EU is really a great game. By concentrating on a specific historical setting, it has managed to provide us with a much deeper and more realistic gameplay than any other strategy game until now. These guys have performed enormous historical research, trying to simulate the historic setting of the era. The game however is lacking in a few major areas:
1. AI. Although the diplomatic AI is very competent at forging alliances and declaring war when and where you're most vulnerable, the military AI sucks, just as bad as the civ AI does. Attrition, supply lines, sieges etc are very good rules to prevent civ-type warmongering from the part of the human player, but the AI just seems to just overlook their existance. It creates monstrous armies and sends them fight on the other side of the continent, into areas with no supplies, losing most of them due to attrition. It uses 200.000 men to siege a fortress and suffer maximum attrition, while only 20.000 could do the job as well and not lose a single soldier. Single-province states, overlooking the fact that if their fortress falls, their enemy has the option to completely annex them, send their armies to siege some far-off province, although the enemy is already marching towards them. Invaluable explorers are sent to sure death across the Atlantic, trying to get as far as they can before their last ship sinks, without ever considering returning to port from time to time.
2. Interface. The game interface is not so well polished out as it could be. There are 8 different aspects of the map that one can see, but not all are accessible in the same way. The Religion map in particular is hidden as deep as it can be. Reorganising your armies is very problematic once you're on foreign land. I never understood why there are only infantry sprites on the map and no cavalry ones. The tech cursors are very inaccurate and fine-tuning is quite hard. The game is also quite a memory hog, since it performs extensive computations for all of the (up to 90) nations in the game.
3. Technology. In an attempt to counter the "steamroller effect" which occurs in civ, where technology is only dependent on spending so that the bigger civs obtain a huge technological edge, thus crushing the smaller ones, EU has introduced a system where tech acquisition is cheaper the less provinces your state has, while other bonuses like neighbor and monarch bonuses remain absolute, thus giving disproportionate advantage to the small states, whose armies and merchants become invincible after a while. The same happens with pirates and rebels which tend to be much more advanced than the armies and navies of the imperialist nations. It is the big AI nations that really get screwed, since the human player, usually finds a way to partially counter his disadvantage.
As for the learning curve, I have to say that it was much easier for me to begin competently playing EU than civ2. This is partly due to the fact that civ2 was the first strategy game I ever played, while now I am a really experienced strategy player. However one surely feels much more at home in EU, since the setting is much more familiar. The game also practically runs itself, specially if you're not a colonialist nation, since there is no micromanagement in the economy and the military units (one has always relatively few armies, because of the bonuses and specialties attributed to leaders and because, against the big AI armies, only equivalently big armies are effective) and there are relatively very few things to build. The really difficult stuff, like the combat system or the trade system, or where is the best place to build a colony can be adequately administered following the common sense (it is common sense f.e. that cavalry can't do sieges, but cannons are way better for the job). The only really steep part in the learning curve is diplomacy, which follows the rules of the era and where one can really do blunders (that's why I always save before sending a diplomat) and perhaps missions, where one needs time to start making valid assessments on his own capabilities (twice I said I would annex Algiers in five years and twice the time passed without ever making a serious attempt). Inflation remains a mystery for all EU players, because their game model is based in some irrational monetarist theory (putting your monthly income to the treasury increases inflation, while doing the same with your yearly income doesn't) which is unfamiliar to us commoners. At least I live in a country where inflation has reached 25% only 10 years ago (now it's less than 4%) and I know some things about it; what would a German with constantly less than 2% inflation know? As for the other stuff, AI will be always AI and there will be always tricks against it, which have to be learned. The manual is a piece of very nice prose, full of history lessons, but it won't help you much because it's disorganised (it even lacks an index) and it won't discuss the inner game mechanics or strategy at any satisfactory degree (What manual would ever do that? Exploring the game's possibilities and discussing your findings with the other gamers is by far the most satisfactory part of the gaming experience).
What a TBS gamer has to learn anew is time management, not in the RTS sense, but synchronisation between units and events, so that there is no dead time and opportunity windows get exploited (fe when multiple sieges take place and one takes some provinces just before losing some of his own, one can get peace with favorable terms). During wars, several events may happen in a single day and things are hard to monitor unless one uses pause and plays at the slowest speed. So there is is a sense time micromanagment; playing slow and pausing often may take forever to play a full game (I played one week for just 20 out of the 300 years of game time) but it has great benefits. This distinguishes the EUgamers in two groups, on that does what I do and another that plays fast, having played the Grand Campaign with many nations many times over already. I guess this is something we'll see in Clash too. Personally I prefer this sort of "stopwatch" games (games of all sorts, like Caesar 3, SimCity, Baldur's Gate) even against TBS games.
The bottom line is that EU is a very bold step for the games industry towards the right direction in strategy gaming (it isn't by chance that this is not an American product), but still it is just a very small step. The gameplay is not nearly as deep as it could have been or as we would like it to be (economy, technology and combat are still too generic) and also a big consession is made, that realism and depth always have to be inversely analogous to the width of the historic game setting. We in Clash should strive to break these limitations, by creating extensive and versatile game models and providing wide possibilities for customisation and scenario creation.
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I wrote this review in response to a request by Mark Everson in this thread:
http://www.apolyton.net/forums/Forum.../000354.html?1
Then it came to me that I should post it here too. Please feel free to add comments and to post your own reviews, since this is something I have yet to see in this forum.
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"In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act."
George Orwell
