All Dressed Up and Nowhere (Much) to Go
posted by Benjasto Oct 17, 2012
I've had a love/hate impression of most of the games in the Europa Universalis "family," and this is no exception.
First, the good: the detail is breathtaking. Everything from commodities to trade to religions and other demographics gives you far more depth in managing your empire than you find in other franchises (like Total War). The graphics are not whiz-bang in terms of FPS or animations, but are quite serviceable, giving the map an authentic "old school" look and feel quite adequate to the task.
Now the bad: there's not much to DO with any of this. I started playing as Japan-- a mid-level nation, not a superpower of the 19th century, but no slouch either. I began to look around my provinces, so I could begin building and developing.
Only, there was nothing to build or develop. Here I am, king of Japan, and I can't build a road, or a Shinto shrine, or a harbor, or a smithy, or a farm, or public baths. Nothing, nada, zilch. I can't even build a fort (though, mysteriously, one exists in my capital province of Edo). That the game designers overlooked the fact Japan had a fine castle-building run in the Medieval Era was rather disappointing, in view of the attention paid to historical detail elsewhere.
So I went about researching the technology to build a factory. Agonizingly slow. Finally, after several game-years, I get the technological requirements to built a furniture factory, except I can't build factories anyway. The game won't let me, because Japan is an "uncivilized" nation. And one of the reasons it is "uncivilized" is that...Japan has no factories. This sort of Catch-22 is bad design, and, unfortunately, there's a lot of it here.
A cardinal rule of game design is that players need to have things to do. If they don't, the rest is largely for naught. It's a test that Victoria II, sadly, fails.
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