OT Thoughts about Europa Universalis
Hi out there,
it is long, and absolutely off topic, but some of you mught be interested.
Europa Universalis
EU has its origins in a board game of the same name, pulbished by Azure Wish, a french
based company. The board game comes with a lot of tables and a really big rulebook (in horrible english). The board game itself has similarities to *Empires in Arms* by AH, but is far more complex.
EU is a build-up-your-empire gamefrom 1492 until 1792. It is historicaly very
accurate and uses a wide range of possible fields of player control. Trade, administration, expanding (colonies), military, diplomacy and even religion.
Sounds good so far ? Well it does.
So what did the developers do with it. To be honest I must answer with famous german poet
J.W. v.Goethe: *Two souls are inherited in my chest* (translation by myself). One of them wants EU to be a good game, because it deserves to be. The other is disapointed by what I got out of the box.
The goodies.
A lovely game map, a lot of possibilities to enlarge your empire with a not too bad interface. A lot of txt-files to change the game settings. Neat animated unit-icons.
The bad.
It is kind of real-time-strategy. You can set the game pace very, very slow or even stop it.
But nevertheless it disturbs me, and gives me the feeling of haste and missing something (I have not played any multi-player-games, so I can�t tell you if you are able to pause the game there).
It has the most anoying manual I have ever seen. Why so ? It is really big, so I expected a
lot of rules and tables in it (see above). Nada. A lot of explaining how bad or good times
have been then. Actually it reads more like a history-essay. There is no index ! There are no explanation of the txt-files (nowehre in the game, even not as a file). I have read the
manual once before I played (something I�ve never done before) and it was good for (nearly) nothing, because if you want to look something up, most of the time you have to
read a complete passage of several pages.
O.k. so I started the tutorial. Forget about that, before the tutorial texts and explanations start to pop up you play for ten (game) years without nearly no advice. This is
about 15 to 30 min. real-time! My personal guess is, that nobody new to the game ever tried
to get used to the game, before the game went gold.
So at least it has a good game-play ? Well don�t ask me, after the miserable tutorial I started two of the scenarios (few, but playing different countries with the same scenario is very interesting). I ruined Sweden in one, and got bored of Austria in the other. It definitely needs a lot of time to get used to the depth of game-play, but I am not really
addicted to this game, and I would not recommend it. If you are interested wait for a demo.
Don�t spend your bucks on high-priced imports (Right now, this game has been published only in Germany, next is a Swedish Version. ASFAIK there will not be an english (american ?) Version before Febr. 2001).
BTW, of course the game needed to be patched only a few days after release. The sound-files were corrupted. These files are important for game-play as you can tell, what (and how far away) something happens.
When I dared to post about the sound-files (and my opnion about game-play) at an EU-forum, I
nearly got killed by comments like *we have been waiting for this game so long, how can you dare tell us it is not the heavenly-made game we all expect it to be*.
Something I have not ever seen on this forum.
So you can see the goodies are few. I hope this game will be enhanced with it�s other language Versions....
Farewell for now
Ferendra
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