Europa Universalis: Crown of the North
Compared to the rest of the franchise, this crown seems a bit plain.
So why are we starting a review of a game called Crown of the North (CotN) with a discussion of Svea Rike? And what exactly is Svea Rike, anyway?
If you guessed that it was a film by Ingmar Bergman, you were close, but receive no prize. (Sorry.) "Svea Rike" literally means "The Kingdom of Sweden." It is also the name of an historically-oriented strategy game created by Dan Glimne and Henrik Strandberg, that was incredibly popular in Sweden back in 1997. Svea Rike II followed in 1999, and Svea Rike III the year after that.
As it happens, Svea Rike III was translated into English, and became...yes, you're right: CotN. The English title may be a bit more diplomatic, though, since the kingdom of Sweden that its Swedish developers refer to was the late thirteenth century model that subsumed Norway, Denmark, and portions of Finland, Germany, Poland, etc. In truth, it was a good time to be alive in the frozen north of Europe, if you enjoyed ABBA.
A Brief Historical Note
CotN is a game with a single scenario, set in Scandinavia from 1275 to 1340 AC. This was a pivotal period in the political history of the region. At its beginning, Sweden was a sprawling power that had almost too much at its disposal: too many resources, plenty of territory, and too much power in the hands of an absolutist monarch who had (of course) too many sons upon whom to devolve a single throne. Norway was relatively feeble; Germany was actually a bunch of separate nations, each with its own traditions and ambitions. Denmark, a natural counterweight to Sweden, was on the way down. Under Valdemar II, it had been accounted one of the strongest nations in Europe, but his three incompetent sons and their equally sordid offspring were bleeding the inhabitants dry, mortgaging their lands, and throwing armies at one another and everybody else. By the mid-14th century Denmark had almost vanished as a nation, like several other countries which were submerged beneath the tide of cynical diplomacy and endless warfare characterizing the period.
The territory you examine at the beginning of CotN, then, is poised on a precipice. Denmark is still wealthy, but much of its territory has already been lost, sold, or annexed by agreement to various rulers and their noble tenants. Three of the competing factions seeking control of the entire region are sons of Magnus Ladulas, King of Sweden. A fourth is Stig Andersson, proud scion of an ancient Danish family, who detested the high and mighty manner of Valdemar's successors and the way they trampled on Danish law and custom. A fifth is the current Danish king, Erik Menved, who in real life was detested for selling his birthright and pillaging the defenseless. The sixth contender, Haakon, was a younger son of the Norwegian royal family, and owned a duchy in Denmark. (By Renaissance logic, this was cause enough to claim a foreign throne. The English ruling family of the Tudors used it years later in trying to claim all of France.) There is no attempt at equivalency among these factions in CotN; the inequalities among rivals is part of the challenge. As is usually the case in PE's strategic games, each side is rated up-front for economy, military, geographical location, and overall difficulty.
Features, Or Lack of Same
The first thing to note is that CotN looks a lot like Europa Universalis, with a closer-to-ground isometric view that makes Scandinavia seem as large as the world (which, of course, it is). Unfortunately, the visuals and pace of play are the closest tie between the two games, since CotN was developed separately. Most of the features that EU enthusiasts rejoice in are not available. For instance, you can create alliances in CotN, but they're just the usual, bland, mutual defensive and offensive pacts found in many other strategy titles. Missing are the distinctive EU alliances, where each one had a specific objective and timeframe, created by a single national leader who could arrange complex peace deals with the enemy benefiting differently every nation in his pact. (You could also opt out of an alliance in EU, cutting your own deal with an enemy at any time, though this risked angering your allies who might take reprisal measures.) You can declare war on another province's ruler, invite them to join a one-on-one alliance, propose a marriage between your houses, give a gift or insult them in CotN. But the EU games provide so many more tools for diplomatic interaction, in addition to the above: a ban from your alliances, requests for military access (to pass through another ruler's territory), three different levels of gifts, two different levels of insults, claims to another's territory (see the note about the greedy Tudors, above), and guarantees of protection against third-party invasions.
There's literally no trade in CotN, as opposed to the embargos, one-on-one trade agreements, loans, bankruptcies, inflation, twenty resource types, and competing merchants in EU2. This is too bad, because it would have fit perfectly into a game about Scandinavia during this time. It was a period that witnessed the first major wars for resource-related wealth in Europe since the implosion of the Roman Empire, and the enormous covert political role-played by the wealthy burghers of the powerful Hansa conglomerate (the first early modern "mega-corporation").