Europa Universalis IV

[pindicator]

What's a good resource for learning how to play? I downloaded the demo and feel lost

[Bigger]

http://www.paradoxian.org/eu3wiki/Strategy_Guides

[BRickAstley]

That's for EU3, so not quite accurate.

I haven't looked at them yet, but a lot of people have been saying that the tutorials included with the game are well put together & a lot more helpful than the EU3 ones were.

If you like videos, quill18 has a video series starting here that goes through the screens and the mechanics of the game (you can probably skip the first two videos which are broad overview/press review), and then applies them to a regular Let's Play starting here. He's coming from a perspective of having played a lot of EU3 though, so that might not quite explain everything.

There is also already an EU4 wiki being put together here, which has a barebones looking Beginners Guide and a good few pages about certain concepts.

[Bigger]

oh I misunderstood, I though Pin was asking for EU3 help.

[Brian Shanahan]

I took Poland for a bit of a spin. Knocked back the GH in my first few years and "conceded defeat" to them while at +12% in the fighting. As they kept regenerating big stacks I backed off at that. Let them eat somebody else.

And I completed my first mission, to annex Mazovia without doing anything. Soon after I pacified the rebel stacks which were infesting Lithuania (might as well save my PU buddies, what ho!), I got the pop up, "congratulations on completing your mission. Have two free cores on the two provinces you've just gained!" Must have been something to do with the Polish Nationalists who ran there out of Lithuania as soon as they saw my stack. They had one province captured and were beseiging the other (Mazovia having walked their 2k stack into a 35k GH one during the war).

So I'll continue a bit with that one and see how I do.

[haphazard1]

Tried the EU IV demo for a bit, walked through the tutorial. As a newb to Paradox games, I found the whole thing rather confusing.

The tutorial in the demo was OK for what it was -- an introduction to the controls. But it was pretty much useless as far as being an introduction to the game itself. (Or so it seems to me, as a Paradox newb.) OK, I now know how to send a merchant to divert trade. But how do I get a merchant in the first place? How tough is that to do? And why would I want to divert trade at all, anyway? Some guidance on the relative importance of things would be helpful, but the tutorial is completely silent on that. If this is more helpful than the EU III tutorials were...ouch.

Time to look for some wiki info and some let's play videos, maybe see if I can find something that gives at least a broad idea of what gameplay is like. The game looks interesting and I see/hear many good things about it, but the initial learning curve is more of a sheer cliff.

[BRickAstley]

Yeah, figuring out why and when to do things in this game really isn't easy. Ie been looking for someone doing a good thorough explanation for newbies to post but I haven't found a good one yet. Maybe if I find some time (ha) I could do one...

Other than that my best advice is just to play and try and figure out stuff as you go, it's not easy but eventually you'll start to get things, it's what I had to do with eu3

[NobleHelium]

Attack people who are smaller than you. If you can't attack them then look for ways to create excuses for war.

[pindicator]

Ok, i messed around with it a bit more today and i'm pretty much hooked now Colonizing with Portugal was pretty fun, even if i am just bumbling around for the most part

[Mattimeo]

...and the problem with everything being an online release nowdays, is we no longer get our 10-15 hour headstart on titles with a global same-day release :'(