Bret Devereaux

Historical events are trickier. The game is free-form, so events after the start date will not unfold in perfect historical order, though some major events (Printing Press, Reformation, etc) are encouraged by game mechanics to happen around the right time. 35/46

The big issue is the degree to which, without serious player intervention, European dominance by 1800 is inevitable. Now of course European colonial empires did happen, so it seems odd to fault the game for regularly producing historical outcomes... 36/46

...but the degree to which those outcomes are presented as mechanistic and inevitable, rather than contingent is troublesome and may lead some careless players down a fairly dark path of historical thinking. 37/46

The game is great for stimulating informative 'wiki-walks' as players want to find out what the heck the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was, or what Maurician Infantry is, or investigate the printing press. In that sense, the historical rootedness has real value. 38/46

For the teacher working with students whose history is heavily informed by EU4 (and other paradox games - they have Crusader Kings 3 for the Middle Ages, Imperator for the ancient period, Victoria II for industrial revolution and Hearts of Iron for WWII)...39/46

...you are likely to want to try to foreground the human impacts of those state-centered policies (because they game doesn't) - present students with what it means*for*people* that France is grabbing islands to plant sugar in order to raise revenue to fight England...40/46

...(mostly misery, in the event) and what it means that state-on-state competition in the premodern and early modern world more or less everywhere led to frequent warfare (mostly misery, in the event). 41/46

And second, you are likely going to want to spend more time and effort stressing the contingency of the 'rise of Europe' in the early modern period, noting how this outcome wasn't necessarily inevitable or desirable. 42/46