East India Company for PC Reviews by Gamers

As a fan of naval wargames, historical strategy and economic management games, Paradox Interactive's recent East India Company seems custom made for my enjoyment. The new game, released this week, gives players the chance to lead their own maritime mercantile empire in the 17th century trade wars that European powers fought in Africa and India. You'll plan trade routes, make war and peace with your European rivals, capture ports, and manage ships and crews. If you're really adventurous, you can even take charge of your fleets in real time 3D battles on the high seas. While that's more than enough quality content for many gamers, there are some shortcuts and missing features that keep East India Company from being all that it ought to have been.

There are a number of limited campaign options here, but I wanted to enjoy all the game had to offer, so I opted for the grand campaign, which begins in 1600 and runs through the whole time period represented in the game. With a bit of cash and the smallest merchant fleet around, you'll set off to trade in the commodities of Africa and India, always following the golden rule, "buy low, sell high." Your home port in Europe (one each for the eight playable powers in the game) has goods to sell to the natives, so first you'll stock up on tools and steel.

It's dead easy to setup trade routes and the automatic route tool is both convenient and reliable. Simply pick the one city you'd like a particular fleet to trade in and they'll sail off, buy up that port's main trade item, whatever else they can fit in the hold (and the budget) and then head home to sell it off and stock up on whatever goods are most in demand abroad. Ships have a limited range, so they'll need to stop in at friendly ports along the way, and can use these stopovers to buy and sell at better prices than are sometimes found in the cities at either end of the trade route.

These automatic routes free up the player to focus on other matters but it also doesn't maximize profits the way a human player would. Since each port only trades in one main trade item, like spice or tea or ivory, a large trade fleet on automatic can soon flood the market at home, resulting in lower prices and less return on your investment. By itself, this feature might only suggest that a smart player would tend to split their trading fleets up to tackle a wider selection of goods at once. But of course, the more you break up your fleet, the more vulnerable you'll be to the pirates and rival companies that prey upon defenseless ships in the trade lanes. Since there's safety in numbers, you'll want ships to travel in large groups, but since you're limited to one foreign port in your automatic trade routes, that means you're going to be dumping lots of one commodity in your home markets.

Whether or not it's worth micromanaging all depends on whether or not you want to gain that extra 5% margin on your trades. In the grand campaign, however, your stockholders will require you to move thousands of tons of individual commodities, so you begin to care less about price and more about moving product in a way that's safe and doesn't require a lot of extra work. So while automatic routes might seem less profitable than micromanaged routes, the game tends to push you towards these "set it and forget it" type routes. Throw in the five-ship limit in each fleet and you'll soon discover that diversifying is something you can't really afford until you've got enough cash to create self-contained trade fleets that can operate on their own.

The good news is that your ships are all basically following the same lanes so it's unlikely that an enemy can ambush your fleet without running the risk of encountering a lot of other potentially threatening traffic. A simple attitude system lets you set rules of engagement for your ships so they know when to fight and when to run. It's also fairly easy to keep abreast of the rise and fall of prices thanks to the comprehensive trading windows, the home port pricing lists and the small event pop-ups that let you know when a particular good is in demand at a particular port.

In fact, the stat tracking throughout the game is very good. A handful of summary screens outline your performance relative to the other European nations, so you can see right away who has the most warships, who has the most cash and where goods are being bought and sold for the best prices. All the information is right there, so there's no secrecy about who is winning. Handy economic breakdowns at the end of each year also give you a sense of your overall economic progress. These tips make it easy to use the trading table style diplomacy interface to trade goods, ports and cash with your enemies, and form pacts, alliances and declare war on each other.



As compelling as the game can be at times, it really fails to make the most of the setting. There's no conflict or cooperation between the merchant companies and the actual welfare of other nations. In fact, nations aren't even modeled in the game. That means there's no political maneuvering in Europe, no colonial frictions in Africa, and no exploiting the locals in India. As far as the game is concerned, the world is made up solely of ports and profits. While that may be an accurate commentary on the philosophical outlook of these companies, it seems a bit superficial in terms of the overall simulation and doesn't allow for the full range of influences that these companies historically had.

The same is true of the ports and ships. The port upgrades are limited to garrisons, warehouses and shipyards, so there's no real sense of creating industry or additional profit potential within the empire you're creating. In fact, owning more ports seems to be a bigger drain on your economy than anything, which makes it particularly troubling to win the game by conquering the entire subcontinent. And while the game opens up new ship types to you throughout the course of play, there's no sense of technological or practical progress. Being able to leverage your profits to create increased performance in your ships would add another layer of interest and strategy to the game. It's nice that you can hire better trained captains with neat skills and abilities, but that system is a bit too random to give you a sense that you're really contributing to your fleet's success.

In addition to managing fleets, you'll also have the option to jump into full five-on-five sea battles with rival Europeans and pirates. The system allows players to lead the fleet either in an RTS format or a Pirates!-style WASD format. There are options for all the requisite sea battle elements -- line formations, shot types, sail state, etc. and players can even dump their precious cargo to pick up a bit of speed if they're trying to flee. Unfortunately, the WASD style direct control doesn't quite give you the on-deck experience we were hoping for and instead feels a bit like the MMO combat found in Pirates of the Burning Sea. On the other hand, the combat animations, wave models and lively details help make the battles come to life.

One of the biggest criticisms here is that the game punishes players too much for opting out of the naval battles. It's one thing to minimize a player's gains from sea battles that are automatically resolved, but East India Company offers no experience and no loot from automatic battles. Players who don't care for the real time sequences will be punished for taking advantage of a feature that's been included for their convenience. We could understand not getting as much experience or as much loot in these cases, but not getting any is going too far.

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