As I’ve attested time and time again, I love Europa IV due to the stories it makes rather than a newfound form of competition. Maybe that is due to being generally pretty bad at strategy titles. So, for me, a good DLC for Europa IV can not simply change the landscape of competition. It has to feed into stories. The stories I’ll want to share with friends with glee and excitement. Rights of Man almost drops one particular task out of the two in a strange acrobatic fumble, but keeps both aloft.
Rights of Man, rather than that waning thing you hear about every so often, is the latest Europa IV DLC. In fact, it may be one of the largest ones in a long while. Usually I’ll read the list of additions, thinking “well, okay, so I’ll have to play this particular kind of nation to try it out.” For example, remember that Cossacks review a while back? You bet I had to try a horde nation. If I played it safe as Milan, I’d simply be staring at the mechanics at play from the end of a pair of binoculars with a smug look of superiority over the chaotic rabble that are the eastern hordes.
Already, out the box, Rights of Man gives a simple hand-gesture over the world and says “all is affected, pick one.” Although, in a particularly odd brand of genius, everyone is changed in different ways.
Will you be the large lumbering giants of the world, swinging the new Great Power options like a club? These are the new spiked club weapons open to the exclusive top-8 club of Super Powers. Want to make people like you? Sure! Pay their debt or income, and make them fawn all over you. Is there a prime piece of real estate in central Europe but they keep being friends with Austria? No problem, force the tiny nation to break their alliance (or get a friend to do it for you to avoid the truce problem).
Want to be a colossal arsehole to someone who is doing a similar land-grab? Feel free to slide into the war like a hot-tub, as long as there are unequal Great Power nations on both sides of course. Although this comes with the bloody frustrating annoyance where once you hit Super Power, every single war with a minor nation turns into a risk. One that a larger nation will use your once-easy massacre as an excuse to stomp on your face until the history books have a bloody paste where your country used to be.
Maybe, in reaction, you’ll resort to sneaking about as always the 9th highest Super Power? Except with the tools they have, the Top-8 Club can swing in and slice your throat. They can disarm you of friends, before gutting you like a fish. Rather than a club of gleeful individuals that the peasantry outside want in, it more resembles the choice between leather cuffs or fluffy cuffs as you’re chained to the radiator.
In addition to Great Power diplomatic options, there are a good few minor additions in Rights of Man. This includes my personal favorite of queens ruling if your heir isn’t old enough, so you’re not bound to not doing much if your king dies too soon. However, I may as well go on to the star of this DLC: Personalities.
It seems Paradox took one of the popular sides of Crusader Kings 2 and ran with it all the way. Crusader Kings 2 has a system where your leader, heir and other people will have personalities that affect statistics. Rather than gain via events and after childhood though, they’ll randomly appear over time every few years. Suddenly your king, heir, queen or military leader will be sparked into a religious zeal, based on a dream that night, and proclaim that missionaries will be more powerful under their name.
The key word is “suddenly,” as this is all randomized what you get. You may get a trait on your general or king that propels your civilization forward, one that is barely used (e.g. said missionary buff in central Europe in 1480) or even one that hobbles you. All you know is it is coming at some point. It’ll even happen to other leaders, each trait affecting how that country may now act. Like an AI with the religious zeal trait from before may decide to wage war on heretical countries instead of following natural historical progression.
Naturally, it being randomized in a game like Europa IV presents the obvious problem of imbalance. You may simply be crushed by someone else because your general suddenly isn’t good at morale or your leader is bad at drumming up taxes. Although that’s the nature of the Europa series. You’ll get a bad general in an important war due to bad luck, have a ruler with 0-0-0 stats due to bad luck and even careen your entire nation into the floor by losing battle-after-battle in a large war out of pure bad luck. Europa IV‘s tag line should be “History Is Unfair” considering how luck heavy it all is.
No, what is important is this: Does it contribute to the fantastic stories you’ll speak of? Will these whimsical tales lure the uninitiated into the Europa IV warm embrace? Oh yes.
You’ll speak of the time when you were about to get into debt, your income so low that interest would crush your empire under the invading tide of bailiffs. Which is when, suddenly, a neighboring irrational king decided to give you the 20 gold necessary to stay out of debt long enough to close the war. Thus saving you from a crushing loan.
You may instead speak of the time where your king just got one bad trait after the next, and you just kept him around to laugh at how bad he was getting. Perhaps gush about the time your general got a boost to the right skills at the right time, turning the tide of the war in your favor.
It just makes it a shame that the personalities will likely never be added on, due to being DLC-only. That they’ll never get an event-induced element, or start dipping into sillier Crusader Kings 2 inspired ones like “Secretly A Bear.” Then again, I think I’m getting off track…
…
…Sorry, just had a day dream of leading your troops as a bear pretending to be a human.
The final score of Rights of Man is an 8/10. This is, without a shadow of a doubt, one of the strongest DLCs for Europa IV in a long time. While they’ve put new systems in, like the Great Power system to leave larger nations no longer crippled by their size, it is the personality system that sells the DLC.
It creates stories while remembering to have mechanical backing to what has happened, and then using said personalities to nudge the player into other events. It falls a bit short by making it always time-induced, never feeling like you earned it or did it to yourself, but it still remains a beautiful sight to behold.
This is a must-buy for all Europa IV owners, managing to provide more with very minimal complications. A bold step forward to depicting a historical landscape of the neurotic, self-righteous smug gits leaders were back then. Y’know, unlike the neurotic self-righteous smug git leaders we have now.
A PC Review code for Europa Universalis IV: Rights of Man was provided by Paradox Interactive for the purpose of this review