If games like Civilization and Age of Empires sacrifice the occasional piece of history for a bit of exciting and intuitive gameplay, Paradox games like EU3 do the opposite. This is a slow-moving simulation hybrid covering about 400 years of world history in great depth, with literally every in-game day as a unit of time across the globe. Over 300 real countries and similar entities, including quite a few from outside of Europe, are included, and every major facet of grand strategy is included.

EU3 is an ambitious game, which is ultimately to its benefit. The main problem is that it expects players to be ambitious as well. Its feeble attempts at tutorials are cute, but EU3 is too complex to simply jump into. It also hurts that rounds easily take over 20 hours to play through. Plus, as is historically accurate, the game's factions are extremely unbalanced.

This is the game for the brave history/strategy buffs out there.