EU5's Encinades Update Is Enormous and That's Both Good and Bad
The second major update for Europa Universalis 5 dropped, and Paradox is calling it 'Encinades'. The patch notes would fill 72 pages of a Google doc. Seventy-two. That's not a patch. That's a whole different game shipped inside the one you already bought.
What's Actually in Here
Over 300 new advances, around 150 dynamic historical events, 2,000+ bug fixes. The historical events lean heavy into Greece and the Balkans, which makes sense given the companion expansion 'Fate of the Phoenix' is all about Byzantium. Good news if you don't want to buy the expansion: the advances and historical events are free for everyone regardless of what you own. That's the right call.
The Holy Roman Empire UI got rebuilt into a tabbed structure. If you've spent any time trying to navigate the HRE before, you know why this matters. It was a nightmare. Tabs are a small thing that will make a real difference for anyone playing in that region.
The Economy Stuff Is the Part I Actually Care About
Encinades overhauls the economy with more refined trade route logic and adds a new trade orders feature. Maritime Presence also got enhancements. EU games live and die by their economic systems, and EU5's was already more complex than its predecessor. Whether these changes make it more intuitive or just differently complicated, I can't say yet. But trade route logic being "more refined" sounds like it could fix some of the situations where the simulation produced obviously wrong outcomes.
Orthodoxy got reworked too. Patriarchs are now interactable characters rather than passive modifiers. That's the kind of change that sounds minor until you actually play an Orthodox nation and realize you can now do things with your church leadership instead of just reading numbers at it.
Laws Got Interesting
The laws and tenets system was updated so some laws are now inviolate and others can be changed. This creates actual stakes. If certain laws are locked, you have to plan around them rather than just spending resources to remove inconvenient things. Could add genuine friction in a good way. Speculation on my part, but it sounds like it's meant to make historical constraints feel meaningful rather than optional.
The Bug List Is Genuinely Funny
2,000 bugs fixed includes some real ones. The Wars of the Roses event now triggers properly. There was a bug where Lichfield Cathedral would move to Stafford, which is the kind of thing that shouldn't exist but absolutely did. The 'Reform Society' disaster could trigger multiple times, which presumably caused cascading chaos. And there was a bug preventing players from liberating countries because the game decided they would cease to exist if liberated, which is exactly the kind of logic error that makes you appreciate how hard it is to simulate history.
Should You Come Back If You Bounced Off Launch?
EU5 at launch had plenty of rough edges. A 72-page patch that fixes 2,000 bugs and adds substantial free content is exactly the kind of update that makes a strategy game worth revisiting. If you liked EU4 and were waiting for EU5 to settle down, Encinades is a reasonable point to jump in. If you tried EU5 and found the core systems too opaque, this update doesn't change that. It refines what's there, it doesn't simplify it.
For Byzantium players specifically, 'Fate of the Phoenix' is apparently the reason this update exists in the first place. Whether that expansion is worth buying is a separate question, but the free content that comes alongside it looks substantial.
Source: Pcgamer