Home Archive Forum About

A Beginner's Guide to Europa Universalis 2: Part 1

by James Sterrett

Article Type: Strategy Guide
Article Date: February 26, 2002

Product Info

Product Name: Europa Universalis
Category: Real Time Strategy
Developer: Paradox Interactive
Publisher: Strategy First
Release Date: Released
Minimum Spec: P200, 64 MB RAM, 180 MB hard disk space
Files / Links: Click Here

Advice, n. The smallest current coin.
—Ambrose Bierce

So you’ve read the manual and played through the tutorials, but you’re still unsure of what to do with all the tools presented to you in Europa Universalis 2 (EU2), and a bit fuzzy on how a lot of it works? This guide is intended for you: it will shed some light on basic tips, techniques, and priorities you may have been missing. Before going further, however, you should note that Paradox’s web-boards are an excellent reference as well, particularly the FAQ Forum, which contains a number of helpful charts and tables.

EU2 is a long game. In many ways, despite covering 400 years instead of some 4,000, it is a longer game than Civilization: it takes longer to play, and if you regard a month as a turn in EU2 (because a month is the smallest increment of time in which you receive income) then EU2 has more turns as well. As a result, it pays to have a long-term plan. Much of your long-term plan will be dictated by your initial geographic location. Thus Russia needs to be a land power, while England must have a navy. Equally, however, Russia can choose to expand into Asia with as much reliance on its armies as on its explorers, while England must either slug it out with Continental powers or find new provinces overseas. Other aspects of your strategy need to be long-term as well, though, especially in domestic policy.

One general tip on learning the game: Try starting the Grand Campaign as China. It has a number of long-term disadvantages, but for the first century or so, China is a superpower with few viable rivals in sight. As a result, you can learn to play the game without getting yourself into a fatal situation through some mistake.

Because this project has become such a lengthy proposition, we’ve split it into two parts. The first one covers internal policy: Stability, Income, Research, and Domestic Policy. The second part will cover Religion, Diplomacy, War, and Grand Strategy.

Two concepts lie at the heart of EU2: money and stability. Most of the time, if the game wants to reward or punish you, these will provide the carrot or the stick. Manage these two well, and much of the rest will follow in train. If you fail to ensure stability and wealth, then ruin will stalk your every move.



Stability

Anything for a quiet life.
—Haywood

As you already know, Stability runs from 3 to -3. Lower stability means you generate lower tax and trade revenues, and increases your risk of revolts in provinces, while higher stability means you generate more money and reduce the risk of revolt. Don’t regard a stability of 0 as normal and 3 as a bonus. Treat 3 as normal. Think twice before you let anything cause your stability to drop, and always work back to 3 as soon as is practical. In the course of the game, you will frequently have to accept a drop in stability to further your goals: just make sure you know what you hope to gain when you accept a drop in Stability, and have a plan in place for funding the return to 3. A drop to 2 is not a big deal and a drop to 1 is not a disaster. However, random events may cause further drops despite your best-laid plans: be wary.

The money for Stability increases comes from your monthly income. That monthly income is split between maintaining your armies and navies, servicing your loans, investments in stability, and land, naval, trade, and infrastructure technologies, and printed money. Thus, any investments you need to make in Stability ultimately come at the cost of slower research or a drain on your treasury.

By waiting until you have a Casus Belli, you can reduce or eliminate the Stability penalty for declaring war

When you reach Infrastructure Level 2, raise or save the cash to buy a Fine Arts Academy in your capital province. It will not only pay back 12 ducats a year, but also continually invest 5 ducats into stability. (If you build one outside your capital it only returns 6 ducats a year. Still worthwhile, but they are expensive, so build the first one in your capital.)

Stability is one of your two key tools for preventing revolts (the other is your religious tolerance sliders). The Revolt Risk listed in Province Information is a monthly risk. See this chart for those monthly risks translated into your annual risk of a revolt. A 1% per month risk is a risk of 11% per year, and a 3% per month risk translates to 31% per year. In other words, if you have ten provinces, and a 3% revolt risk, you’ll have three of your provinces revolting every year. Since revolts generally mean the province gets pillaged (the small picture of the city is burning or smouldering), and pillaged provinces contribute nothing to your income, you can expect a 3% revolt risk per month in all your provinces to cost you a third of your income. Keep your stability up and keep that revolt risk down!

While we’re on the topic of revolts: you’ll notice that newly annexed provinces usually have a revolt risk of 3% attributed to “Nationalism”. This will dissipate at a rate of about 1% every ten years. Until it comes down, station an army in the province, capable of defeating the rebel forces. If you defeat them fast enough the province won’t be pillaged. Provinces that show your national shield (when you click on the small two-flags icon) do not suffer nationalism when annexed.

An example of provinces with and without National Shields

Making Money

Ready money is Aladdin’s lamp.
—Byron

Those of you more familiar with dogfighting might want to think of money and income as equivalent to altitude and thrust. Without them, your situation is probably hopeless. As your reserves of them grow, so too do your options and capabilities. On the other hand, much of what you want to happen in EU2 involves trying to convert altitude into more thrust: investing your available cash in a manner that will increase your future income. At the heart of your long-range plans should lie the expansion of your income. How to do it, however? There are a number of things to consider.

You can—and should—appoint Tax Collectors and Magistrates when you have the technology to do so. The revolt risk from tax collectors can be offset by stability, and partially offset by Magistrates. These officials are costly, but they pay back relatively quickly in terms of the length of the game. A Tax Collector that costs $50 and raises your province’s tax value by 1 pays back at a rate of $13 per year: $1 in census taxes at the beginning of the year and $1 into your every-monthly income: as a result, the Tax Collector is making pure profit after four years. Not all of that will appear directly in your bank balance, since most of the monthly income goes into technology investments and maintenance, but if you haven’t got the cash to cover your monthly expenses it comes out of your bank balance.

The various Manufactories look horribly expensive, but these too are worthwhile if you can find the cash. All of them pay out a yearly sum, and also produce continuous free investment into some aspect of your monthly budget. Each Refinery pays out $5 per month into your Trade research as well as the contributions to your taxes: if it cost you $700 to build it, it will reach the breakeven point in Trade research alone in 12 years. Pay attention to where you build the Manufactories to get the best income from them. Weapons manufactories pay off best in provinces with copper or iron, while Refineries pay off best in provinces that produce wine or sugar.

How do you pay for these, though? If you are likely to face a stable financial situation, consider financing the construction with some loans. For example, if you just ended a war with your major enemies, and thus can expect at least five years of peace, you could choose to wait five years to accumulate enough cash to buy the manufactory, or you could draw loans and build it. If you wait, the cash sits around doing little of anything in your bank account for a number of years. If you build the manufactory, it begins producing more income once it is completed in two years’ time. It is true that you’ll still need to accumulate a float of cash to pay off the loans, but you’ll probably be doing so from a position of higher income despite the interest payments. Obviously, this is not a technique to use every time, but it is one of the times when a loan or two is a good idea.

At a Stability of 3 your provincial incomes get a 25% boost

You can conquer more territory as well. This is quite common and pretty straightforward. War (and diplomatic annexation) is not cost-effective in its own right. However, the provinces and their incomes you gain directly destroy the power of your competitors, giving you a relative advantage. There is nothing better for setting a rival back than a victorious war in which you demolish their income during the war by occupying their land and then rip away valuable provinces during the peace settlement. We’ll discuss wars in more detail further down.

Colonization is essentially conquest by other means. Remember that Trading Posts are good at claiming territory, but they are completely incapable of defending themselves, and enemy troops can destroy them in wars. If you want the province in the long term, make it a colony. Even a level 1 colony has to be negotiated around in a peace conference, while the Trading Posts can be burnt and then claimed by the first colonist to arrive. (Obviously, it is a useful tactics for you to send small raiding parties to destroy your opponent’s Trading Posts, especially if you can follow up with your own colonists to claim the land.)

If a province is too difficult to colonize, you can make matters easier by slaughtering the natives. Send in an army and repeatedly select the “Attack Natives” button. If you can kill off their army before it breaks and runs away (or defeats yours) then you have killed off the native presence, and colonization will become much easier. Attacking repeatedly prevents them from building up their strength and morale between battles. There is a drawback to this, however: when you send in your seventh successful colonist and convert your colony to a city, and surviving natives in the province become happy citizens of your empire. In some cases, this can take your tiny colony straight to the level of a minor metropolis, with consequent improvements in the revenue you get from it. Slaughtering the locals is easier in the short term, but you are sacrificing long-term income when you do it. If you can, it’s better to station a force to defend the colony from the local uprisings (which stem from failed colonization attempts) and eventually incorporate those unruly natives into your empire.

Loans are a double-edged sword. They provide instant ready cash, which is good. However, there are three downsides. First, in exactly five year’s time, you must pay off the amount of the loan. Second, you have to make interest payments on the loan every month. Third, loans increase your inflation. Used carefully, loans can be very useful in speeding up your purchase of expensive items such as manufactories. However, loans are mostly a means of carrying you through desperate circumstances, such as those times in a war where you must have more money to raise troops or suffer defeat, and problems five years down the road are less pressing than the struggle immediately at hand. Remember that you will automatically take out a loan if you cannot cover monthly expenses with your monthly income plus your bank balance!

You can have up to five loans. It is wise to have as few as possible, not least to maintain that reserve of available cash for times when things get desperate. Unfortunately, loans taken in desperation tend to be the ones you are in no shape to pay off. It’s easy enough to extend a loan, but it comes at a real price: the interest rate on the loan rises, and your inflation rises still further. If you know you cannot cover a loan, you are better off taking out a new loan to cover the old one, simply to avoid the extra increases in interest rates and inflation. [Remember that the “Archive” - which you can access by clicking on the book in the lower-left-hand corner - will tell you when your loans are due.] The larger danger of loans you cannot cover, however, is bankruptcy: if you have five loans, and cannot repay one on its due date, or need another loan (because your bank balance plus monthly income cannot cover your monthly expenses), your country goes bankrupt.

Bankruptcy costs you one point of Stability and most of your current investment in new technologies. It also hurts your military’s morale, spikes your interest rate, and means that all future loans will suffer from a much higher rate of interest. On the bright side, your extant loans are written off. Most of the time, this is a fate you want to avoid! However, if things are really desperate, you can induce this deliberately: take out five loans, spend all the money, go bankrupt because you cannot cover monthly expenses, lather, rinse, repeat. In the short term, your Stability will swiftly drop to –3 and your military will perform poorly, in addition to a solid probability your provinces will be revolting en masse. Interest payments on loans may soon be prohibitive, and in the long term inflation will cripple your economy. That’s still better than national extinction, however.

The Treasury slider is well to the left and the inflation rate will be low

Inflation will happen to you, like it or no. There are two easy ways to combat inflation: promote Governors (each promotion reduces inflation by 1%) and keep your Treasury slider hard to the left, so that you mint no money and must cover all your monthly maintenance and loan interest expenses out of your yearly income. Unfortunately, the ability to promote governors is halfway up the Infrastructure technology ladder, and not minting any money is highly impractical.

Instead, you need to control inflation, accepting that it will occur but trying to minimize it when you can. You can do this in part by taking out loans only when you need to and by paying them back right on schedule. However, the most direct control you have over inflation is the Treasury slider in your budget window. The more money you mint (the further to the right the slider is placed), the higher your inflation is. You can do a lot to control inflation simply by planning ahead so you can leave the slider well to the left in times of peace.

That can be a lot harder to do in practice than it sounds. Most of the time, you’ll wind up trying to keep the Treasury slider such that you have a small positive or negative monthly balance. If that requires you to keep the slider too far to the right, you may be paying too much on military upkeep. Try to hold your military to a reasonable size. Look in the “Army” window and keep the number of troops under the “Supportable Size”. You can also choose to pay your military less (the slider between 50% and 100% in the Army window), but at a cost in morale and the risk of soldiers deserting.

Finally, there’s trade income. This is calculated by some complex formulae that you needn’t worry about when you are starting out, because they boil down to this: the more merchants you have in a Center of Trade, and the higher your Trade technology and your trade bonuses from Domestic Policy and religion, the more money you make from trade. Centers of Trade you own also generate tariff revenue for every trader present in them. Since it costs much less to place merchants in Centers of Trade you own (merchants cost more to place the farther they have to go from home) and you also get the tariff revenue from Centers of Trade, conquer Centers of Trade when you have the opportunity, in order to reduce the costs of placing merchants there, and to gain the tariff revenue.

Don’t ignore the income from trading. If you can get a monopoly (six traders) in a large Center of Trade, the profits can be astounding: consider the advantages of getting 75% or more of a Center of Trade that generates $1,000 every year. You can hand off the placement of merchants to the computer, and it won’t do a bad job for you, but once you have a handle of other aspects of the game, delve into trade to increase your income further. Trade is not being covered in more detail here because it’s a more advanced technique. However, if you do try your hand at guiding it yourself, then do this: 1) ensure your Trade levels is high through research hand; 2) choose your targets and overwhelm them: instead of a scattergun approach, use your merchants to take over selected high-profit Centers of Trade, gain a monopoly, and retain it.

The wages of monopoly are longer life

You may find your bank balance goes down unpredictably at times. This either means you cannot cover your monthly expenses with your monthly income, or that you have set the game to “Autosend Merchants”. Neither is necessarily a bad thing; autosending merchants is a good thing to beginning players to use, since the computer doesn’t do a bad job and it relieves you of a worry. However, remember that it is happening, and turn off Autosend if you need to maintain your capital for a while (at the possible expense of having your trading position eroded). It can be very frustrating to save money for some task only to see the computer send a merchant out and thus leave you a hair short.



Research

Necessity is the mother of invention.
—Richard Franck

Discussion of the Treasury sliders brings us to research. Money for your research comes out of your monthly income, so the higher your income, the faster you’ll do your research, in theory. In practice, there are modifiers for country size that make it an uphill battle, though more money is always faster. Much of what you need to know about research has been covered above, such as building manufactories to support it.

The key to long-term success in research is long-term investment. In general, you’ll want to have a balanced investment in Trade and Infrastructure, with a bit more in Land and a bit less in Naval. Countries that must be Naval powers cannot afford to neglect the Navy, but for all the rest, survival depends on income and land battles: so invest more slowly in the Navy. Do not neglect Trade and Infrastructure! They are the keys to your long-term economic survival. If you only invest in Land technology, after 100 years you’ll have excellent military technology without the money to make it useful.

If you plan to spend a year or more mostly investing in research, but not accumulating capital, then put the Treasury slider as far to the left as possible. Divide your bank account by 12 and lose just under that much money every month. This lets you cover your monthly expenses with your bank account and put more of your monthly incomes towards research. It’s a more controlled and efficient means of investing than the commitments of $200 for a $100 result, though it is also usually a slower trickle.

Be careful when you colonize provinces claimed by Spain or Portugal under the Treaty of Tordesillas

Domestic Policy

All political parties die at last of swallowing their own lies.
—John Arbuthnot

This set of sliders is one of the new features of EU2. The interrelations between these sliders, your goals, and random events are complex and deep. You can only make one voluntary change to these every ten years, and that at the cost of a point of stability. Random events will often pop up that allow you to either change or avoid changing these sliders further. Usually, any change you’d like to see is accompanied by a cost in cash or stability. As always, the more stable you are and the better your bank balance, the better prepared you are to take advantage of opportunity or to survive adversity. There are time when you will have to accept moving a slider in a direction you do not like instead of suffering further losses in stability, especially if you have chosen to engage in the endless battle to stay Centralized or Innovative.

Take care in thinking through what you do with these sliders. The slow speed at which you can move them means your domestic planning must be long-term. Even if you can’t have them where you want them immediately, know in what direction you want them to tend, so that you can take advantage of the random events (or resist them, if possible). Decide what you want out of them most, and see if you can manage to offset its penalties with another slider. There’s a long series of discussions at that Paradox’s web-boards in which good arguments are made for moving each of these sliders towards either end of its spectrum. My observations are below: your mileage may vary.

France in 1632, sortly after the end of the Wars of Religion (a long series of French civil wars), while missionaries work to improve revenue and provincial stability - if they succeed

Plutocracy vs Aristocracy: Until Luther hits the scene, the diplomacy bonus for Aristocracy is very nice. Cavalry is also at its most useful in the early game. However, once the Reformation hits, the hardest aspects of diplomacy (vassalization and diplomatic annexation) are made even more difficult by religious tangles, and the value of cavalry steadily drops over the course of the game. Thus you might reverse directions and head for the Trade bonuses of supporting the middle class. Events will often drag you towards Aristocracy in the early game and towards Plutocracy late in the game. Going with the flow is easy. Be aware that some events—notably the French Revolution—come in several levels of severity, getting worse the more aristocratic your society happens to be. If you want to concentrate on Trade, move this relentlessly towards Plutoctratic to get the Trade bonuses.

Decentralization vs Centralization: No contest: Centralization wins. Cheaper tech research and improved trade revenues can set you up for quick wars to avoid paying the penalty of increased revolt risks in wartime. Events that try to force you to decentralize are frequent and generally quite irritating, costing you Stability. Keeping your nation Centralized is difficult, and that is perfectly in keeping with history. Having your nation Centralized is mostly a great benefit: and that is also in keeping with history.

Narrow-Minded vs Inventivness: This can be tough. Inventive societies get their tech faster, thus allowing you to win your wars and giving your merchants an edge in trading competitions. However, if you are a colonial power you need the colonists, and you may need the missionaries to convert captured provinces as well. Stay inventive if you can get the colonists some other way. Your priests will frequently try to force you to be more narrow-minded. (Un?)Fortunately, if you mutter “will no-one rid me of this troublesome priest!?” [Henry II of England], your knights won’t go off and butcher an Archbishop [of Canterbury], creating an incident that gets you into even more trouble. [Henry was made to be very sorry.]

Free Trade vs Mercantilism: Free Trade gets you more colonists and more merchants, but you pay more to place your merchants. Mercantilism does the opposite and allows you more trade refusals. If you are a trading powerhouse or a colonial power, you need the colonists and your merchants can outperform the competition’s without the extra cost crippling you. This is also a relatively painless place to get more colonists if you can’t afford to increase them elsewhere.

Defensive vs Offensive: Defensive’s decreased costs for artillery and increase in default leader siege values are nice, but the cost of lower morale and default leader shock values is too much to pay. Go for Offensive and use the higher morale and higher default leader shock value to storm the fortresses. It’s quicker and it helps you win the field battles as well.

Naval vs Land: Naval gets you more settlers. Otherwise, Land is the way to go here for almost every nation. If you lose a naval battle, it’s bad. If you lose a land battle, it may be disaster. Therefore, get the higher land morale and find your settlers elsewhere. At least moving the slider towards Land doesn’t cost you colonists.

Quantity vs Quality: Quantity gets you more, but Quality gets you better. Since you have to pay less upkeep on smaller armies, and you’ll have to buy fewer new units if you lose less, go for Quality with its bonuses to morale and default leader fire values. Remember: practically every single battle in EU2 is won by morale. However, be careful about losses, since running out of troops is not pleasant.

Morale almost always wins.

Free Subjects vs Serfdom: This one is the most difficult, because both sides are useful. Serfdom’s lowered stability costs make it easier to keep the country on an even keel. However, the reduced morale means you’ll lose more battles, and the lower industrial production means you’ll have less money. Free Subjects are more unruly, but they fight harder and produce more Production (and thus Trade) income. Unless you’re sure you need one or the other end, use it to cancel out some negative effect (on morale or Stability) elsewhere.

“There were gentlemen and seamen in the navy of Charles II. The seamen were not gentlemen, and the gentlemen were not seamen.”
—Macaulay






Resources

Articles:

Sites:

Files:


 Printer Friendly

© 2014 COMBATSIM.COM - All Rights Reserved