December 2025 Update: Quality Over Speed
Let's address the elephant in the room: if you've been waiting for new country guides, we owe you an explanation.
The Patch Problem
Since EU5 launched on November 4th, Paradox has released a steady stream of patches—each one bringing substantial changes to core game mechanics. Trade routes, building priorities, control calculations, estate interactions, military composition... the list goes on. What worked brilliantly in patch 1.0.2 might be suboptimal or even counterproductive in 1.0.8.
We've experienced this firsthand. Several guides we were preparing for publication needed significant rewrites after patch updates changed fundamental strategies. Writing a comprehensive guide only to have it become partially obsolete two weeks later doesn't serve you well—and it doesn't reflect the quality standard we've set for eu5.guide.
Our Decision: Intentional Patience
We've made the deliberate choice to slow down our country guide release schedule until EU5 reaches a more stable state. This isn't us abandoning the project or losing interest—far from it. This is us respecting your time and trusting that you'd rather have accurate, reliable guides than a flood of content that needs constant asterisks and disclaimers.
When you sit down with a eu5.guide country guide open on your second monitor, we want you to trust that the strategies work. That trust is more valuable to us than being first.
What's in the Pipeline
Here's the good news: we haven't been idle. We currently have approximately 15 country guides in various stages of research, writing, and editing. These span multiple regions—Western Europe, Eastern Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas. We're deliberately not naming specific nations yet (we've learned our lesson about overpromising), but the coverage is broad.
Each guide goes through our full process: hundreds of hours of gameplay testing, strategy verification, cross-referencing with community knowledge, and editing for clarity. That pipeline is full and ready to flow once the game stabilizes.
What We've Been Doing
In the meantime, we've focused on work that provides lasting value regardless of patch changes:
- Keeping existing guides current: Our 9 published country guides (Castile, France, England, Portugal, Ottoman Empire, Muscovy, Milan, Hungary, and Vijayanagar) have all been updated for patch 1.0.8.
- Expanding beginner content: We've added comprehensive guides on Buildings & Urbanization and Top Beginner Mistakes—foundational knowledge that transcends patch cycles.
- Building infrastructure: Behind the scenes, we've improved site navigation, accessibility, and mobile experience to make guides easier to use during gameplay.
When to Expect More
We're watching Paradox's patch cadence closely. When we see signals of stabilization—whether that's fewer mechanical overhauls, longer gaps between major patches, or official communication about a "stable" release—we'll begin rapidly publishing our backlog. You could see multiple new guides releasing in quick succession once that happens.
Until then, we'll continue maintaining what we have and building what we can behind the scenes.
Thank You
We appreciate your patience more than we can express. Building eu5.guide has been a labor of love, and knowing that players rely on our content makes the extra effort worthwhile. We'd rather be the site you trust than the site that publishes fastest.
The guides are coming. They'll be worth the wait.
— The eu5.guide Team