"Wow someone with 5000+ plus hours in the game giving a negative review, they must be a troll"
Now that that's out of the way, let me just say that I had a lot of fun with EU4. This game used to be excellent (my old review is below). However, continual updates over the course of the last 3 years have turned the game into a boring, broken, slogfest. As of the time of writing, the game actively does not work. Ironman saves will be corrupted, and without a specific combination of DLC the game will continuously crash. These issues might be fixed, but unfortunately, the boring AI and meaningless feature bloat probably won't be.
Its sad to see a once great game lurch continuously into an unplayable mess.



EUIV is a very well designed game, but the entry cost is a bit high. The tutoral isn't as helpful or as in-depth as it needed to be to serve as a strong introduction to the game; it also was apparently unupdated for patches and DLC/Expansions. After the initial time investment (I spent around 8 hours actually learning how to do various things in the game) and a trip to the wiki (eu4wiki), the massive depth of the game really shines through. The randomness of the game allows for a massive amount of replayability, which combines well with the sheer size of the game to create an experience that can last for hundreds, if not thousands, of hours. There are a few nitpicks, especially when the game refuses to say why something can't be done. There are certain moments when very unrealistic things can really break the immersion and tone of the game which is both a flaw and a testament to how well the rest of the game handles realism.

While this certainly isn't something that everyone would like, and there is a good deal of time and effort input required to glean any experience from the game, the reward is an immensely deep and lengthy, yet enjoyable experience.

EDIT: A note on the DLC policy of the game: The game is constantly being updated (both with improvements and some poorly thought-out mechanics) and DLC is intended to fund this. The different DLC have very different value-to-cost ratios (Art of War-good, Mare Nostrum-bad), so it's definitely better to buy the DLC on sales, since the total overall cost is a bit absurd. Some of the changes that come with the free patches can be quite divisive, and the reviews for the accompanying DLC often reflect this. The patches also have pretty bad Quality Assurance and often times bugs can remain for months after being added and reported.