And the most pointless game of the year award goes to...

Strategy First came onto the gaming scene a few years ago with a few really bad titles. Ever since then, its games have been improving, and sometimes actually contained a few original concepts. The company became the fastest growing publisher of computer games in the late 90s and early 00s. Now, however, it seems the company has exhausted the little creative potential it pretended to have. Over the course of the past several months, Strategy First released the sequels to it’s three most successful titles: the quite unique Europa Universalis, the highly addictive (and arguably the company’s best game) Disciples and the sometimes underappreciated Kohan: Immortal Sovereigns. While the new Kohan game was a true improvement (in the same sense Civilization II was an improvement upon the original Civilization), Disciples II turned out to be a simple data disk and Europa Universalis II only a patched version of the original game. Yes, that’s right: the game you are thinking to buy is the most expensive game patch ever, nothing more.

In the past, some have accused me of being biased against Strategy First. In fact, I am biased against every single game publisher who insults me by selling me an inferior game for a superior price. Unfortunately, all games by Strategy First (with the notable exception of Disciples) were highly overpriced, in my opinion. Because of these accusations, however, I will be a little more detailed about this game than I tend to be. The following review is divided into three main parts: the description of the game itself, the good and the bad aspects of the game.

I. Europa Univarsalis II – the game.

Overview
Europa Universalis II is a real-time strategy game, in which you colonize the world, develop the infrastructure in your holdings and fight other empires. The game, while often compared to a real-time Civilization, is more like a real-time Imperialism. Unlike other strategy games, your goal is not to conquer all your enemies, but simply to survive as a leading nation throughout the course of the scenario, which can be as short as several decades and as long as 400 years.

Research and development
The game offers research in four main areas: Infrastructure, which allows you to build more advanced tax collection agencies, legal offices and factories, Trade, Land Military and Naval technologies, which are quite self-explanatory. You can adjust the amount invested into each technology by a sliding bar. Technologies, however, are not homogenous. While the Land Military technology has over 50 levels, Infrastructure has only five. And while you will be able to research the first level of each technology at roughly the same time, researching the top level of Infrastructure may take you as long as 200 years, while military technologies remain constant. The development is pretty limited, however. You can build one factory in each province you own, upgrade the fortifications a few times and upgrade a few governmental offices, such as the tax office and the office of the governor.

Military
This game deals in large numbers. The smallest unit you can build has 1000 soldiers, and it is not uncommon to build an army of 500,000+ soldiers. There are only three types of land units: infantry, cavalry and artillery. These are supplemented by three types of naval units: warships, galleys and transports. Military actions themselves are limited to invading neutral or enemy provinces, where they will fight the enemy without the player’s direct involvement. The aspect of the military that is unique to this game, however, is attrition. All your armies will suffer losses for moving or staying in territories that you don’t control. The amount of losses will depend on the territory’s physical features, the types of units and your military technology and even the weather. Very often, I have lost more units to attrition than to enemies.

Diplomacy
Diplomacy is the heart of the game. As bad as this game is, it has the most advanced diplomatic model ever seen in a computer game. You can declare war only if you have a good cause for example, there are many different ways to sign a peace agreement, you can create vassal countries, annex provinces, besiege them, or simply organize royal marriages. If that is not enough, you can become the Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire or declare yourself the Defender of the True Faith. All has certain advantages and disadvantages. Now combine this with scenarios of over 100 nations, and you get a very complex diplomatic model.

Religion and culture
Other aspects I’d like to mention are religion and culture. All territories have a certain religion and culture, and your empire has certain tolerances to each. This will not only affect the success of your colonization attempts and the likeliness of a revolt in those territories, but also affect the relations with other countries. There is a total of ten religions in this game, which only adds to its complexity.

II. Positive aspects

There are a few positive aspects to this game. However, note how many times I use words like “better”, “improved” and “fixed”, and how many times I use the word “new”. This only shows how much of the game has been really changed.

Packaging
The packaging now contains a large map of the whole world, with all the territories you can conquer. I consider this to be a very nice bonus to the game, as the map looks truly good on my wall. In addition, US residents find a coupon for a free one-year subscription of Computer Games Magazine included (others must pay extra postage).

Manual
The manual has been greatly improved. While still lacking an index, the manual does not read like a history schoolbook anymore. It still contains short historical lessons, but they are well integrated into the text. In addition, the very detailed table of contents almost completely supplements the missing index.

Gameplay
There are some improvements you can find in gameplay. Perhaps the most visible improvement is that you can play for about 100 years longer than in the previous game. In addition, there are more territories to conquer, more religions and more nations. Furthermore, the game contains two new scenarios: the American Revolution and Napoleonic wars. Lastly, you can finally adjust domestic policy settings, which go into such details as whether you want better trained or larger armies, what level of economic and political freedom you prefer, etc.

Special events
This is perhaps the single most important improvement over the previous version of the game. Special events were added to increase the historical accuracy of the game. Most of the time, you will have the choice of reacting to such an event. Your choice will affect your domestic standing, as well as diplomatic relations with other countries. For example, when you are asked to react to the independence movement in the Lower Countries, your support will increase domestic stability but anger Spain and France, while your denounce will decrease trade.

Soundtrack
The soundtrack to this game is truly superb. It consists of authentic music created in each time period you are playing. So, for example, you will listen to German music of the 15th century, but also to Vivaldi, Bach, Beethoven and Mozart. While the music will repeat itself quite often, it will never get annoying.

III. Negative aspects

All it takes is to browse the official Europa Universalis II message boards, and you will notice a strange thing: the largest discussions are about gameplay problems, certain bugs and the lack (or abundance) of authenticity. I have never experienced many of these problems, but there is a whole list of gripes I have with this game.

Before I start with the details, let me point out the single most negative aspect of the game and the main reason why I rated it so low: unless you are a history buff or take pleasure at the delicate twists of medieval diplomacy, you will get incredibly bored. The game simply does not offer the same level of self-gratification other games do. It is nearly impossible to conquer the whole world, due to the fact that your military, religious and colonizing capacity does not grow nearly as fast as your empire. With the growth of your empire, you will get more money and a higher risk of revolts, but the number of available military, merchants, missionaries and colonists remain fairly fixed. This means that while the frustration from managing your empire will grow with its size, there is no payoff for this frustration. I found perfectly satisfying to control a small but easily defensible area, such as the British Isles or Spain and Portugal, and isolate myself from the rest of the world. There was simply no point in even trying to conquer anything more. Now back to our regularly scheduled program: picking on Europa Universalis II:

Technical issues
Neither the game box, nor the manual lists the hard disk space requirements. In addition, the game does not seem to check for available hard disk space, or at least does not offer the choice of the installation size. I was lucky to uninstall another game, otherwise I would not have the 400MB required for this one and would have run into serious problems. The ironic thing is that the game seems to dump all the files onto your hard drive, including the music, which accounts for half of the whole hard drive space required.

Another technical issue I have had with this game is DirectX. The installation program tries to give you version 8. However, I refused, and the game ran well on DirectX 6. DirectX 8 causes some older games to crash, and that’s why I refuse to install it onto my gaming machine.

A serious problem has been reported on the official message board: opening games that were saved under the 1.02 version of the game cause it to crash whenever opened under the patched 1.03 version. While I cannot confirm it, Paradox, the game developer, seems to take this issue seriously.

By far the largest technical issue I have with this game, however, is the vastly understated system requirements. The game box states that you need a Pentium II 266 with 64MB of RAM. Running the game on a PII 450 with 64MB RAM, however, proved to be futile. The game took several minutes to load a simple map, was really choppy and tended to freeze every time a new music track was selected. When I tested it on a PIII 750 with 128 MB RAM, the game was still more choppy than, let’s say, Command and Conquer: Renegade (both times, I did install DirectX 8). While I would suspect decreased performance in action games, it is not acceptable in a strategy game. The fact that the 1.03 patch decreases the memory usage by 20% just proves the game has been released prematurely.

Gameplay issues
The gameplay remains unbalanced, the A.I. very weak and the overall experience very limited, due to the special and random events.

The first problem with the gameplay is that not the whole world is being represented. In some cases, this greatly decreases the game’s authenticity. For example, Mongolia, which was the premier Asian superpower, is missing. While other missing places, such as the Amazon basin or Siberia are not as bothersome (they don’t decrease the historical accuracy), this still decreases the scenario editor possibilities. For example, you cannot create a scenario about tribal warfare in central Africa.

The second largest problem is the artificial intelligence. The designers did a really good job of converting the original board game, but this has meant several limitations on the A.I. The enemy simply cannot cheat: on higher levels, the enemy will not get additional troops or money, or a better infrastructure. Due to the very limited game mechanics, the enemy will remain severely limited, and as soon as you are able to develop a certain strategy, the game will become boring. In addition, the A.I. has two more quirks. First, it tends to consolidate like crazy, annexing everything it can lay hands on. This means, for example, that Europe will be consolidated into several nation states by 1650, while this has really happened about 150 years later. Second, the A.I. is not being confined to its historically accurate realms. Therefore, it is not uncommon to discover America in early 1500s and find that Cuba is already colonized by the Chinese.

The last problem in gameplay is the introduction of special events, which, sadly, cannot be turned off. These events take away the control from you, which may cause some major frustration. For example, in one scenario, Portugal gets annexed by Spain for a certain time period. You can play as Portugal and reduce Spain to a single backwards province, you still get annexed by Spain and suffer major development penalties. Events like this make the game seem futile.

Other issues
There are two other issues I’d like to mention: disastrous interface and abysmal manual.

The interface, which needed a severe overhaul in the previous game, has not been changed. This means way too many buttons to push, a really busy and hard to read map, and quite bad keyboard shortcuts. The map is even busier than before, mainly because the smallest zoom was taken away. Often, you will forget your units and often you’ll spend the first ten minutes studying the map and different relations between countries. In addition, the game sports several keyboard shortcuts, which require you to press the Control button and another button from your numerical pad. This puts laptop users into serious disadvantage, as they have to enable the numerical pad before using these shortcuts (at least my Inspiron 8000 did not let me use the keypad equivelants).

I know I praised the manual format before. The content, however, reads like a manual on how the game should look like and not how it turned out to be. For example, the manual states that as soon as the number of people in a colony grows over 600, it turns to a city. The correct number should be 700. In another instance, the manual changes the technology requirements for two different factories, which has greatly confused me at the beginning (I’m one of those people who always read the whole manual before even installing the game).

The bottom line
This game brings too few improvements to deserve a new number behind its name. Adding a few territories to conquer, a few nations and a longer time period to play in simply does not justify the additional $40 that people end up paying. If you have the original game, don’t bother with this one (unless the price drops to $5). If you don’t have the original one, read the game description once again, add one star to my final rating and then decide. Just remember: for people who weren’t history buffs, this game will remain either boring or confusing.