After a year of faintly enigmatic developer blogs, Paradox has finally unveiled its sort-of-but-not-exactly-mysterious Project Caesar, confirming it to be (just as everyone had expected) Europa Universalis 5 – a “new era for grand strategy”.
Paradox says Europa Universalis 5 has been in developed for the last five years, built by Paradox Tinto – a its Barcelona-based studio assmembled from ‘modders, super fans, and the best developers around the world’. It’s goal has been to create “the grandest strategy game” ever, and the result is a “very ambitious” game where players can “do pretty much everything”.
This time around, players can experience history across a span of five hundred years – from 1337 to 1837 – formulating their strategy of sustainment and expansion through the Renaissance, the age of Enlightenment, and beyond.
Key to all this is a “living world” the features pops at his heart. Similar to pops seen in other Paradox grand strategy games, these population groups are bound by the likes of shared culture or religion (300 religions are said to be represented in EU5), and can range from a single person to millions.
Pops work in buildings such as farm and factories, producing goods and these in turn feed into all other aspects of the game. You can produce food to feed the population or keep armies moving, for instance, or goods to trade at markets to build a thriving economy. Pops are also split into social class – from peasants to the clergy and nobility – and further grouped into estates, each with their own thoughts and agendas. And you’ll in turn need to keep these groups happy – perhaps granting them special privelidges – to pass crucial policies in parliament.
What you do with your time is entirely up to you – you might opt for growth through trade or diplomacy or military might – but your strategies will guide you through six ages (traditions, renaissance, discovery, information, absolutism, and revolution) an “thousands of historical events”, each with different institutions representing core ideas of their respective eras.
Institutions unlock brand-new technology tree, so players embracing the quest for the new world institution will, for instance, find it easier to colonise lands overseas once they reach the age of discovery.
All this plays out across a “new and larger” world described as the “most accurate and granular map [Paradox has] ever made for a grand strategy game”. The means a greater number of nations and “more varied topographical features” – all promising to make for radical different gameplay depending on your set-up, your neighbours, and even your terrain. Geographical features can dramatically impact battle, for instance, with rivers, mountains, straits can all potentially influencing the outcome of a battle – you’ll just ned to make sure you don’t leave your production houses empty of workers as you sell your ranks on the battlefield.
There’s a lot more granular detail to be found in Europa Universalis 5’s 30-minute long announcement video, but one thing Paradox isn’t quite ready to talk about just yet is a release date. Currently all its saying is Europa Universalis 5 is “coming soon”.