallow they may be sometimes. The fact that you can even be a Fanatic Militarist in the game and still have friends afterward is something that some may find particularly fun. See More
Unfortunately, the game is lacking a bit in certain types of content. There is a great number of events in the game, but not enough as it is. With how many events there are, it is likely that you will see many of these events occur over multiple games. For instance, finding Sol or Sanctuary once may be interesting, but finding it every couple games makes it seem less special. See More
This game has much enjoyment in gameplay as you construct and build up your armies, air force, and navy. Completing focuses to push the country onward. What can make this game enjoyable is that you could be mostly taken over, losing the war and then just surprisingly do great and start winning. Sometimes you know the outcome but sometimes you don't. See More