I’ve been playing Paradox games since EU1 and the marketing for EU5 is hitting me hard. However, I’m not really motivated to play it, purchase it, or engage with it too much. I am currently playing games to escape and after 25 years of watching Lords and Ladies lose power to the nation state I can say that I’m over it. Paradox has made the age of discovery excite me as much as Gettysburg, Normandy, or any of the campaigns where Russia is invaded.

Stellaris is a fun little game with good writing that doesn’t have a hook beyond “what if bird people hated machines and loved mining?”. I think that is a fun little space simulator that keeps getting refreshed because it, for some reason, needs to extend 200+ years beyond the point where you know what the galaxy is, what you need to do, and who you need to defeat. As I get older the idea of colonizing Australia with the Ottoman Empire or reforming the Roman Republic just isn’t fun to think about or experience. I don’t want a game that puts effort and thought into the triangle trade. I don’t like hearing the baby die in CK3. However, if radish people are going to eat bat people I can have a lot of fun. Building a religious oligarchy with a subterranean origin and unyielding as an early tradition doesn’t have a real work analog.

What is being talked about with EU5 also doesn’t make me happy. I don’t need every single person in the world simulated for a fun game. When I covered Age of Sigmar 4th edition launch I got an experience on what the “private events” for marketing previews were and while a lot of the intentions get expressed the real way the game the designers wanted wasn’t “nighthaunt are really good”.

It’s alright to look at something and say “not for me” but it does make me a little sad that EU5 is going into a direction that I don’t want to follow. The last few EUs have felt like they are attempting to take nations away from a specific path while giving the impression of historical events. Stellaris, without a real history, feels like they move the game on rails towards a final crisis so that each galaxy ends more or less the same way. For me it is a happy accident that Stellaris continues to bring me such joy. I’m ok with some of the misses (toxiods, cosmic storms, the grand archive) because the hits (Aquatics and the Machine Age) more than make up for it. Once Anno 117 comes out I’ll be able to get a large galaxy going with a new PC.