Listen, in my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some lousy advice and I hadn't really thought about it until now. Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone, just remember you’re a fuck-up and will never amount to anything.
It all came to a head about a week ago, slumped in bed at about four in the morning when my pet woke me from a reverie, most serene, about the declaration of the Islamic catboy-republic. It was then that the lurking shadow that had stalked me for weeks was unmasked. I had a problem, I was getting too into Europa universalis 4 (Eu4) and would have to take drastic measures.
It started with a sale two years ago, the game was going for something petty, under a quid, though the real cost would be far higher. I played some of the tutorial and it didn’t really click, so like the one ring it was lost to time, until a hobbit, or hard drive clean up, found it. I was making space for trashy third tier video-games when I realized it was still installed, just sitting there, waiting patiently for my return.
I have to explain something if we’re to proceed. I love strategy games, I love them too much. It's an open ended brain sink, and my thoughts will churn through hypotheticals and tactics whether I choose to or not. I am only ever a miss-click away from falling back into a hole and losing thirty hours to the game itself and a month of productive thinking spent strategizing.
So, when I start up a simulation of the medieval world, with grand strategic objectives and considerable mechanical depths, I may as well have been smoking opium.
It took three false starts before I got the hang of things, and even then I was an ass-clown. The game is not forgiving and has a learning curve like the white cliffs of Dover.
I was playing as the ottomans, as the game informs you they are easy enough to start out with, and I’m quite fond of Islamic history. So anyway, I bungle the seizing of Albania, Greece, and Constantinople along with a number of territories out east. My economy is in shambles, my armies are few and without manpower, and I am without allies. I was unaware of half of those issues at the time though, because I was too busy diving through a sea of menus and screens trying to figure out what corruption is, and why and if I should care about the privileges of the merchant class.
Things go from bad to worse, when Hungry seized most of the Balkans, including Wallachia and I only got scraps by joining in on their unfettered conquest of rage. It’s easy enough though, say’s I; I’ll just fight them for it.
Six glorious years later a thing called Poland/Lithuania is kicking my teeth in like the casual I am, I reload a save rather than allow the diplomatic wedgy to continue. This is the first of seven attempts to topple that alliance over the course of two hundred years. I would reload after each attempted war, and come to think of them as the imagined war of ottoman humiliation. They account for half my playtime, roughly.
I got better at managing the economy, it's easy when you're not a person-of-different-ideological-stance, I built larger armies that were bigger and more huge militarily, along with some heftier horde and sizable soldieries, and I picked off smaller isolated nations at moments of weakness, slowly growing into a regional power.
Despite this, the other thing the ottomans were good at was melting Mamluks, which ruled over Egypt and the Levant, historically they fell in three years, in my game they only ever lost a single province to me, during a protracted multi-lane war between, myself, Persia, Russia and the polish commonwealth and them (which we technically lost) I had gotten good enough to levee large number instead of using those filthy stupid tactics. I could trade bodies until only my troops were left but this was slow and costly. Thought it allowed me to gobble up Persia and Georgia and oh god do you see the problem?
This is barely a third of the wars fought, I still haven’t gotten around to talking about how the game is even played, what any of the menus do, how things like tech and ideas work. The game even in its simplified based form is a sprawling mess of menus and sliders to juggle.
It’s immensely satisfying to balance a country's budget, to go from being thousands of ducats in debt to becoming an economic powerhouse over the course of a few decades of good management. It tickles my dopamine receptors to the point where my day to day drudgery is merely a vehicle to fantasize about my next fix.
It even invaded my inner sanctum of dreams where there is normally a baseline of deranged rambles (I'm not joking), then my sleep consisted of pouring over menus and tweaking sliders as I angled for my next shot at those Shitlords the Hungarians.
It was becoming mentally exhausting, and I was denied any satisfaction in simpler things. So I did what I had to. I deleted my save files, not just the current one, but every backup and what if. Then, I uninstalled the game, and got ready to sweat it out.
For another two nights the dreams kept up, but without the hope of the save files to come back to, the fever broke and I became myself once again. A third night passed and I awoke feeling less like a caliph and more like the smuck I am. It wasn’t good, but it was necessary.
I am just taking every day as it comes now, trying
to stay clean. It’s been a week since I got my life back and I’ve not looked
back. Choose life! Choose to not play Eu4. I kind of want to go again but maybe
this time I’ll play someone else? The need is still there burning through me.
But for now, just for today i’m clean, and hopefully tomorrow too, and every
tomorrow after that.
