Over the last week or so I discovered and purchased Europa Universalis III.
It's basically a hyper-realistic RTS where you lead any nation from any time between 1399 and 1820, and by any nation I mean any nation, out of all of the 300ish that existed.
With that said I'll now describe my brief affair with Europa Universalis III.
Starting up the game takes my computer ages, I'm not sure if this will happen to any of you, but it happens to me. However after I got it to start I, going by tradition, instead of going to the manuals just hopped straight into it, and was more or less surprised.
There are several single player modes, in each of which you control what nation you play as and what time period it's in. I picked my favorite nation, England, and 1399, the earliest time possible.
So I got a map of the British Isles and a few territories on the mainland, which I promptly lost to France without a fight... A great start. Moments later Scotland attacked me and I got a few other surprises, firstly you don't actually fight battles. What you do is make the armies, select the commanders, and send them off.
After a short war I took all of Scotland's providences, and that was when it became apparent how in depth the game is, I didn't actually take their providences, I occupied them, and had to make Scotland a vassal, or demand regions as part of a peace accord to get them. So I made Scotland my vassal, with the ability to annex after ten peaceful years.
I then went to take Ireland and form The United Kingdom 300 years early, and that was when I learned that declaring war for no reason murders your nation's stability. So for the next around 30 years I had to fight a civil war, but the end result saw my United Kingdom created by 1450.
All the while I had been accepting other nations' requests for royal marriages, which led to me randomly taking control of some landlocked mainland nation just separated from the sea by The Netherlands. Several wars later I had most of that area, and several years after that I had just one coastal mainland region.
So with my hopes of a European empire shattered I funneled all my nation's resources into the navy and colonization, and by 1460ish I had my first colony in The New World.
That brings us to the current game date of 1530ish I control a large chunk of North America, Mexico, and have an inflation rate of 50%, I have around 8 loans and my nation's in massive debt.
