I really really really like Europa Universalis 4. It tickles my brain in all the right ways and I just can’t stop playing it. Once in a while I somehow get the idea that I may finally be free from its grasp, however it never takes long for me to be proven wrong.

Admittedly, that does make me sound like an addict. Don’t get me wrong, while it’s my most played game on Steam by a good margin, I’m not one of the crazies with thousands of hours.

Not for the lack of trying though.

Achievement hunting

My gaming “career” started in 2017 when I bought myself a Switch. While I had played a couple games on my uncle’s Xbox One (AC Black Flag & Unity), this was the first time I had my own console.

The problem was… I was a child and I had just spent all the money I had saved up over the years on the console, leaving nothing for new games. Fortunately, since I made the purchase around my birthday, as a present, my parents bought me Breath of the Wild.

That would become the only game I had for a loooong time. Keep in mind that this was the first year of Switch. There were pretty much no free/freemium titles on the eShop: no Fortnite to consume the child’s attention, no Warframe, no Brawlhalla.

Having BotW and nothing else forced me to make the most of it. I had decided to 100% it. Though I guess it wasn’t much of a decision, just a thing that sort of happens when you have no choice but to play the exact same game again and again.

I had the time, I loved the game. Why not? Well… The Korok seeds. There’s 900 of them. Hidden all over the massive map. 900. 900.

That honestly remains the hardest/most mind-numbing 100% challenge I have faced to this day. Quite the introduction huh…

What followed was a very very long autumn. I honestly don’t remember much, but I can’t imagine it took anything less than the entirety of my free time. It was somewhere along the way that I began thinking whether trying to 100% a game had the ability to retrospectively damage the relationship with the game itself. It probably was.

But I did it! By the end I had a playtime of something like 260 hours, but I did it! I got the golden poop just in time before Christmas where just under the Christmas tree Mario Kart 8 awaited me.

I would go on to 100% MK8 as well, unlocking everything and beating all the dev ghosts in time trials. That was much more fun.

The same would also happen with Super Mario Odyssey. I got all the moons available in the world to the point of grinding the cloud level in Bowser’s Kingdom to get obscene amounts of money to buy even more moons from the shops.

I hope the pattern’s clear by now. Due to the fact that I just didn’t have many games and the fact that the games I had were very very good, I got into the habit of 100% each and every one of them. That’s despite Nintendo purposefully not having any kind of achievement system!

As I moved from Switch to Steam, the habit remained. Every game I played I tried to complete. Either fully or as much as possible.

Cue EU4 with its 373 achievements.

Lol.

Keep in mind most achievements are not something you can easily obtain. Hell, even after all these hours I am not even half-way there yet. The difference is, though, that unlike most other games where achievements are just a mark of progress that just so happens to appear on the storefront, in EU4 they are entirely valid playstyle to base your runs upon.

Needless to say, I was hooked.

In most other games achievement hunting feels like a pretty obvious detriment to your gaming experience. Alt-tabbing to check if there are any missable achievements at your current point in the story is very immersion breaking and a practice I purposefully avoid now. Others, even if they are not missable, require tens of hours of grinding a part of the game that often isn’t even rewarding by itself.

So to see a game where it was the exact opposite - where achievements actively improved the experience, well you better know I’d get hooked.

The power fantasy

Strategy games are amazing. Civ6, XCOM, BTD6 are all phenomenal. Hell, the 1 month Diplomacy campaign I hosted is probably the best gaming experience of my entire life. What make EU4 different though, is that it’s just really not that hard.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s certainly overwhelming. You won’t become mediocre without spending at least 100-200 hours, but that’s the point!

The thing with a lot of strategy games is that they require… actual strategic thinking. I know! What a surprise!

Let’s compare EU4 and Civ6. In the former I was still learning of new mechanics 500 hours into the game. In the latter I’ve not even spent 100h just playing with friends and already feel like I know everything there is to know. That may not necessarily be true but in this case how I feel is much more important.

When you feel like you already know everything about the game, the only way of further progressing your skill is by improved strategy. And honestly? That’s pretty difficult. I mean the term “strategic thinking” is so inexact and vague that when you understand that the only way to get better is by improving it (whatever that means), you just get lost.

In EU4 by far the largest factor determining your skill is just how many game mechanics you understand.

You can be a strategic genius, yet without spending the prerequisite couple hundred hours you will always lose to a literal child who just so happens to have a 1000.

Now. I am aware that all of that sounds like a critique, but it’s actually the opposite. That’s actually what makes EU4 such a relaxing and fun experience to me! The great thing about memory is that it’s not particularly taxing. Sure, if you’re actively memorizing, that’s different, but if we’re talking about knowledge assimilation, it’s practically effortless.

And since most of EU4 skill is just awareness of the most optimal button combinations to press, that makes it a game where you can very easily improve passively.

That’s why it’s the ultimate power fantasy. The simplicity of the core gameplay along with a skill progression path with a length of thousands of hours which you will progress through whether you want to or not is just a really fun combo. That’s pretty much the same formula as the chinese wuxia cultivation manhua where the protagonist effortlessly becomes more and more powerful over thousands of chapters.

I would be lying if I said that was not an incredibly fun experience.

Surely EU4 is not the only..?

Oh that’s for certain. I have not played much of Paradox’s catalogue, and even excluding them I’m sure there are similar titles. Just you know… Better the devil you know than the devil you don’t.

And of course, it’s not like there’s no place for strategy to shine in EU4 either. The runs where people completely conquer the world within 100 years are a completely ridiculous investment of time and mental capacity as some of the theory crafting that goes on is legitimately insane. It’s just that there is like 200 people who actually do that and that’s definitely not required to become an incredible player.

Every person has to have a map game to pass through the hardest of times.

I sure as hell have mine.