EU4 seems like exactly what a sequel should be.

The Ottomans may survive this, but their longer war against irrelevance drags on.

"It's like going from masturbating to sex."

Dip your beak into this invisible river of traders' gold.

I whispered conferences with Austria about carving up the Alps and western Germany.

Less Trafalgar and more a tempest in a teapot.

If your monarch is a moron, well, spend carefully and pray.

The curtain goes up on the last act of The Enlightenment.

This is my side, that over there is your side.

This kind of pressure just doesn't happen much in EU3.

'Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all, eh Rob? Especially for you, as you're moving on to a new love while poor EU3 will die old, alone, and bitter. What once-beloved games have you unceremoniously dumped when you met its younger, hotter sibling?

Even as a fan of the series, I was skeptical the first time I heard about Europa Universalis IV Europa Universalis III was still going strong on my hard drive, and I didn't exactly see why I needed another just yet. Whatever improvements Paradox might make with EU4, they'd likely be marginal, a bit of extra polish and the odd tweaking, but not something worth getting excited about, right?Then they let me play it. And everything I thought about EU4 went straight out the window.EU4 might look a lot like it's immediate predecessor -- or Crusader Kings 2 -- and that's because Paradox games tend to be more alike than they are different. They are consistent in the core controls, their pacing, and their overall subject matter: power politics in different eras. But EU4, in the two or three hours I spent with it, seems like exactly what a sequel should be. It's as if for every nagging issue I have in EU3, everything that never quite made sense, never worked in a fun or interesting fashion, or was just plain annoying, there was someone at Paradox who had the same problem and figured out how to fix it. And when you make those kind of comprehensive tweaks and adjustments across the board, what you have is a bunch of smaller tweaks and improvements that add up to a leap forward. I was reminded of when I traded in my beaten-up old 1997 Toyota Camry for a new sedan. I didn't know how creaky the old model had been, or how good driving could be, until I sat down with the new one.Admittedly, I had a charmed session. At last week's Paradox Convention in Iceland, they arranged for a number of strategy-focused writers to compete in a multiplayer LAN session for three hours. We picked our countries and went to work on allying or destroying one another. I've hardly ever played these games in multiplayer, mainly due to lack of opponents and opportunity, and playing against about seven other friends and acquaintances was an enormous treat -- a total change from the ordinary.Producer Johan Anderson would agree. "Every person that we get into the multiplayer campaign, it's entering a new world for them," he told me during an interview afterwards. "I shouldn't say this, but it's like going from masturbating to sex. It's a whole different thing."Multiplayer is crucial to understanding how Paradox designs its games. Hang out with the Paradox guys for a day, and you start to realize that not only are they their own games' biggest fans, but their own office multiplayer matches have probably led to some patches that trickled down into later updates. They identify exploits and start using them to get an edge in multiplayer sessions, and then the other developers get together and say, "Well that doesn't seem right," and patch it out. To hear Paradox's Chris King tell it, he and Johan Andersson are indirectly responsible for half the balance updates to Crusader Kings 2 and EU3.And yet Paradox games are often treated more as single-player experiences, where multiplayer is a curiosity for the passionate few. Paradox is determined to change that."People don't play multiplayer because of time commitments, and the infrastructure around multiplayer is prohibitive," Andersson acknowledges. "But time commitment isn't really that big of a deal. There's millions of people who play MMOs. A large fraction play on regular dates, doing raids and PvP. If we have good enough technology and ease-of-use for the experience, multiplayer should be as natural for you to play as single-player."While we were playing a short LAN session, once EU4 comes out this fall, it should feature things like hot-join, where you can sit in on a friend's game and play in their EU campaign, or vice versa. You can toggle the option on and off at will, so you can spice up a long game of EU4 with the odd appearance of human guest-stars. Paradox is also working on an IRC-like chat interface where players can have private conferences with coalition members or secret meetings with their rivals, out of view of other players. During our multiplayer sessions, for instance, I had whispered conferences with Austria about carving up the Alps and western Germany. Meanwhile, in the general chat (and banter around the room), I feigned deep concern over Austrian imperialism.Meanwhile, I was busy uniting France and driving the English off the continent. This is a phase I know very, very well from EU3, and it's always been a bit awkward. In EU3, you never really won a war until you occupied half your enemy's country. So as France, even though you had taken Normandy and the Aquitane from England and they had no hope of landing a large enough force to retake those regions, England would never negotiate or settle. You basically had to seize London before King Henry even considered offering concessions.EU4 fixes all that by not just measuring the outcome of a war based on the absolute strength of the two combatants, but also by considering what they are fighting for. When I took Normandy from the English, I had won a major victory because I'd declared war specifically over Normandy. England wasn't totally beaten, but I went to the peace table with a big edge because I'd already taken my objectives by force. This should make those routine endless, apocalyptic wars of EU3 a thing of the past, and encourage more varied international relations. Now "limited war" is a real strategy.With the English out of northern France, I had to deal with my economy. Here, again, there were some small but significant changes that I had time to appreciate as France lurched toward bankruptcy. First, national loans are at once more of a drain on the economy and also easier to maintain. Rather than coming in a few big disbursements, loans tend to pile up in little packets as needed. You can have dozens of loans on the books at the same time, which means you won't get walloped with ridiculous amounts when a loan comes due, but which also means it takes a long while to clear accumulated debt. And it's easy to end up financing earlier loans with more loans, if you don't turn that economy around.To save myself, I spent administrative points on a new set of national ideas dealing with finance. Admin points are a new idea for EU4, and they represent your government's capacity to undertake policy shifts. They accumulate based on your ruler's administrative ability, plus some other modifiers (like which advisors sit in your cabinet). You can use them to unlock new national ideas, which give your nation bonuses in areas like diplomacy, trade, or colonization, or you can spend them to boost your internal stability, or hand down a new government edict. If you have a ton of admin points thanks to a great ruler, development is easy and you have flexibility. If your monarch is a moron, well, spend those things carefully and pray nothing unexpected happens.The national ideas also illustrate something else about EU IV: it's a game of button and trees, not sliders. EU III loved sliders, and used them for just about every variable it could, which made it harder to see what explicit choices you were making, or what their effects would be. EU IV's focus on clearly labeled buttons, which explain both what they do and their side-effects, make it a much more accessible game.While my economy was rallying slowly, it looked like man was due to land on the moon before France was out of debt and once again had some spending cash. That's when I realized I basically had no trade presence, and my economy was suffering for it.The trade map showed me what was happening. The main trade route to the Far East runs by sea through the Mediterranean, around Spain, and up along the northern coast of Europe. But the flow of trade in my neck of the woods was overwhelmingly bypassing France and heading up to England. I was barely getting a trickle of gold from trade, while John Bull was swanning around like Scrooge McDuck.I sent a merchant to a transit point in the Bay of Biscay, between France and Spain, and had him open an office there. That started to direct more trade into my western port, but I was still getting a tiny fraction of the available wealth. That's when I sent my navy's force of light patrol ships into the trade lanes to start patrolling.Patrols make local waters safer and more desirable for merchant shipping, and so being able to project naval power with patrol craft (not battleships, because those aren't suitable for chasing pirates and stopping smugglers) can exert a big influence on the flow of regional trade. Now I was starting to make even more cash via trade, but still the English were like a magnet, pulling gold north. And this is why we ended up fighting round two.Because the English still held two seaside French provinces, each with a major port, along the Bay of Biscay, they still exerted more more influence on trade than I did through my glorified fishing village to the north. If I wanted to start pulling a lot of trade into the French heartland, I needed those provinces. Even though I felt unready for war, I couldn't afford to wait. I attacked.Again, this kind of pressure just doesn't happen much in EU3. Trade is a sideshow, with scarcely any connection to military or political strategy. The idea that a land power like France would wage war for trade was ridiculous. But in EU4, trade is influenced by many factors connected to politics, geography, and power. It's also too important to ignore, so it becomes a new source of conflict.Everything in EU4 just seems a bit sharper than it was before. Resources, be they economic, governmental, military, or diplomatic, are scarcer now than in the past, and I faced harder choices in my session. It's a promising sign, because EU3 develops massive balance problems in the late-game as countries become overpowered and draw from bottomless resources. Now there seem to be systems in place to stop the snowballing that could ruin a good game of EU3.And yet it is also a clearer game, more challenging to play but easier to control and understand. Design Lead Thomas Johannson said, "We want to ease the road bumps on the way to this core experience. ...We're trying to do focus testing, to see where people get stuck." The effort shows. Europa Universalis may never be for most PC gamers, but this newest version at least looks like it will welcome most strategy gamers with open arms, and not a kick to the head of its predecessors.Thus, the one sad thing about my time with EU4 is that it marked the end of my love affair with EU3. Even as the session concluded and we reluctantly stepped away from our wars and rivalries, I knew I couldn't go back. For me, theEuropa Universalis comes out this fall.