East India Company review

Rule the high seas in East India Company

East India Company combines 17th century economics, trading, and diplomacy with tactical/RTS naval battles to gleefully suck away hours of your time. (Did we mention it has pirates?)

Rule the Waves

East India company puts you in command of a 17th-18th century naval trading company. Your goal is to become the richest, biggest, most powerful naval trading power by any means necessary -- for king and country, of course.

You begin by joining a trading company in one of the major world powers -- Spain, France, Britain, Portugal, etc. In the early part of the campaign, you'll spend most of your time buying up goods in various ports and sailing them to other ports where you can sell them at a profit. You'll need to do this for a short while to establish your cash flow while you learn the ropes.

While sailing the high seas in merchant ships is a simple enough start, East India Company ramps up the complexity -- and the fun -- pretty quickly. Once the game is going 'full sail' you'll be managing multiple fleets of ships, watching the price of goods like a wall street tycoon, and schmoozing other trading companies through diplomacy -- always looking to your own advantage, of course. You'll also be conquering ports and commanding naval battles.

Through the course of the campaign games you'll also be tasked with meeting certain objectives, and rewarded when you complete them.  During the campaigns, failure to meet assigned objectives ends the game -- but if you prefer a sandbox-style game, East India Company offers a sandbox mode as well.

The game also has certain randomized events to keep things interesting. For example, during my adventures I found the wreckage of a salvageable warship that I towed back to port, fixed up, and added to my fleet (yay!). Later, one of my captains died (boo!) -- probably of scurvy.

My two ships -- the Dr. Teeth and the Floyd -- are readying the coup de grace
for some foolish pirates (the ship in the red circle) that attacked my fleet. Avast!

As you build up your finances, you'll gradually acquire more money and build up your fleet with bigger, more powerful ships -- which you're going to need. Eventually, diplomacy will fail -- or you'll get tired of it -- and you'll probably want to send your enemies to Davy Jones' locker. 

Business is war

Whether you're attacked by pirates or rival fleets (or you attack them), your military might starts becoming a concern after about the first 5 years of the campaign (about 30-45 minutes of game time, depending on how quickly you like to play).

You'll also want a strong fleet to capture ports in the glorious name of whatever country you're serving. (The game can be won by capturing and holding all twelve ports in India.)

Naval warfare can be done through tactical, real-time strategy, or 'auto-resolve' modes.

The auto-resolve mode is for players that like to just get it done with, take their lumps, and (win or lose) focus more on the strategic and economic part of the game. Both the tactical and rts modes, however,  take you to a 3D view of your vessels where you'll take command of the battle.

The Tactical mode lets you control ship movement in real-time with the WASD keys and the mouse. Real-time strategy mode plays like an RTS game. One advantage of playing out the battles in tactical or RTS mode is that you can plunder the defeated ship, take it back to port, fix it up, and add it to your own fleet.  The auto-resolve mode only determines a victor -- who gets no spoils.

Although the tactical and RTS modes are fun, they aren't fast. As a matter of fact, you may find yourself choosing these modes purely based upon how much time you have or whether or not you feel like slogging through the combat. It took two ships of mine about 10 minutes or more to bring down a single pirate ship that got a wild hair up his mainsail to attack me. The combat is reasonably fun (and I did get some booty and a salvageable pirate ship), but it does slow down the game considerably.

More than just war

Ship captains that are successful in combat gain experience, and as they gain levels you get to pick special abilities. Special abilities grant various advantages for either combat and trading, such as Haggling, which helps you get better prices for goods, or Conqueror, which gives you improved odds of capturing a port with a naval assault.

Capturing ports helps you expand your power, but once you've captured a port you'll typically have to expend significant resources building it up. Each port has a trading post where you buy and sell goods, but once you conquer a port, you'll probably need to build or upgrade its shipyard, warehouse, garrison, and defenses to protect it against your enemies.

You don't always have to fight, of course. You can also negotiate with other trade powers. Negotiations typically involve the offering/exchanging of money and/or goods to forge a pact or alliance. Pacts and alliances can help you steel yourself against stronger enemies, until you've acquired the resources you need to turn the tables and... well, screw everyone over, if that's the way you roll.

Unfortunately, for such a complex game, East India Company is relatively light on tutorials. In addition, the tutorials require a heck of a lot of reading. While this won't put off strategy gamers in general, I think the game's user interface could have been better streamlined, and the tutorials could 'show' a little more than 'tell'.

It also would have been nice if East India Company offered more 'AI' and options to make managing your captured ports easier. Again, being able to simply right-click a port and perform various actions in a single click -- or even queue actions up -- would have been a welcome reprieve from the game's micromanagement..

But who are we kidding? To a certain degree, micro-management is part of the fun, as is learning the ins and outs of how things work. Learning strategy games through trial and error can be part of the fun as long as the game doesn't actively thwart you through lousy user interface or cheating AI -- and East India Company never felt like that.

The complex nature of balancing trade routes, economics, and  military/diplomatic expansion gives strategy gamers plenty to sink their teeth into. I've already given up many, many hours to this time-suck of a game -- and I freely confess I haven't even tried multiplayer yet, which offers high-seas fragging. But for this genre of game, I don't think there's any higher compliment that I can give than East India Company is one "massively great big giant fun time suck."

Visit the official East India Company home page for more info

East India Game trailer: