GamesStrategyParadox says where we’re going, we don’t need no marketing plan as it just shows off and chats about the unannounced Europa Universalis 5When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.

GamesStrategyParadox says where we’re going, we don’t need no marketing plan as it just shows off and chats about the unannounced Europa Universalis 5When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.

When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.

(Image credit: Paradox)

A portion of India shown in Europa Universalis 5�s map.

That’s a rough summary of a game that goes into incredibly granular depth on everything from diplomacy to religion to technology, and in which a huge part of the appeal is that very detail. Andersson talks about how the new game will simulate people, or “pops”, and how they’ll impact on events.

“A single unit of people in a single location can be any size from one to a billion as long as they share the same three attributes, culture, religion, and social class,” writes Andersson. “This unit of people we tend to refer to as a pop.” He goes on to list some of the characteristics being tracked:

Note the little aside in the religion category: “nothing new.” That’s probably because this has been an element of Europa Universalis since the first game. Other statistics include literacy, which both impacts the technological advancement of the country the people are in, and rather existentially “impacts the pop’s understanding of their position in life.”

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The pops will impact “the military, economical and political part of the game”, can grow or decline over time, can assimilate with other cultures, convert religion, and in some cases migrate.

Now we get some details about scale. There are “currently 27,518 unique locations on the map”, ten times as many as Victoria 2 apparently, and Andersson has some music for the ears of thirsting conquistadors: “Now we are building a game based on decades of experience, and so far the performance impact of having pops is not even noticeable.”

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