Europa Universalis: In Nomine

Europa Universalis III: In Nomine – I can only guess at what the title means, much less figure out how to pronounce it. It’s probably safe to assume that this name was not researched by a savvy marketing team using a demographically-balanced focus group. Still, the heady title serves as fair warning: this is a niche game, for a niche audience.

So the first thing to consider before diving into a title like this is “Am I part of the target audience?” While it’s impossible to tell what a person might like from a couple data points, here are some tips that can help you decide if this game might be worth your dime:

• If you enjoy grand strategy games and you’re not afraid of a learning curve, you’re a shoo-in, but you probably already knew that.
• Fans of games like the Civilization series who want a higher level of detail and realism may find their Nirvana in a game like EUIII:IN.
• Anyone who used to enjoy table-top strategy games should give it a try as well. 
• If you’re interested in geography and history you’ll probably get more out of this game than if you find those topics painful and boring.
• If you have control issues and aspirations of world domination, this is definitely a game for you.

Overview

As many readers are likely unfamiliar with the core game, let’s start with some background.  EUIII, the third installment in Paradox’s “Europa Universalis” series, carries the dubious distinction of having been awarded IGN's Best of 2007 for "Best Game No One Played."  This game is usually classified as either Grand Strategy or simply Strategy.  The first expansion, Napoleon’s Ambition, was released in August of 2007. The latest expansion, In Nomine, was released in May of 2008.  

The game offers a number of scenarios, each beginning at some key historic event, as well as a grand campaign that covers the entire game duration (1399-1820 with the expansions). Throughout each scenario, you use a combination of diplomacy, espionage, warfare and economics to guide one of approx 250 countries to conquest and glory. The game allows you to explore the world, colonize untamed lands, build a thriving trade empire, conquer your enemies, and spread the One True Faith.

In EUIII your objectives are whatever you believe you can achieve given your starting country and skill level; you can work toward goals as limited as surviving until a certain date (which can be a challenge with some minor countries), as ambitious as total world conquest (which is mostly a test of tenacity with some major countries), or anything in between. Alternatively you can play with no long-term objective and just see where the game takes you. While user-defined victory conditions may seem too squishy and subjective, once you get used to it, this open-endedness allows you to scale the level of challenge to match your skills and play preferences to a fine degree. For example, “rebuilding modern France” is a trivial exercise for an experienced player, but “rebuilding modern France by 1500 without starting a war” requires diplomatic skill and luck for anyone.  

One of the many interesting complexities in EUIII is that, as you expand, the culture and religion of conquered regions affect how well they integrate into your empire. Things like revolt risk and productivity are affected by (among other things) how closely related the provincial culture and religion are to your state culture and religion. Over time, the culture of a province can be absorbed into your national culture or if the culture is widespread, it can become an accepted culture within your nation. Many of the policy decisions you make will affect the likelihood of these social changes.   Building on these themes, with the latest expansion revolters have Causes such as ethnic or religious independence. Collections of revolting provinces can form their own countries, or join existing culturally-aligned countries. These are good additions to the underlying theme, but still need tweaking to make the results more cohesive and rational. Overall though, a lot of brilliant analysis and research went into this part of the game.

In addition, there are eventually Protestant and reformed Catholic movements that spread across Europe, which bring with them all of the internal conflict you’d expect (similarly there are Shiite movements within Islamic regions). Through a wide variety of mechanisms, you can chose to either move in the direction of religious tolerance, or you can try to stamp out any heresy, with either approach having negative and positive consequences depending on your situation and other decisions.  

Beyond the internal religious struggles, EUIII provides an additional layer of challenges and opportunites for European nations through the Papacy and Holy Roman Empire, including such things as “influencing” cardinals and participating in crusades. With In Nomine, as Papal Controller, you may be able to have opposing rulers Excommunicated and you can call your own Crusades. These features provide a layer of richness that will heavily influence the strategies of European nations.

Despite the underlying complexity involved, the cultural and religious mechanics play out rather nicely. They’re relatively simple to work with, and even if players don’t fully understand the mechanisms or their rationale, the implications are easy enough to manage for anyone.  

In Nomine  

Two major new features of IN are Missions and Decisions. Each country, including the player’s, is given a single Mission at the start of the scenario. Once completed, the nation gets a small bonus and another Mission. Examples of Missions may include such things as building a certain structure, taking a certain province, or some other diplomatic or military goal. Missions not only help guide the AI, but also affect player priorities and choices as well, as the rewards are enticing but not so much so as to make the player feel forced down a particular path.

Decisions are religious, national and provincial options that give the affected nation or province small bonuses and penalties to various scores (things like diplomatic relations, production, trade, dissent, etc.)  Decisions have criteria that must be met before they're implemented.  These simply provide additional options that can help you achieve your goals through fine-tuning.  While they can be interesting, provincial Decisions in particular can become a bit tedious to manage for larger empires.

Both Missions and Decisions drive historic actions, providing a nice way to maintain historic flavor without imposing a stale and predictable time-line. It’s an interesting approach that should be considered for other games in the genre.  

A particular area of attention for In Nomine was improving the AI. The diplomatic AI is much more cohesive than in the original release; most notably your own alliances are more willing to work together to achieve mutual benefit. In previous versions I found the fickleness of the diplomatic AI rendered diplomacy near useless. This improvement makes diplomacy much more meaningful and the game is richer for it. Likewise, the naval AI has been significantly improved. With the combination of the AI having full visibility, instant reactions, and now reasonably grouped fleets, you’ll want to keep your fleets far away from the opposing home country when up against a superior navy, else be prepared to suffer massive losses. The land AI, on the other hand, is not convincingly improved over core EUIII.  It does seem a bit more natural though, occasionally being as irrational as a human player might be, which can be more fun even if it’s not more effective.  

Opportunities  

Any game with a scope this big will always have room for improvement. Surprisingly, I find that in EUIII:IN, the biggest opportunities involve land combat mechanics. I say “surprisingly” because this area is arguably the bread and butter of strategy games, and because so many other games, including other Paradox titles, cover land combat pretty well. There are a number of typical land-combat features that are either non-existent or severely under-weighted.  For example, the effects of terrain on combat are generally insignificant and uncontrollable (you randomly fight in one of many terrain types within the province, and regardless of the type you wind up with, it doesn’t seem to affect the outcome much in most situations.) The effects of weather on combat are non-existent, as are supply lines (though both can affect reinforcements.) Quality of leadership has even less impact on combat than terrain. All these issues leave the land combat system feeling a bit shallow. Unfortunately, these problems seem even more pronounced in the latest expansion.  

In addition to these, a few suspected balancing hacks that date back to the original release still seem to be in play. Leaders are way too expensive for their quality for most countries in most situations, while the AI seems to always have great leaders regardless. This is especially irksome since your mediocre leaders seem to die far more quickly than the AI’s excellent ones. This vulnerability seems even more pronounced when using your monarch as a military leader: an act far too often resulting in instantaneous death for your monarch, while AI monarchs seem to dance about the battlefield for years without a scratch.  The imbalances in leader skill and leader death are then further compounded by an apparent skewing of combat rolls. I imagine it’s always a tough call on where to place balancing hacks when required, and any given choice will bother someone, but these were not the best design choices, imo.  

The combination of the rather flat land-combat mechanics and ai hacks leaves the player with few dependable options in executing a ground campaign; it all boils down to the quantity and quality of your forces, mostly quantity. You do what you can to improve your force quality (through sliders, research, advisors, etc), build a lot of units, then throw them at the enemy and win. This is not to suggest that there aren’t other ways to win ground battles, or that there aren’t times when you have to pursue more sophisticated techniques (especially if you’re playing a minor country), but such techniques are too effort intensive, too unreliable and generally provide low cost-benefit. The shallow land-combat in EUIII would normally be a game killer, but given the depth of every other part of the game, this winds up being a minor disappointment in an otherwise exceptional game. 

Conclusion  

We’ve barely scratched the surface of EUIII:In Nomine; the scope of this game is awe-inspiring. It also happens to be fun and well-made. However, it’s a niche game that you can not pull off the shelf of your local Piggly-Wiggly. You can download it exclusively from GamersGate (where it is as of this writing their top seller), and if you like this genre, we strongly suggest you do so. As this is a cumulative expansion, you must own both the core EUIII and Napoleon’s Ambition to play In Nomine.