EU5 Achievements: All 75, Cross-Checked Against Real Completion Rates

EU5 has grown to 75 achievements as of patch 1.3 — but the wiki’s difficulty ratings stopped being updated after version 1.1, so 20 of them (everything from 1.2 Echinades onward) currently carry no community difficulty label at all. This page cross-references what rating data exists against real Steam completion numbers, and reports honestly on the achievements that only have one source or the other.

The headline number

The single most-completed achievement in EU5 — “Rule of Law” (change a policy) — sits at 34.9% Steam completion. That’s the ceiling for the whole game: not even two-thirds of owners have done the single easiest thing the achievement list asks. Keep that number in mind before judging any individual percentage below as unusually low.

Does the wiki’s difficulty rating track real completion?

Reasonably well, for the 55 achievements where both sources overlap:

The gradient holds — easier-rated tiers do complete more often — though Hard and Medium sit closer together on average than you’d expect, and the Hard tier’s median (0.7%) is far below its mean (4.3%), meaning a couple of high-completion outliers are pulling the average up. That’s not noise; it’s one specific, documented achievement.

The exception: an achievement that’s secretly free

“Welfare State” — have a market with a 60,000-food stockpile — carries the wiki’s Hard rating, yet sits at 28.4% completion, the 7th-highest in the entire game, comfortably ahead of achievements rated Easy or even Very Easy. The wiki’s own note resolves the mystery: starting as Great Yuán satisfies the requirement immediately at game start, before you’ve made a single decision. “Hard” describes the mechanic in the abstract — building and maintaining that large a stockpile from scratch genuinely would be difficult for most nations — but it doesn’t describe the achievement once you know which nation gets it for free. This is the mirror image of a pattern we documented on our EU4 achievements page (achievements rated easy that almost nobody attempts because the setup is obscure); here it’s an achievement rated hard that’s actually trivial once the shortcut is known.

The 20 unrated achievements: real data, no wiki verdict yet

The wiki hasn’t assigned difficulty ratings to anything added since patch 1.1, which means the following — six from 1.2 Echinades, the rest from the Fate of the Phoenix DLC and later patches — have only Steam’s completion data to go on:

*Two entries — “Greatness from Small Beginnings” and “African Trade” — are technically listed on the wiki under 1.1 Rossbach with a Hard rating already, included here because our merge treats the wiki and Steam names as authoritative independently; no contradiction, just confirming Hard-tier, very-low-completion territory. **African Trade’s rock-bottom 0.1% is consistent with a Hard rating and a narrow nation-specific requirement (Kilwa).

Every achievement in this unrated group sits below 3% completion — consistent with them being genuinely difficult, DLC-gated, or requiring specific late-game situations, even without a formal community difficulty consensus yet.

Bottom of the list: the rarest achievements

Completion bottoms out around 0.1-0.2% for a cluster of late-DLC and 1.2-era achievements: The Great Great Wall, African Trade, Uomo Universale, League of Legends, There Can Be Only One, Stefan’s Dream, Nut Allergy, and several others. Nearly all require a specific starting nation, a specific late-game situation outcome, or both — the kind of achievement that demands a campaign built around it from turn one rather than something you stumble into.

Sources checked

Difficulty ratings are transcribed from the wiki’s achievement table, which explicitly flags itself as verified only through version 1.1 — treat any achievement without a listed rating in this page’s tables as genuinely unrated by the community, not merely unresearched by us. Completion percentages are transcribed directly from Steam’s public global achievement statistics page for all 75 currently listed achievements.