Good evening you're listening to Three Moves Ahead, and I'm your host, Rob Zakeney.

Joining me today, once again, our old friend Jason Wilson, copy editor at Games Beat. Jason, welcome back to the show. Thank you, Rob. It's been a very long time. And we also welcome back our buddy, TJ Hafer, contributing editor at PC Gamer. Hey, how's it going? Not too badly. I've been having a fairly nice vacation, and I've been spending a lot of time with a game that I think we're all very excited to talk about today.

Europa Universalis 4 from Paradox Development Studio.

You know, I think this is a series that has evolved considerably in its third iteration across a number of expansions.

And since, you know, EU3 paradox has changed a great deal.

They made a, the development studio at least made a very concerted effort to raise quality and accessibility.

And I would say that starting with Crusader Kings 2, we saw maybe a more mature, more polished paradox sort of surface.

And I think EU4 is kind of, in my impressions, at least, kind of a capstone for the series.

And I was really pleased to see your reviews as well because it looks like we're all having a pretty

positive experience with this game. Jason, I want to talk to you because you gave it a very high

score and so did you, T.J. But Jason, I kind of want to start with you and maybe you could just

tell us a little bit about why does EU4 succeed so fantastically at being a grand strategy game?

Well, I think it succeeds so fantastically of being a grand strategy game

because of two reasons. And one reason is one that is not very technical, and the other is. So let's go

about to technical first. It gives you so many different options to do just about anything in its

historical world that you want, that you can pretty much use whatever strategy you want to try to get

ahead, especially with the way they have fixed trade and made trade more

of a viable strategy.

But the thing I think makes any grand strategy game, and some people may disagree with me,

is the emergent storytelling that comes out of your playthrough.

And that's what I really loved about Europa Universalist 4.

Is, with my, I had two big playthrus I did for my review.

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