When comparing Stronghold Crusader HD vs Europa Universalis IV, the Slant community recommends Stronghold Crusader HD for most people. In the question“What are the best singleplayer games on Steam?” Stronghold Crusader HD is ranked 45th while Europa Universalis IV is ranked 55th. The most important reason people chose Stronghold Crusader HD is:
Easy to learn mechanics of economy, castle building and army production. Does not overwhelm players with choices.
Specs
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Pros
Pro Great for RTS beginners
Easy to learn mechanics of economy, castle building and army production.
Does not overwhelm players with choices.
Pro Deep yet intuitive interface
Many options are available in the game along with good tutorials that introduce the player to these. While not all options are necessary the inclusion of them is welcome for those that would like to take advantage of them.
Pro Unique Gameplay
A unique blend of real-time battles and castle-sim, which the Stronghold series is famous for
Pro You can set your own goals
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.
Pro Game features pausing and adjustable speeds
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.
Pro Lots of depth
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.
Pro You get to chose how to play
You can either expand with colonies, martial might or be peaceful and attempt to ally neighbouring nations.
Cons
Con Lacks polish in some areas
Things like buttons on the bottom of the screen that are not intuitively placed as well as notifications that can not be filtered to the more important. This can detract from the gameplay as it is immersion breaking to have to rifle through inconvenient button placement as well as notifications looking for what you need at the time.
Con Multiplayer is a hassle
A third-party connection app like Tunngle, Hamachi, GameRanger is needed to play the non-steam version of the game and therefore multiplayer games are mostly unresponsive and error-prone
Con Games can take a very long time
Due to the in depth, meticulous gameplay mechanics, the games can take weeks to finish which some people may not have the patience for.
Con Steep learning curve
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.
Con Math
This game is pure math, like every game. But in this game, you can actually calculate the outcome of an action, which makes the computer (AI) feel dumb.
For example, when you grow, you easily form an alliance with the second largest army on the map, which will accept and let you grow, grow, grow without the slightest clue that he will be next. This is weird.