All Paradox Strategy Games Ranked By Difficulty

It’s quite hard to rank all the paradox games by difficulty considering they are all painfully hard to learn in their own way, especially with their rather uninformative tutorials teaching you the bare minimum. This is also made worse because their tutorials are just massive text dumps that rarely get updated to help teach the new mechanics of the billions of DLCs that come out for each game.

This is my way of saying that this list will be based on my experience with each game and may not apply to everyone in the same way, but it should give you a general idea of which paradox games are a good place to start because they are well worth the steep learning curve.

This list will also focus on map-based strategy games like CK3, EU4, and HOL4.

Crusader Kings III

As much as it pains me to say Crusader Kings 3 is possible if not the easiest of the main Paradox strategy games this is rather hard to say considering it took me a good few hundred hours to understand what the hell I was doing. Despite this and after playing other paradox games I would have to say that compared to the others CK3 is pretty easy and this is in no small part due to the fact that there are only a few DLCs currently available for the game.

Stellaris

Stellaris is probably on par with CK3 in terms of difficulty to learn but if you have all of the DLCs for the game then there is significantly more to learn and do, especially in the later game.

Imperator Rome

What makes Imperator Rome harder than CK3 and Stellaris is the lack of players so getting answers on Discord, YouTube and the Forums is so much harder and bug fixes are few and far between.

Europa Universaralis 4

EU4 one of my favourite paradox games is particularly difficult partly because of the massively outdated tutorial which just teaches you how to make an army and how to use an army. Possibly the harder part is the 18 DLCs for the game not including outfit, music and soldier packs all will set you back a whopping… I’m not even going to add that up…

Victoria 3

Victoria 3 is mind-bogglingly hard just imagine having to run an entire Victorian-era economy trying to pass all the right laws to make your people happy and after about 50 hours in the game I still have 0 clue what I’m doing, but I hope you like menus and submenus, but that’s pretty much the bulk of it.

Hearts of Iron 4

Last but not least is HOI4, a game I’ve tried many times to get into and many times failed. I don’t even know where to begin with this one but I can’t for the life of me wrap my head around it, despite being something of a wizz as Crusader Kings… I’m stumped, this thing is HARD.

I may just be dense considering that HOI4 is the most-played paradox game on Steam…. thoughts?