Reposted from the school blog I write for.
Mention the name “The East India Company”, and you’re likely to immediately either associate it with the last two movies of the Pirates of the Carribean film trilogy, or Sir Stamford Raffles. There was indeed such a trading company that operated out of England for about 250 years up till the 19th century before the company was actually dissolved in 1874. At their high point though, they were well-known for their trade of luxury and exotic goods from the Indian subcontinent.
The game East India Company is a PC strategy game that provides a perspective of the company’s glory days, with the game’s main campaign taking players through the 1600 to 1750 years. Translated into actual play time, that’s about 10-12 hours at least for the main campaign and only if you set game time at maximum acceleration and have your fleets zip around the oceans.
The game starts you off with a company commission, some money, and a port that belongs to your faction e.g. London if you play the English. Your early tasks include securing your first ship – possibly a small vessel manned by a small crew and capable of just carrying 10 tons of cargo. You hit the port’s Trading Post, make decisions on which goods to fill your hold with cargo, then sail off to another port that offers good buy-back prices for your goods. Rinse and repeat. Make a lot of money, and eventually you could be owner of hundreds of ships: some transportation, some for waging war, and others a hybrid.
Along the way, you’d get challenged by other national factions, who’re like you competing for trade opportunities, and ports of call. Depending on your diplomatic arrangements with your neighbors, you could ambush / attack them or just ignore them altogether. When at war with a faction, you can expect your fleets to be attacked, likewise for the ports you own. To this end, you have to decide what kind of ships to build, to manage, and what kind of fortifications to build in each of your ports. Your choice of ships range from small schooners to massive Ships-of-the-Line armed with multiple decks of cannons, and hundreds of sailors and marines.
The campaign itself is broken into several missions that each take several hours to complete, and last anywhere between 25 to 50 in-game years. These missions typically require you to meet multiple objectives: e.g. they may require you to trade a certain volume of a certain type of goods (e.g. 1000 tones of silk), sink a number of ships, or bring a number of India ports under your control. On the up side, the game is easy to learn and pick up. The interface is stream-lined, and you can engage options that leave a good portion of game play running on AI routine. You could skip the tactical naval battles and let the computer figure it out. If you’re bored of trading, you could also set automatic trade routes between ports and let the computer decide on which goods to buy and sell.
Setting the game to run on the latter will result in a nearly hands-free game though. The AI routines in automatic trading will do a reasonably OK job in keeping your bottom line in black ink (i.e. you’re making overall profit), but you’re more likely to rake in far larger profits if you directly manage what goods to buy and where to buy them from.
This is essentially an economic simulation set within a high-level strategy game. Your bottom line is the figure you see at each year’s Account Sheet: if it’s in the positive black, you’re all good and making profit. Negative sums and you’re in trouble.
The game nicely too doesn’t make profit generation too easily, even if you let the AI run everything. This is especially because your ports are very expensive to maintain. A fort that has the higher-class levels of trading posts, warehouses, shipping docks, garrisons and forts – everything and the kitchen sink – will cost you your arms and legs. Realistically, your ports will never each have this kind of quality constructions as you simply won’t have enough money to maintain all of them. What that means is that at any given point in time, you will have vulnerable ports to enemy action. You just have to anticipate enemy movement, watch where their fleets are heading too, and try very hard to meet them head long first with your own fleets of combat warships.
Handling the tactical naval battles without AI intervention though can be a little cumbersome, which is probably also realistic. Sid Meier’s Pirates remake of 2003 is arcade-ish in comparison with naval battles sometimes taking less than a minute to wrap up. In East India Company, naval battles can take 15 minutes to resolve. Ships maneuver slowly, take a while to get into position, and are harder to destroy.
Graphically, the game looks pretty ordinary: the high level global map is colorful and serviceable if not especially gloriously rendered in high polygon count with fancy lighting tricks or visual effects. Likewise for the port screens. The tactical naval battles are a different matter: they’re very nicely done, and with your movable camera you can get the best point of view of the action of sinking someone else’s ships.
The problem though lies in that there’re some game play oddities. Like that apart from that you need to own a certain number of ports as a mission objective, some discount benefits in trade and that you need ports for your ships to stop-over and replenish material and manpower, there seems to be little other benefit to owning large numbers of ports – especially considering how huge a money sink they can be. Also, the grand campaign itself too will last you a few dozen hours if you go slow, but after that there’s little more outside quick battles and a multiplayer component. I would have liked to see more campaigns for sure.
That said, I enjoyed East India Company even if I can’t award it an unqualified recommendation. The game’s available for SGD56.90 on shelves here. Make sure also you patch the game too – it makes the game run more briskly by eliminating a couple of extraneous game loading segments. (Pictures from Gamespot)
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