The cover of the official remake that never was.
- Our objective is to give you, the man behind the curtain, the tools to pursue your objectives with myriads of different strategies and immerse you in a new reality. Your challenge is to take the best decisions and decades, if not centuries later, look back and be proud of the decisions that shaped your nation's destiny.— Ubik, creator of Magna Mundi
Magna Mundi is a mod for Europa Univeralis III. It was meant to become a game of its own in 2012, but that was cancelled. It has been known to be a challenging mod, as it prevents easy expansion where it would not be historical.
It improved and expanded on EU3, with more advanced religious conversions and religious minorities, a revamped naval system, internal factions, an in-depth Holy Roman Empire, Barbary Pirates, an advanced building system, a gorgeous new map, and much, much more.
The mod itself is no longer being produced after the newest Europa Univeralis III expansion, "Divine Wind", in favor of the commercial game. The commercial game was cancelled by publisher Paradox Interactive in June 2012.
This game mod (and future stand-alone game) provides examples of the following tropes:
- Balkanize Me: The Holy Roman Empire and Japan. Also what can happen to France if the player really sets his mind to it.
- Easily Conquered World: Subverted in a couple of ways:
- Just having funds and manpower to raise and maintain an army and then wage a war is problematic by itself. And simply being already big before the conquest isn't making things any easier.
- Without an advanced government or administrative national ideas, your administrative efficiency will be too low to handle a large empire, and you will begin to suffer penalties.
- Rapidly expanding your empire increases your reputation, and the more reputation you have the slower your war exhaustion lowers. If you cross a certain threshold (usually around 18-25), you will become hated throughout the world, and other countries will begin declaring war on you in a large pile up. Of course, even getting close to that threshold is dangerous, as the Framed! event can strike at any time, and will you will have a few choices to make, and if you are unlucky your reputation will increase by 10 points - usually enough to put you over the threshold.
- Not to mention that a bad reputation can indirectly cause your country to collapse outright, because reputation raises war exhaustion.
- Harder Than Hard: The main pitch of the mod and then the "full game" was ranking up difficulty of EU3 in every possible direction, to the point just surviving being an achievement all by itself.
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Nintendo Hard: Even simply keeping the country together and not conquering anything is hard work. - Succession Crisis: If your heir is not old enough you get a Regency Council. Also, your nobles may take offense to the new ruler, and you may suffer a noble opposition. Imagine yourself, if you want to, facing a two front war against the Holy Roman Emperor (Austria), and a large Russia. Your awesome 9-8-8 monarch dies and is replaced by a 3-3-3 regency council, with massive noble opposition. Then The Plague starts. Have fun surviving!
- The Plague: You better hope you get this event early in the game while your country is small, or never at all - Or else you will be suffering for years, if not decades!
- Video Game Cruelty Potential: Forced Religous Conversion, burning heretics, chopping off the heads off the nobles that oppose you...
- Of course, it is also turned back on you with the Framed! events, and sometimes it's YOU who are getting your head chopped off...
- We Have Reserves: The main strategy of any Russia or Chinese game. Anyone building a large empire will have to resort to this, too, having to put down countless rebellions just to stay afloat.
- Won the War, Lost the Peace: Just winning battles and controlling enemy provinces isn't even half of success and neither is negotiating a favourable peace treaty. It might turn out not only you will be unable to reach your goals for the war, but the tally in the end will put your country in a negative, with less troops, money and income, but far more problems than before. At worst, you might just dig your own grave once the war is over, having enemies, rebellion, religious issues, bad reputation and wide range of internal and external discontent, not to mention beaten side looking for revenge.
