I had a regiment of soldiers touring the continent, deliberately wiping out every last native, so there wouldn't be even the slightest chance of resistance once my pioneers arrived. So desperate was I to claim ownership of each American province before the filthy English took advantage of my discovery that I had to take some steps to help my colonists out. Yes, there's some pride in being the fourth-best nation of 12, but you're still a loser really. Civilization though, that you have to win. The most immediate comparison is Civilization - both posit the player as an ageless, formless national leader overlooking a world map, managing matters of military, economy and diplomacy, and taking an awfully long time to get anything done. It's very, very hard to get into, but its impressive openness means it offers a personal experience very rare from strategy games. Yours might be invading France, taking over the entire planet (all 1700 provinces of it), establishing a merchant empire, or all of the above. Mine was colonising America with Scotland. It's a strategy game without any prescribed goals - your victory is what you want it to be. And yet, it's capable of inspiring immense self-satisfaction. But mostly it's about who's got the most tiny, textureless men.Įuropa Universalis looks incredibly dreary, plays agonisingly slowly and is so unforgivingly complicated that I had a panic attack while playing through the tutorial. Combat involves dice, modifiers, morale and baffling coloured squares. That was before it found a whole new continent, and promptly filled every inch of it with Scotsmen. All Scotland had was that one little boat, going nowhere ever so slowly. They grovelled, they begged, they thinned the royal blood with countless foreign marriages - anything to stop other nations invading them. To any other nation, the Scots pouring their entire GDP for about 50 years into constructing one little boat that would sail the apparently infinite ocean blue must have looked like insanity. Thanks to me, the power behind the Highland throne and bringer of geography from the future, Scotland knew full well exactly where it had to go to discover America. And yet it was the first country to discover and colonise both North and South America. Pushed into a tiny handful of provinces, regularly bothered by backstabbing Englishmen to the South and generating barely enough cash to keep the Shetland Islands clean, prospects for 16th century Scotland weren't good.
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