14 DAY TRIAL // I talked in my previous diary for El Dorado about how I was fascinated by the new Nation Designer feature and spent more time than I should have exploring the options that it offers and tweaking every little aspect of Dacia, the country that I planned to plop in the middle of south-eastern Europe.
Once I started the game, I realized that my position might make it impossible to remain a nation in the long term, especially after failing to choose the Ottomans, the most powerful existential threat in 1444, as a rival.
My plan was to try and take out Hungary and maybe even Poland as quickly as possible, taking some provinces from them and maybe bringing in some vassals, in order to make sure that I could battle the Turks.
Europa Universalis IV makes it hard to gobble up countries and make alliances a potent force against a common enemy, but I wanted territory in order to increase my strength and show that I was becoming an important second tier power.
I recruited an army that bumped up my force limits and then waited for an opportunity, which arrived when Austria declared war on Hungary.
I took two provinces and planned to execute a similar move against Poland, but by now the Ottomans started to occupy all the small nations to my south, including Serbia.
The Nation Designer creates opportunity and peril
After a few wars and some attempts at containment, I admitted defeat in the face of the attacks from the Ottomans and returned to the Nation Designer to try and create a better country and decide on the best possible strategy to make it a force.
The great thing about the new feature introduced by El Dorado for Europa Universalis IV is that it makes anything seem achievable with almost any nation the player can think of.
Of course most creations are doomed by geography or events or simply luck, but some of them will be successful in the long term and players will savor their victories even more when they are achieved using countries they have constructed from the ground up.
