Europa Universalis 5 has its first public patch, which encompasses over 350 fixes. Among the bigger things it smacks with the heal-o-spanner (an actual game development tool, traditionally carved from the base of a Taito arcade machine) is the Steams achievements system, which will no longer shower players in plaudits they haven’t earned. On the plus side, you’ll now earn achievements even if you activate the “allow ahistorical” game rule.

I grasp at those relatively intelligible nuggets like somebody lunging for the doorhandle in a room full of bees. I do not play Europa Universalis 5. That review gig went to Brendy, who was anointed many months ago as our human sacrifice to this particular god of grand strategy. Brendy is now more number table than man. He bleeds – erm, well, I can’t even say what he bleeds, because I’m not hip to the Europa Universalis terminology. As such, I’m a poor choice to write up the game’s first set of patch notes, but what can you do. Here are the apparent highlights, as detailed on Steam:

• Fixed more than 350 bugs (not counting Translation-related number of errors fixed, which you can find in its own section)
• Fixed the scope type for Achievement triggers, which was triggering several errors, along with many other minor fixes to them; also, activating the “Allow Ahistorical” game rule now doesn’t block getting Achievements
• Fixed several CTDs
• Made several fixes to Personal Unions, especially to AI Union Law voting, making it less spammy
• Fixed an issue making the Timurid spawning player event to not work properly
• The ‘Claim French Throne’ peace treaty during the ‘Hundred Years’ War’ situation no longer requires you to be senior in a PU already
• The events that convert Hussite pops for Bohemia during the ‘Hussite Wars’ situation are now converting much more aggressively and impactfully
• Japanese clans will now properly lose their clan’s foreign buildings when being landed after the ‘Sengoku Jidai’ situation starts

The rest of the notes span all aspects of the game, from whether or not the Earldom of Ulster is a Vassal of the Pale, through the addition of province capital map markers, to ensuring that there are “proper reasons for countries to join Autocephalous Patriarchates”. WTF is an Autocephalous Patriarchate. Some kind of octopus grandad? Can you conquer things with it? If you’re reading these notes, you’ve likely played the game and I look forward to your generous explanations.

Europa Universalis 5 seems to be going down well among players. It and Paradox stablemates Crusader Kings 3 and Hearts Of Iron IV are currently congregating in the high 20s on Steam’s 100 Most Played. They’ve got Red Dead Redemption 2 sandwiched between them like a strip of horse jerky. If you’re keen on EU5, but are having trouble running it, this workaround for lower-spec graphics cards might be of interest.