Kamilaroi Universalis

"They tried to fight... for liberty"   [after murdering and enslaving all nearby tribes]

"Without a chance in heaven they gave up

The white man won in the name of god

With the cross as alibi"

 

Enigma - Silent Warrior

 

 

Ah, Europa Universalis 4, a ten-dollar game costing several hundred dollars per Paradox's infamous obsession with the DLC spam business model, which is why I waited a decade before buying it despite being one of the titles I wanted to jump on right away. (That and their decade-long refusal to offer it DRM-free as it should be.)

Yes, I can exhibit occasional self-control. Please stop acting so shocked.

Anyway, I was uncommonly bad at #3 despite enjoying it quite a bit, largely because I find it difficult to think in terms of politics, of placating and manipulating others, and if asked what can you give me that Planetfall doesn't, Europa Universalis answers a confident: "POLITICS" !

So perhaps unsurprisingly I started by limiting the politics. For my first foray into this "four, eh?" I wanted a simple learning experience, some isolated single-province corner of the globe without any merchant company, papal or other entanglements. Rolled a mental D4 between the Rocky Mountains, Siberia, Patagonia or Tha Lend Dawen Undah, and the Aussies won. Crikey!

 

Avoiding the northern coast on the assumption it would be hit hardest by Eurasian colonization, I opted for Kamilaroi in 1444, thinking a landlocked capital might help defensively (proven irrelevant, but them's the breaks) and I could probably steamroll my southern neighbour Eora for more elbow room (proved harder than it sounds.) Leaving history aside for the moment, native tribes from a strategy standpoint grow out of the neutral factions we've always seen standing around waiting to be cleared from the map as prelude to the real fight between major factions. Making them playable is a riskier proposition than most might realize, as operating by different rules makes balance a nightmare. But then much of the EU series' charm comes from eschewing absolute victory as the only goal and seeing how far you can get with various factions and strategies. For a native tribe, that mostly means solidifying a decent slab of territory before the people with the big guns show up... and by "big guns" I mean "guns".

I wasted a bit of time at the start uncomprehending what, if anything I can do to expand (in the absence of colonization) before figuring out the migration feature, a roundabout way of staking out provinces for future expansion. On the flip-side, this same feature makes tribes highly resilient early on, automatically migrating to nearby unsettled land even if you conquer them. However, since the AI seems to NEVER settle down and claims only three-ish provinces as fresh pastures, I rapidly overtook my neighbours.

 

Lighter green is claimed by me via migration but unsettled

My original plan to ally with Mianjin against Eora fell through when Mianjin allied with both of us. Luckily, Palawa, which starts in Tasmania, picked up the slack, sandwiching Eora and Wurundjeri between us and eventually migrating to the mainland. (I'd forgotten there's something austral to austral Australia.) Wars against Eora earn me a few mission completions. As natives suffer severe (50-100%) research penalties, I sank my resources into province improvements, but no matter how much sense that makes economically it still earned me one humiliating defeat by the far smaller Eora and the loss of a couple of unsettled tribal provinces down south. I found this a common refrain: while building up your production/tax/manpower base raises your baseline efficacy, the massive force multipliers yielded by even minor tech/specialization advantages can easily overturn numeric superiority, to an extent reminiscent of Alpha Centauri. Maybe too easily.

Eastern Australia shook down to an alliance of Kamilaroi/Kaurna/Palawa gradually pushing back Mianjin/Eora/Wurundjeri until exterminating them via claiming all land. By the 1580s when Spain colonized Tasmania, I was struggling to vassalize and annex my allies peacefully, which proved damn near impossible -

- due to a single infuriatingly obtuse and punishing requirement: economic base. Even with orders of magnitude more provinces/development, the formula for that single factor calculated it as a stronger total negative than all possible positives put together, even after nearly bankrupting myself building up an impressive military to compensate. Seemed the longer I built up my provinces, the worse our ratio due to the potential vassal's development counting as squared (also that -90 modifier edges out even medium-sized factions a bit too forcefully.) I eventually figure out that by leading a tribal federation I can incorporate the others instead of vassalizing, but that's after decades' worth of wasted resources.

To my surprise, when I finally get a look at Madrid it only boasts a modest 12/13/7 development compared to my capital Barunggam's 23/22/20, meaning all I should have to do now is make nice with the palefaces and swap to Euro-tech ASAP and I should be golden... which basically means waiting for the Feudalism "institution" to randomly spread to me via the Spanish colonies.

 

I was right about the northern coast.

 

By 1673 when that's finally done and I flip my government to a republic and begin rapidly advancing in tech, it's too late. In a historic bombshell, Austria somehow takes control of Spain. While I'd built up a decent relationship with the Spanish, for Austria I was just a big fat negative-opinion target. War soon follows. I was expecting massive numeric losses from superior Austrian units, but morale defeated me instead, with my armies breaking and running from forces not even a fifth their size. After dozens of defeats and instant siege losses (and losing the University of Wallamaloo) I finally throw in the towel.

 

For fumbling my way through scores of unknown mechanics, I don't think my first attempt went all that badly. If not for the surprise Spain>Austria swap, my "15th-highest province value" could've given me a fighting chance to the see the end. So, first impressions of Europa Universalis 4?

 

- EU3 used to reveal the map gradually via passive "spread of discoveries" but (at least for natives?) EU4 lacks that feature. (I was Spain's colony's neighbour far more than 50 years, zero zones revealed.) Meaning the only way to see more of the map is by taking the Exploration idea group, which quite frankly looks useless late game.

- Due to the above, I only had contact with ONE (1) overseas power, meaning zero chance to build up alliances for defense and play the bigger empires against each other. Granted, it is rather historically accurate.

- Took 200 years, past mid-game, 70-ish years after contact with Spain, for feudalism to spread to Australia allowing me to change government. Got two other institutions beforehand. The luck-based spread of institutions looks fine in general, but given primitive tribes' crucial need for Feudalism to reform, maybe that's one randomizer needing a taming.

- ALL primitive tech buildings instantly getting wiped out upon post-feudalism government switch seems hamfisted and gratuitously cataclysmic.

- Note my unused merchants. Since I can't reach more than one trade node they're flat-out useless. Granted, this is especially punishing for isolated Australia, but I'll bet other corners of the globe suffer the same discrepancy to a smaller degree. Some secondary use for them might be nice, especially since the extras were inescapably tacked onto other economic advances.

- Why not incorporate the "feels threatened" coefficient into vassalage calculation, to make tiny provinces seek shelter with their neighbours in the face of total obliteration? Well, I guess the federation mechanic is supposed to make up for that, but still...

- Defeated armies now don't just retreat to the nearest province, but run all the way across your empire to safety. Annoying in itself. Utterly broken with the higher-impact morale losses causing them to rout nearly instantly. Entirely prevented me from fighting a war of attrition against Austria, as armies become functionally useless for months after a single defeat. Should a fighting retreat be impossible?

- I'm one of the few people to really voice a love of Stellaris' user interface (despite its annoying popups) and it comes down to hyperlinks and tooltips. Being able to one-click between interrelated windows and see breakdowns of various calculations at a glance is crucial to navigating a good strategy game's massive amount of information. The same can be said of Old World or Planetfall. But in EU4 most terms or mechanics like the complete loss of tribal buildings (at least those not carried over from EU3) are thrown at you without explanation, and just trying to figure out WTF IS "ECONOMIC BASE" via the wiki and reddit posts took me more time than some online game matches. Complexity should not imply obtuseness. Tell me why, tell me whyyyy, tell me WHYYYYYYYYY, in the name of god, these kinds of changes!?!?

Still, overall, playing a native tribe, especially with the migration/federation mechanics, felt impressively fleshed out given it's a mere sideshow to the main events. For my own money I'm too much a SciFi fan not to prefer Stellaris, but EU is obviously Paradox's pampered baby, and its sheer interconnected detail understandably makes nerds drool even compared to Stellaris which out-details and out-interconnects most competitors with millefiori grace.

 

I'll happily return to 1444 after some detours elsewheren... maybe as a less intrinsically doomed faction than Kamilaroi.