Like an asteroid touching down in a freshly shaken martini, Europa Universalis 5 is now available on Steam, and some players have been having trouble playing it. I don’t mean the people who don’t understand inflation or why they can’t make friends with Greenland. I mean the people who can’t even get the new 4X strategy game to launch, because their PCs are too pitifully puny for this behemoth of history. Don’t fret, those people. The hardware Popes at Paradox are blessing your meagre graphics cards with a sneaky workaround.
“We´ve noticed that many players crash the game due to the hardware being too weak,” explains a launch-day Steam post. “There is a way to force the game into a very low preset.” To do that, you’ll want to right-click EU5 in your Steam library, go to the General and add “-graphic_preset=very_low” to the launch options.
The post also notes some other problems with the game becoming unresponsive and going all black-screeny when launching from Steam. Apparently, this has to do with the Vulkan renderer, and the solution again is to right-click EU5 in your library and add “-dx12” to the launch options. You can combine this move with the forced very low graphics preset.
If none of that works, well, here’s the official Paradox bug report forum.
Our Brendy (RPS in peace) deemed Europa Universalis 5 to be a honking good time and also an atrocious burden on his mental resources that is sometimes better beheld in mild horror than played. “When the game is understandable, it is hugely gratifying,” he wrote in our Europa Universalis 5 review. “But it also feels a bit ‘you cannot press this button until you press that other button’. And that other button is obscured in a warren of menus you must spend nights coming to understand. It’s a hugely deep pool of wonderful tricks to get lost in, but a pool still sweaty from all the confused forum posters who dived in before you.”
How are you getting on, if you’re playing? A few years ago I reached the conclusion that Europa Universalis is not for me, but I quite like the idea of founding Iceland, getting really obsessive about lumber, and just sitting out most of the second millennium.
Nobody’s going to bother Iceland much, right? AFAIK it’s all volcano and EVE Online servers. Seriously, how many spreadsheets does it take to manage a country the size of Iceland. If you are from Iceland, please let me know. I’m pretty sure you live within shouting distance of the Treasury. Also please don’t get offended by my characterisation and go viking again – England has little to plunder besides branches of Gail’s right now.
