2. Pace
Here’s another truth about Grand Strategy games: they can be overwhelming. At the start of a typical campaign, you’re greeted by a wall of spreadsheets, buttons, tabs, and flashing alerts, all demanding attention at once. For new players, that’s not “depth”, it’s a fast track to panic mode.

To tackle this, we looked toward a timeless principle of good design: The Inverted Pyramid of Decision-Making, which in a complex game such as this, resonates well. A game should begin with just a few meaningful choices, and gradually expand as the player’s understanding grows. By the time you’re managing multiple systems, you already know what each of them means and why it matters.

That principle works naturally in turn-based games, where time conveniently stops while you think. But Grand Strategy titles live and breathe in real time and not just as a turn-based, which makes pacing far trickier. So we asked ourselves: how do we recreate that gentle learning curve?

Our answer is Adaptive Automation. In EUV, most major systems can be automated. It’s optional, flexible, and entirely under the player’s control. Early on, you might automate several of these systems to focus on the fundamentals or simply the playstyle tied to the recommended country of your choice: learning what matters without juggling everything at once. As your mastery grows, you can start switching off automation feature by feature, taking full control at your own pace.

This not only creates a smoother onboarding for newcomers but also gives veterans powerful tools to shape their experience. A long campaign naturally goes through phases; perhaps during wartime, you let your economy run itself, and in peacetime, you turn your attention inward, managing estates and diplomacy in detail. Adaptive Automation isn’t just for beginners; it’s a quality-of-life system for everyone.

Generic Walkthrough / Automation Step + Automation Panel