Earlier this week, Paradox released the Leviathan expansion for Europa Universalis 4, which is aimed at making it easier to ‘play tall’, gaining power by centralizing rather than expanding. It adds more diplomatic options, specialized colonial nations, and so on. At the time of writing, it has a rating of Overwhelmingly Negative on Steam, with only 10 percent positive user reviews.
That’s lower than Flatout 3 (14 percent positive), Spacebase DF-9 (18 percent positive), or RollerCoaster Tycoon World (25 percent positive). To be fair, it only has 1,351 reviews so far versus the, say, 5,719 that Godus has. It could turn things around yet, but there’s a lot that players want to see changed.
Since the release of Leviathan, players have encountered a raft of issues. Even those who didn’t buy the DLC are finding bugs related to the accompanying 1.31 Majapahit update to the base game. A release problem megathread on the official forum that’s over 40 pages and a Leviathan bug report megathread on Reddit collects the complaints.
Among them, hordes’ missionary strength being set to 100 percent instead of one percent (allowing them to convert entire provinces in a day), the Sikhism interface missing buttons, natives transforming into Europeans when unified no matter where they’re from, settled provinces reverting to unsettled, games crashing after 100 years (in-game time, obviously), and plenty more.
Paradox has already released a hotfix, which has dealt with some of the bugs, like problems with reform rates, and attempted to rebalance broken or exploitable mechanics like monuments and the speed at which favors are gained. Some of the fixes are quite minor: “Ulm flag made slightly higher quality”, one of the patch notes says. It hasn’t done much to alter opinions on the forums or in the user reviews, which remain predominantly negative. Among the rare positive reviews is one that reads, “Now i finally can quit complaining about Cyberpunk 2077 being the most glitchy, btoken [sic] and rushed out game i’ve ever played.”