Europa Universalis III

You can do anything you want with this game, the limits being only your time and imagination. If any of you budding warmongers, strategy fiends or history buffs out there are looking for complete control, world domination and a great wargaming experience, look no further.

Remarkably well-honed-arguably Paradox's finest achievement in the form to date.

It hasn’t moved from its niche within the RTS genre, but without compromising a single pixel of depth Paradox has managed to simplify and streamline the experience. Possibly Paradox’s finest title yet, certainly the most pleasing.

But as a single player game, there’s nothing quite like Europa Universalis III. Not even Europa Universalis II offers this much replayable wide-open history.

Europa Universalis III is still one of the best grand strategy games you can find. [Apr 2007, p.64]

Given the incredible scope and the devs' track record for turning out hard-to-get games, EU3's riches are surprisingly accessible. [Mar 2007, p.92]

The incredible scope, combined with the awkward menu system and lack of tutorials just serves to make this game completely inaccessible to the grand strategy novice. [Score originally posted as (50)]

The game is just amazing. I love play this game. For me this game is amazing ! Nothing more to comment because this game is amazing ! I rate this 10/10

Sure, it looks horrible but the game itself is a well put together medieval europe strategy title. If details aren't your thing then you'll hate it. But if you always wanted England to colonize France, then great.

400 years of nation building with any country that existed between 1399-1822. The High medieval ages, the fall of the eastern roman empire,fall of the ming dynasty, the renaissance, the 30 years war and the Napoleonic age. This game is nearly 100% historically accurate at the start dates but when you start playing it's all lost! You have control over your nations destiny, colonizing, conquering and trading to gain power. The Holy Grail of Historical Sandbox games.

For all it's intense depth, length and re-playability, EU 3 ultimately fails to deliver a solid combat experience which can be a lethal blow for games like this. One example would be on how combat ends with your enemies once either your morale or theirs gets too low, ultimately causing one side to run away even with deaths that can be as small as 300. So for an 12,000 man army to rumple over an army of about 3000, you would pretty much need to chase them around the world in order to actually kill the unit off. This develops hair-pulling frustration when you are engaging more than 2-3 different enemy troops, while not big, stray too far from repeatedly kicking the same unit away and he'll grab your territory. Same frustration can also be found in the "Tech" bars, where you have production, navy, government and stability to pour funding into without knowing what the rewards will be in the slightest. And if you want to become especially precise in a certain field, you'll have extremely heavy draw-backs due to the tech being discovered "Too early", leaving you wasting years of in-game time to get a small 1% bonus. Of course you can choose to not spend this money like a proper sane individual but then the game will punish you for "Inflating" your currency, pretty much giving you an guaranteed chance to fail later. In the end, this game has too many angles and I certainly don't blame them for balance-issues but dropping the ball on combat? Come on now.

I love historical games and I really like simulation/strategic games too. Looks like everything is in place to have a great game play experience. Unfortunately, it wasn't the case, I pick up Aztec for my first game and it was horrible. I read a lot of stuff on the internet in order to have an idea what to do to get out of this stupid tribal political system. I had to westernize, which I haven't been able to do after seven attempts and 37.4 hours of play time. And what is this annoying behavior of those "riots army" who flee when I WON?!? They run everywhere and I have to play cat and mouse all over my territory to fight over and over again until they finally get all killed. Ridiculous, it's as if they had not even tried to play their own game.