User Guide

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production efficiency of all of your prov-
inces which, in turn, will lead to significant
increases in your monthly income.
• Trade:
technology level 1 is required before
you will be able to send merchants out to
the world’s centers of trade. As you progress
further in this field of research, your mer-
chants will become far more efficient at
competing for trade and will find it easier
to establish themselves in the world’s cent-
ers of trade. There are also several province
improvements that require somewhat ad-
vanced levels of trade technology. Trade is
discussed in more detail in the chapter on
Trade.
• Naval technology:
will gradually increase
the combat and operational capabilities of
your ships. There are increasingly large and
more powerful ship designs that will be-
come available as you increase in level. You
will also be able to travel longer and further
at sea without worrying about returning
to a friendly port to take on fresh supplies.
We’ll talk about this in depth when we look
at the military part of the game.
• Land:
technology will result in similar
improvements to your land forces. As you
increase in land technology levels, your in-
fantry will replace their swords and pikes
with various forms of gunpowder-based
weaponry. Your cavalry will also increase
in ability, but they tend to become some-
what less of an elite, infantry-destroying
force than they are at the start of the game.
Perhaps the most important advances will
come with the development of artillery. Ar-
tillery regiments will become available once
you have reached level 5 in land technology
and are very effective at breaking down en-
emy fortifications. They are not very useful
on the field of battle until the middle and
later stages of the game. We talk about this
in the Military chapter.
Your current technology level in each of the
fields of research is the large number displayed
at the extreme right end of each slider. To at-
tain a new level in technology, you will need
to allocate a portion of your income to that
field until your total investment is sufficient
to achieve the next advance. The exact amount
that you need to invest will depend somewhat
on how significant the advancement is, but it
is also affected by how close the current game
date is to the historical date that such a tech-
nology first commonly appeared. Europa Uni-
versalis III uses a mechanism that makes it very
difficult and almost prohibitively expensive to
achieve technological progress that is too far
ahead of history, but this same mechanism also
makes it quite unlikely that you will fall too far
behind it either.
To allocate part of your income to a field
of research, simply set the appropriate slider to
the desired position. This may be done by drag-
ging the slider button with your mouse to make
large changes, or by clicking on the arrows at
either end of the slider to make very small, in-
cremental changes. If you increase your invest-
ment in one slider, you must decrease it by a
corresponding amount somewhere else in your
budget. This can result in several sliders mov-
ing slightly downwards if you move another
slider significantly upwards. You can lock or
unlock a slider’s position by double-clicking or
right-clicking on it.
At the right end of each slider, you will see
the amount being allocated to this technol-
ogy from your budget each month. Hovering
your mouse anywhere over the slider will dis-
play a tool tip indicating the total investment
required to achieve the next level of technol-
ogy, and the amount that has been invested to
date. The slider itself is colour-coded to give
you an approximate view of your progress.
At the beginning of each level it will be red,
and as you invest in research it will gradually
change to green from left to right. Once the
green progress bar reaches the right end of the
slider, you will gain the next level of technol-
ogy. If you’re in a hurry, you can click the small
lightning bolt symbol to the right of the slider.
This allows you to make an investment of gold