Paradox says where we're going, we don't need no marketing plan as it just shows off and chats about the unannounced Europa Universalis 5

pcgamer.com:

While other developers stick loyally to promotional schedules crafted at great expense by dedicated professionals, publisher Paradox Interactive knows that with some things there's no need to bother. All you do, see, is show off a bit of a world map, start talking a little bit about population complexity and, like hungry sharks drawn to the blood of the chum, the Europa Universalis massive will materialise.

A new blogpost by Johan Andersson, studio manager at Paradox Tinto, basically just straight-up starts talking about and showing off elements of Project Caesar, a game that is very clearly Europa Universalis 5. Andersson is the creator of the series and, after over 25 years at Paradox, established Paradox Tinto in 2020 which initially worked on supporting Europa Universalis 4. 

Andersson begins by discussing two core elements of the game. First is population, because «the simulation of the population will be what everything is based upon, economy, politics, and warfare», and you would not believe how excited people are about what he has to say. To briefly give some context, Europa Universalis is a grand strategy game on a global scale, where you lead a chosen nation from roughly the 15th to the early 19th centuries: one of the twists being that, when historical events happened in real life (for example, the French Revolution), the game will somehow reflect that depending on your actions.

That's a rough summary of a game that goes into incredibly granular depth on everything from diplomacy to religion to technology, and in which a huge part of the appeal is that very detail. Andersson talks about how the new game will simulate people, or «pops», and how they'll impact on events.

«A single unit of people in a single location can be any size from one to a billion as long as they share the same three attributes, culture, religion, and social class,» writes Andersson. «This unit of people we tend to refer to as a pop.» He goes on to list some of the characteristics