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Add to Account. Add all DLC to Cart. See All. View Community Hub. The empire building game Europa Universalis IV gives you control of a nation to guide through the years in order to create a dominant global empire. Rule your nation through the centuries, with unparalleled freedom, depth and historical accuracy. True exploration, trade, warfare and diplomacy will be brought to life in this epic title rife with rich strategic and tactical depth.
Main Features: Make your own decisions Nation building is completely flexible and the possibilities are endless. Use your Monarch Power Experience the new system of monarch power where your choices are influenced by the caliber of the man or woman you have at the top and will direct the ebb and flow of gameplay. Experience history coming to life The great personalities of the past are on hand to support you as you make your mark on thousands of historical events.
Turn the world into your playground Enjoy hundreds of years of gameplay in a lush topographical map complete with dynamic seasonal effects. Experience the all new trade system The trade system adds a new dimension to the great trade empires of the period. Gain control of vital trade routes and make the wealth of the world flow to your coffers. Bring out your negotiating skills in a deeper diplomatic system Use coalitions, royal marriages and support for rebels and explore the possibilities of the new unilateral opinion system.
Engage in Cross-platform Multiplayer Battle against your friends or try the co-operative multiplayer mode that allows several players to work together to control a single nation with up to 32 players.
Featuring improved chat and new matchmaking servers. System Requirements Windows. Internet Connection or LAN for multiplayer.
Controller support: 3-button mouse, keyboard and speakers. As the name suggests, this is the fourth game on this theme by Paradox. The game is primarily played on risk-style map but with far more, smaller provinces — a little over 3, in total which are simulated in substantially greater depth , where players can move around their armies and fleets and make province-level administrative decisions.
Players choose one historical state to play as out of several hundred — there is a real effort to get practically every state of any size or significance to be on the map and playable ; all of the other states operate under the same rules but are managed by the AI or by other players in multiplayer, but most players stick with single-player.
The starting maps are based on historical borders at given points in time and generally fairly accurate; far more so than is normal in the genre. While it is clearly the expectation that players will want to helm historically important, large states, one absolutely can opt to play as smaller, weaker states or states that were quickly absorbed historically.
Any state on the map is playable. This is a game where choosing not to fight is often the correct choice though war can be forced on the player by the AI. So, in essence, the player guides state actions through roughly years of the early modern period. Now I want to stress something about that description because it is really crucial for understanding EU4 and how it views history.
This is a game about states. If you play as, say, France, you play as the state of France. You do not play as the kings of France, or any particular king of France — kings in this game come and go, often with little notice by the player except in how the minor differences in their abilities impact state strategy which transcends their reigns. Even complete changes in dynasties often pass without remark; I have had successions through distaff lines change my ruling house in games as Prussia or Burgundy and not noticed until decades later.
Heck, even changes in government form are not meaningful discontinuities; transitions from kingdom to republic can be managed and while they can be disruptive they do not end the game. Likewise, when playing France, you are not playing as the French — indeed, France starts with many provinces with French culture outside of its borders and control. This is a game about states , not nation-states; unlike in, say, Civilization you are not playing as a people, but as a political entity.
So you do not play as a ruler, nor a family of rulers, nor as a government , nor as a people , you play as a state. Consequently, EU4 views the world almost exclusively through the prism of state action. Only states are real actors in EU4 rather than simple mechanisms those states must manage , to the exclusion of all other forms of social organization.
This comes out clearest in the way that the game treats non- state organizations: it either re-conceptualizes them as states, or reduces them to largely predictable, mechanistic systems to be managed by states.
Take, for instance, non-state polities that is, people politically organized into things — like tribes — which are not states; for those who want a refresh on the distinction between states and non-state polities, check out this post , which covers states and state formation. Nevertheless, they behave like states because they play almost entirely like the other states in the game: they control clearly defined territories with a monopoly on the use of force in those territories and they act in complete unison under central direction and strategy, all of which is the definition of a state.
Consequently, the complexity of non-state polities like these is just ironed away to make them all behave just like states, mostly to act as colonial foils and victims for the major state powers.
Which is still better than the peoples the game does not convert into ersatz states. They do not expand, make aggressive war, engage in diplomacy or anything like that. They exist to be settled upon or colonized and have no real chance of stopping that process once a state has turned their eyes upon them.
These non-state peoples, rather than being converted into states, are treated as little more than soft gray clay, ready to be molded by the states around them. Sub-state organizations get similar treatment, reduced to mechanics that are managed by the state. In short, while the game features social change, religious change, revolution and upheaval , these sub-state or international movements are treated from the perspective of the state and its concerns.
I have history courses in my back pocket that I teach which are absolutely political histories focused on the structures and fortunes of states! And again, the history of states is a valid historical lens to adopt; states, by virtue of being big, powerful institutions, can have big, powerful historical impacts.
One facet of this expression of state power and player convenience is the absolutely vast amount of information the player has. While the actions and situation of foreign states may be, to a degree, hidden although the player still has far better information on relative military and economic strength, to the point of knowing, down to the last man, how many men in service and liable for conscription every single state has at any given time , the player has effectively perfect information about their own state.
Every state, no matter how limited its administrative capacity, can with a click look at a province and see its development which replaced population in previous games , tax, production, trade value, local culture, local religion, notable public buildings, available manpower, precise supply limit, trade power, the major local product, how much is produced and where those goods flow. The state has precise knowledge at all times of how much manpower they have available state-wide, how many sailors, exactly how much money and so on.
These were things that pre-modern states generally did not know! Indeed, modern states can often only estimate these sorts of things in very broad strokes! James C. Scott, in Seeing Like a State — itself long overdue for a fireside recommendation — takes up this issue of legibility directly. Humans are hard to keep track of; they move, marry, have children and die. Consequently, Scott documents the lengths some states the book is organized as a series of case studies have gone to in order to render those people legible.
Moreover, even once this process was done, what the state had gained was often the illusion of knowledge, possessing lots of uniform statistics which did not show important local knowledge about conditions on the ground leading to things like, for instance, the failure of efforts at massive, state-run farms; farming is a very localized thing and the absence of local knowledge of seasons and soil conditions often produced catastrophe.
One example Scott uses early in his book is illustrative to how these processes went. In late s Prussia, the state owned significant amounts of forestland, the logging of which generated revenue to the state. In an effort to maximize this revenue in the long term, the Prussians embarked on a program of carefully measuring their forests, classifying trees and recording them. That effort created a demand for forests that were easier to record and thus easier to calculate revenue maximizing utilization , so the forests were transformed into artificial grids of trees, using just a handful of tree species in neat rows which grew to more or less uniform heights.
But that very process of regularizing the forests had unintended consequences. It disrupted the small ecological processes which enabled the forest to renew itself after cutting, such that, a century in on the project, the Prussian forests began to experience Waldsterben forest death.
Trees died, production shrunk and efforts were then put underway to create virtual, artificial ecologies to replace the more robust ecologies that systematization had destroyed, often with only limited success. Rather than disrupting natural ecologies, they disrupted natural communities , often to the frustration of the people who inhabited those very communities.
All of this was simply an effort to see the countryside the state in theory controlled but in practice had only ever controlled very incompletely and to render that countryside understandable to state bureaucrats and advisors in far away capitals and administrative centers. Note that all states engage in these processes to a degree and you find efforts to create legible societies even in ancient states. What changes in the early modern period is that the level of state capacity, at least in Europe because other areas of the world had high state capacity in much earlier periods rises tremendously, making radical efforts at social state-legibility possible.
States in EU4 seem to have none of these limitations, at least at first glance, as they have perfect information about the production and revenue capabilities of all of their provinces. It could be argued that the process by which the player develops provinces in their state reflects this process of legibility, such that when the player clicks the button to spend resources developing the tax base, or production or manpower of a province what they are actually doing are things like registering households for taxation and conscription or seizing and privatizing common land a process known as enclosure to render it liable for taxation and so on.
Yes, this is a period in Europe of rising urbanization and population growth, but not generally as the result of state action. Moreover — and this will be a frequent refrain for this series — the player is given no sense of what impacts these decisions have on regular people.
Because the game is focused on states the only impacts we see are impacts on states. What we do not see are the royal inspectors going house to house signing up and in some cases, violently impressing newly legible peasants for military service from which they will likely never return. We do not see peasant resistance to being made newly legible for new or old taxes which might push them into misery this interaction, where increasingly effective taxation of the lower classes lead to economic misery was a key contributor to the discontent that produced the French Revolution.
We hear a happy sound, and our state now has more power and it seems like everything is good because everything is good for the state. There is no sense that sometimes increased state power is actually bad for the people that the state nominally protects or works for, even though as Scott points out with case study after case study, historically rising state administrative capacity could be very bad though it could also be quite good for the subjects of those states.
There are no costs or tradeoffs. One of the consequences of these limitations in state power and legibility historically and a conclusion it is hard not to draw from a reading of history is just how limited the power of states is to change underlying cultures intentionally.
Sustained efforts by the Soviet Union over seventy years to drive the Orthodox Church and other religions as well out of Soviet society largely failed, despite the vast power of the Soviet state.
Examples of these sorts of failed top-down cultural initiatives are practically endless; it is very hard for states to intentionally effect mass cultural change by main force as an intentional policy.
There are some exceptions, of course; states are, for instance, generally effective at getting people to learn new languages but much less effective at getting them to abandon old ones. But overall, state efforts to mold culture tend to be long and difficult and still yield disappointing results. By contrast, because of the strong focus in EU4 on history as a story of state action , the state is made the main director of most cultural change and moreover given tremendous agency over such change to the point of often obliterating the agency of other groups.
This is perhaps most obvious in the tremendous control the player is given to make decisions that we might understand as changes in the culture of their state. Each idea group is essentially a cluster of bonuses representing the increased effectiveness of the state in some specific kind of activity.
Because there are more idea groups than there are slots for idea groups, the player is essentially being asked to specialize their state, to decide what things it is good at, at the cost of being less good at other things. Some of these ideas are things like having a national bank or a formalized officer corps which do fit within the space of state action and speak to the configuration of the state.
And certainly it is possible to look back and see that different states were differently able at certain tasks. It is dangerous to oversimplify here and end up reducing complex states and societies into stereotypes caricatures of themselves, but the idea of a game simulating states that, being excellent at one thing are less excellent than their contemporaries at other things makes sense. What is really ahistorical here is the degree of state control.
It is safe to say that the Dutch Republic remember, states, not peoples, so the Dutch Republic, not the Dutch , for instance, rather more competitive in trade than many other states. It was a product of the terrain of the Netherlands sitting at the mouth of a big navigable river that reached inland and provided a coastline with lots of good harbors , a product of the fact that the Low Countries had been an important region for trade particularly in fabrics for centuries, which in turn had shaped longstanding cultural assumptions and social structures in the communities of the Low Countries.
While these deep structures in society do change, they change only slowly and at a pace generally too slow for states to plan around them. I should note, the specific school of historical thought that EU4 is not really engaging with here is called the Annales school. In this reading, kings and empires rise and fall — often quite quickly — but the slow work of these structures is more influential in the long run. Sometimes kings and empires do last and do have permanent impacts on the underlying structures!
EU4 likewise privleges state action as the primary motivator of culture change in another way: the culture of provinces. Each province has a primary culture, which in turn a member of a culture group generally modeled on linguistic families. There are a lot of assumptions packed into this system and we will be coming back to it later. When a state absorbs provinces that are of neither an accepted culture or the primary culture, it has essentially three choices: first, it can simply tolerate the reduced revenue and resources and higher unrest from the province not generally a good choice.
But there are a sharply limited number of slots for accepted cultures, so developing a truly pluralistic society is generally impractical. I want to focus on that third option. There are two significant problems here.
The game makes a happy little horn-call when you press the button and the conversion starts, with a little administrator figure appearing on the map with a progress bar. The implication is that the forced cultural conversion of an entire province within a single generation by state action involves no coercion, no violence, no force, no death. The second is that this process vastly overstates the ability of states, by direct action, to change underlying culture. It is a long observed point that it is often states which create nations and only more rarely the other way around although it does happen!
The process by which, say, the Latin language slowly spread out through the western parts of the Roman Empire took centuries to complete. These changes happen over generations , not years. Now I understand what the game is trying to simulate. It is trying to simulate the emergence of modern nation -states, a real phenomenon that did occur in this period. Medieval France, for instance, had many ethnic groups — Franks, Occitans, Aquitanians, Bretons, Burgundians, and on and on — who spoke somewhat different languages and had meaningful cultural differences and to be clear, these regional cultures mostly still exist , but now layered over with a common French identity because — once more with feeling — cultural identities are complex and layer over each other, not simple and exclusive.
And I should note this process is not exclusive to Europe or to the early modern period. Practically every cultural grouping larger than a few towns or villages is the product of these sorts of processes. That said, for reasons we are about to discuss, these forces get much stronger in the early modern and modern periods, worldwide. But they have the agency here all wrong. Here I think it is helpful to lean on B.
Anderson, Imagined Communities , also a classic which doubtless will make a fireside appearance at some point. Anderson argues that the real agent of this process in the early modern period is the combination of mass literacy generally in the vernacular, that is local spoken, language rather than a fancy lingua Franca like Latin with the printing press and the mass commercial literature it produced expressed by Anderson more or less as the printing press plus capitalism combined finally with the movement away from personal rule through hereditary monarchy and divine right that occurred with the Enlightenment.
And what I want to note here is that the only real state agency in any of that is that some states encouraged mass literacy in the vernacular through public education, using state resources to teach new generations a standardized version of the national language which is why countries like France have government agencies which determine correct spelling and punctuation, rather than how countries in the Anglophone world leave that issue to endless, ineffectual bickering between writing style guides; this is not to say that Anglophone countries have never attempted to force people to learn English as a means of cultural erasure though.
But the rest of it — the printing press and the mass commercial literature and even most of the drive for mass literacy — happen below the level of state activity and outside of the control of the state. This is perhaps most visible in Germany before the formation of the German state. Indeed, in the German case, it was the feeling of nationalism which led to the national state, rather than the other way around to greatly simplify a very complex series of events.
State power in these processes is often minimal , as attested to by the frequent failures of state efforts to culturally consolidate nations either at home or abroad. In terms of modeling the limits of state power, EU4 is thus a step backwards from EU3 which was more prepared to admit that these sorts of processes existed largely outside of the realm of state action.
Nevertheless, if we are being fair, I understand from a game design point of view the desire to take a seemingly random and uncontrollable process and give the player a sense of agency and control.
Games where you can control things are more fun, after all. Moreover, not only does EU4 not confront the player with the human cost of theri decisions, but it goes further and often implies that no such human cost exists. They result in more power and glory to the state and so ad maiorem patriae gloriam they are uncomplicated good things. In a handful of cases, the march of state power can produce random events which begin to suggest the unmooring of traditional societies, but the game invests these with no amount of perceivable consequence ; the events are just that, random events, not direct results if your policies.
The result is a game that plays as a love letter to state power. More state power is always better. And so my advice to teachers who find their students coming from EU4 to the classroom is to foreground the human consequences of those state-centered policies. And for students who are using EU4 as a background, my advice would be to interrogate more deeply some of the processes that are being simulated here.
These processes — the steady increase of state power and capacity and the emergence of national imagined identities — were very real historical processes that really did happen and really do shape our modern world in profound ways. I applaud the folks at Paradox for making such an effort to try to model those processes, even if in some cases they fall short.
But I would suggest for the student looking into this to ask some hard questions about the costs and tradeoffs of those processes. The modern world is, I think, mostly a good thing, but it came with some catastrophic birthing pains.
Scott, Seeing Like a State and B. Anderson, Imagined Communities Next week, we take a turn and look at war, diplomacy, war, politics and war. View all posts by Bret Devereaux.
I find it interesting that two Paradox titles deal with issues of cost of state centralization and power better are Crusader Kings because of their inherently personal focus and Stellaris — a science fiction game. I think it is a conscious decision on Paradox part — they avoid depicting grand scale atrocities in their historical titles creating a very sanitizing view of history.
If you let players do a thing, some players will do that thing very happily and with an intent to express abuse. Historical strategy games tend to attract a disproportionate number of people from non-mainstream political ideologies, especially if they get to play as those ideologies.
The crusades in Crusader Kings seem like a pretty bad example here. One of the options for said event is to murder all of them because even noncombatant unbelievers deserve death. Indeed, Crusader Kings typically take a very cynical view of religion. Many of the events come off as mocking anyone who takes religion seriously and assumes any character who is religious is a thuggish brute.
Killing people for Odin makes you a cool badass. This has been discussed quite a bit in the Hearts of Iron community. Paradox has consciously decided not to represent the atrocities of the fascist regimes, but has made reference to some of the Allied atrocities in particular the Great Purge and the Bengal Famine , which promotes a sort of false moral equivalence between the two sides and inadvertently promotes myths like the Clean Wehrmacht myth.
The reasoning right or wrong Behind some of this is western allied attrocities are often historically minimized or erased, while axis attrocities are well discussed and taught. This is quite uncomfortable. Well, the result is a game that implies a very lopsided perspective on the atrocities of the era. There is a mod for hoi4, called new world order. While it is alternate history, it is so well fleshed out it plays better than the original games in many ways.
And the economy in Stellaris is as centralized and micromanaged as can be — you have complete control over what buildings get built and what jobs your people work.
While your empire is vaguely implied to have some sort of internal private economy, every resource that matters to you as a player is only generated at your command. Your empire is basically a giant production line for alloys and tech, with things like consumer goods and amenities only mattering to the extent that you need some of that to support the pops working in the alloy foundries.
If you run EU4. If so, Has the game ever run OK on this computer? Or never? After running it will open a window and start collecting info with a progress bar in the lower-left corner. When it completes click the 'save all information' button and save it to a file then attach that file here. Since I just got this game I did the instructions at the top and it worked thanks! Tarqua Recruit.
May 4, 1 0. Hello, I've run into the same problem after te latest update version 1. DxDiag Add EU4. RockCroc Recruit 85 Badges. Mar 27, 1 0. Hopefully this helps someone else. Hello, I seem to be having the same problem. I've tried doing all the things you've indicated could fix the issue but to no avail.
I'm still having the same problem. There was no issue with this a couple months ago, but since then I have reinstalled windows 10 onto a new SSD. I use windows defender as my virus protection and eu4. Last edited: Feb 5, Jul 2, 5 0. I just do all things who u tell the guy and not worked for me! Sorry for my english im brazilian.
Click to expand AndrewT said:.
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