Played very little of EU 4; played the heck out of EU3 'way back in the day (didn't have a PC for over 10 years, which severely limited my gaming experience!)
Biggest problem with the EU games for me was that it was impossible to develop any game in anything resembling a historical fashion. Start a game with 100s of tiny states and statelets all over the map, and within a century most of them were gone - swallowed up by a few big whales of major States. In most cases, the only question was which Major State was going to gobble up most of Europe: Spain, Framce, some weird eastern combination (Austro-Lithuania, Bohemia-Sweden, etc) or Ottoman Turks. Unlike the real world, nothing small could survive for long.
The reviewer mentions a 'new administration' mechanic that makes running a wide-spread Empire hard, and that's the part that interests me most. Purty graphics, multiple things going on at once, being able to play as the Dontgiveadamistan Caliphate - those are nice, but being able to play in a realistic environment for the time and place between the 14th and 19th centuries - that is exciting.
Assuming they are pushing for a 2025 release, this year is going to be full of interesting new games for the historically-minded gamer: Anno 117 set in Rome, Farthest Frontier in a Medievalish survival setting, EU V if you want to play Everything Medieval In The Whole Freaking World - and, of course, whatever bells and whistles they add to Civ VII later in the year . . .
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