I would unequivocally recommend this game for anyone if you can get it for $10 when it is on sale. For anybody who is interested in strategy games or simcity style games, I would strongly recommend it as well even for $40. It is very well put together, and gives many hours of possible enjoyment. I think generally the game can be described as a type of super Risk that you would dream about making or playing someday.



Before I bought it, I read some reviews that talked basically about how it was too easy, and once you figure out the game mechanics there is no real depth. This is likely true to a certain degree for people who have a strong backing in strategy games. At the same time, though, there is a lot to explore in the game, mechanics wise, and there are a lot of different options to pursue with regards to difficulty, mainly by choosing weaker countries to start. I think it is also a bit misleading, though, as well. In every game, for a good stage of time, you are not invincible by any means and can lose a war if the AI times it right, ie, if you just finished a long war and your manpower is low, or if your tech is behind, or if they have the right amount of allies or a coalition against you. In short, I think most people would be happy with the difficulty and complexity of the mechanics. A lot of the reviews about these things are probably comparing EU IV to their ideal dream game, and obviously it falls short to that. I wrote a lot about this in this review because it is the most important thing for me to consider when buying a game.



One other highly positive aspect of the game for me is that your actual actions, ie mouse clicks and keyboard commands, are very easy, and can be done at your own pace. This is important to me because when I play a game, I want to relax, and not have to worry about clicking a ton of things quickly. So for instance, First person shooters are not for me, and though I like Starcraft 2 it is not the type of game I want to play every night when I get home from work, because it is so much work. I have not felt this way about EU IV since I bought it about 2 months ago. Also, similarly, you can change the speed of the game from basically really slow to really fast, and pause whenever you have a lot going on, which helps keep the game relaxing even if you are involved in a major war with multiple fronts.



If you do buy the game, I would strongly recommend being very careful about going to war too fast. The game punishes warmongers a great deal, and I think some people who dont like it simply go to war too much and too often. You can go to war a lot, but you have to make sure you take care of administrative things, like coreing provinces, and repairing relations with your neighbors, and letting your manpower build back up, and letting your war exhaustion go down, before you go to war again. I dont know this for a fact, but judging from game play, I think if you are at war a lot you will have semi random bad events happen to you, effecting things like your legitimacy or stability, and conversely, if you stay at peace a while semi random good events happen to you. This is a nice effect, because it makes the decision of whether to go to war much more strategic then simply looking up the allied countries and various army sizes and seeing if your number is bigger than theirs.



As far as complaints about the game, I cant really think of anything other than the usual bigger, more complex and better things people want in every game. The main issue I have with the game is that you can play from 1440 or so to 1821, but then the game stops, and you cant play on. I wish the game would stop as far as your official score etc, but that there was an option to continue playing if you wanted to. There is a mod that changes this which I use so you can play to 200,000, so it is not a big deal, but it would be nice if it was just implemented in the game.



For background on my tastes, I liked Banished, Distant Worlds, Port Royale 2, Ocean Trader, Heroes of Might and Magic series, Magic the Gathering, Hearthstone, Starcraft, and Rome Total War. I think this game is most similar to a mix of Distant Worlds and Rome Total War.