Grand strategy fans gobsmacked by this outrageously detailed Holy Roman Empire map from the unannounced Europa Universalis 5

An in-development image of the Holy Roman Empire from project caesar, the in-development unannounced Europa Universalis 5.

(Image credit: Paradox Interactive)

Every week for the past few months the developers at Paradox Tinto have been posting developer diaries and in-progress map screenshots from the game that everyone knows is Europa Universalis 5, but which for now they're just calling Project Caesar.

This week was a big one, as yesterday's Tinto Maps post was the grand heart of early modern Europe: The Holy Roman Empire. Historical strategy fans long knew that this would be an immense undertaking at the level of fidelity which EU5 intends... but I don't think anyone truly saw this coming.

The shockingly detailed detailed map shows just how absurd a patchwork of principalities, prince-electors, prince-bishoprics, free cities, prelates, archbishop-electors, and imperial peasant republics the incredibly complex Holy Roman Empire was. It's a pre-modern political structure you can't call a state and can read a dozen books on before you start to—barely—understand what it was.

It's staggering to even consider how th is thing will work in a videogame that's trying to simulate society starting in 1337. Paradox says the current draft has a total of 357 different countries in it. By contrast, the Europa Universalis 4 Holy Roman Empire has fewer than 100 countries modeled in it. This is the kind of detailed map that would be the entire strategy game in an earlier era—there's even an EU4 mod, Voltaire's Nightmare, that cuts the entirety of EU4 down into just this kind of a map.

It gets more absurd the more comments from Paradox Tinto developers about the capabilities of the game to model the Holy Roman Empire's outrageously complex systems, at least as it is at this point in development. One comment, for example, notes that there will be rules in place for even some of these tiny countires to further subdivide as lands are partitioned between multiple children in an inheritance.

You can go on over to Paradox's forums if you'd like to see more maps of the region, such as population, production, and more detailed maps of imperial politics: Paradox Tinto Maps #12.

Jon Bolding is a games writer and critic with an extensive background in strategy games. When he's not on his PC, he can be found playing every tabletop game under the sun.