The game is like that, too. It’s complicated, like the historical period it models so well. But you won’t find any way to make it easier to understand. And you won’t be blitzing through at high speed. You have to be prepared for quite an investment in time to get a running start on EU2. You have to want it.

The precursor, EU1, was reviewed by ESCmag in April 2001. El Supremo Editor Andy gave it an 8 and admitted he was "totally engrossed" by the concept of leading all of Europe to greatness.

Where EU1 took place from 1492 to 1792, or from Columbus to Napoleon, the sequel adds time on either end. You now get to experience Europe from 1419 to 1815. An extra 90 years shouldn’t hurt, right?

Possibly. But the game is already very slow, so extra years could be a bad thing for some players. Time slips by like grains of sand in an hourglass, and it will take some newcomers a week or more just to go down in flames. And for grins, set the game on its highest speed and watch how fast your struggling duchy will wither and die.

Historically accurate real-time strategy games are not for everyone. In fact, due to the ability to pause the game, it’s not really an RTS. It’s more like a hybrid between turn-based and real-time. If you like Command & Conquer, Dune, Sudden Strike or Kohan, for example, you’ll be unhappy at the pace and give up quickly. Save yourself the exasperation.

But if you like the Civilization series or Cossacks, give this a try. The game will grow on you and refuse to leave you alone.

Here are the feature bullets according to the EU2 website:

• 90 different nations
• 9 scenarios including a Grand Campaign Game encompassing 300 years.
• More than 500 different historical missions
• Dynamic system generator
• 200+ different historical events
• 800+ named provinces, 550+ named sea zones and 100+ named rivers on a map covering the entire globe
• Up to eight players in multiplayer games over LAN or the Internet

First, the manual. Andy had a tough time with the EU1 manual, noting that it lacked a table of contents and index. That’s an unpardonable sin for a strategy game manual, and while it’s improved, there is still no index.

The manual is full of good information, but you need a well-lit room and good eyes to get to it. The distracting use of the background map beneath the type on each page was jarring, and combined with the small font gave me a headache.

(Having said all that, the included map is jaw-dropping gorgeous and one of the most beautiful pieces of documentation I’ve ever seen. Once it goes up on your wall, it will stay up.)

The game interface drove me nuts a few times. For starters, font choices are abysmal at best. EU2 uses some intricate, serifed font that is just not necessary. Compare this interface to the new Civilization III, which has a clean, easy-to-read sans serif font that looks stunningly simple.

There’s a lot of Latin tossed in as well. I know what the word "bellicose" means, so if someone has a casus belli against me, it probably isn’t good. I don’t think the flavor of the game would be diminished too much if some of these touches were dropped.

The tutorials left me in the most pain. It just so happened that I’d already been looking at RTS tutorials, in an arcane academic assignment. So I was excited to see hints that the EU2 tutorials were supposed to be pretty good. Instead, I mostly found some interesting flaws.

First, the grammar in the tutorials is atrocious, with missing punctuation all over the place. Somewhere there is an overflowing bucket of commas meant for this writing.

In addition, the tutorials interface should probably be re-thought. The method used is to show a map, then place a great big dialogue box over it, with a single OK button in it. Text displays at the bottom of the screen detailing the moves you should make. Each time you click, the lesson progresses, with the text piling up at the bottom. It takes a lot of clicks to move all the way through each lesson. Clicking on the OK button to move through is painful enough, but what makes it worse is the button hops around a little with each click, so if you’re in a hurry you can’t just park your cursor and click through.

Most times the tutorial dialogue box obscures the very map it is trying to explain. This is especially obnoxious when there is so much wasted space in the box. It gets very annoying to move the box every single time a new dialogue displays.

The tutorials don’t stand alone, either. The user is referred forwards and backwards depending on what lesson was missed. But the references to missed lessons rely on naming, such as Chapter 1 and Chapter 2. Unfortunately, the main tutorial menu doesn’t refer to the numbers; it lets you choose by name. Fortunately, they are in order. They’re just not labeled. All you have to do is count, but it isn’t intuitive or friendly.

Other times, if you drift down with the pointer, the map scrolls away, and you have to fix it. Since all the land there is "terra incognita," it would make more sense to just lock it down.

Here’s another example from the tutorials: "This is the barracks. Click it to start building new land units i.e. cavalry infantry or artillery." Naturally, you can’t click it and start building anything. Interestingly, I got the same message when I clicked on the port. When I clicked on the mayor’s office, nothing happened, but when I clicked on the town hall, I got new information. Then I clicked BACK and wound up with no view of the town.

Also, in the Boy Scout tradition of leaving things better than when you found them, here’s a glitch that’s probably already fixed: There’s a font issue with Report #12. The letters are jumbled over each other and don’t look very good.

I hate games that don’t play nice when you ask them to. The first time I selected the weakling AI, I got slaughtered in 10 minutes. Can’t we all just get along? Finally, I got the hang of things and began to appreciate how intricate and compelling this game really is. There’s no way to give a game this ambitious a low score; it is a fine piece of work. But just as I was beginning to get into it, I felt as though I were standing on the edge of a very, very tall cliff. If I really wanted to understand this game, I had to take that next step. It looked like a long way to the bottom. I backed away.