East India Company Review [PC]

14 Sep 2009 at 10:38:05 by John Robertson
Systems used to review this title: (PC)

Set during the European trade wars that took place from 1600 to 1750, East India Company puts you in the shoes of one of eight companies looking to dominate the trade routes leading from India, Africa and the Middle East back to Europe. 

As one of the companies (located in eight different European countries) the general idea is to make as much money as possible, catapulting your business to the top of food chain while everyone else is left to fight and scavenge over the remains.  There are two obvious ways to go about achieving this, either by dominating the most lucrative trades routes or by taking out your rivals with a little help from the tried and trusted partnership of the cannon and cannonball.  While the latter option has a satisfying sense of destruction about it it's not really what the game is about, and you're much better off choosing the slightly more financially stable option of shipping valuable goods back and forth between ports. 

Throughout the game the bulk of your time is spent constructing fleets of ships that you then send off to faraway, exotic locations to bring back products that are in high demand back home.  It's important that you choose wisely which goods you're going to ship from where to where, as well as in what quantity, as it is possible to over-saturate a given market leading to lower prices and decreased profits for your company.  While this is not an issue early in the game, it soon becomes a major headache as your company grows to the point where you have to control the movements of vast numbers of ships, all travelling back and forth to different locations across the map. This forces you to micromanage their routes (and the goods they trade ateach port) to prevent the market saturation problem.

Supposedly, help is on hand in the form of the auto-route option allowing you to simply select a ship and tell it to trade a given port.  While it sounds perfect in theory, the application is far from it. The hitch is that automated ships will only purchase a port's main product, which, over time, leads to the exact same problem of over-saturating the market that you were trying to avoid in the first place. It results in a vicious circle oftrying to manage the entire fleet on your own, realising you can't, automating a number of shipping routes, over-saturating a market, changing trade routes and starting the process over again as you wait for prices to level out.

Aside from immense patience and a degree of business savvy, you'll need to bring your diplomacy skills to the table when entering negotiations with rival companies. These allow you to make peace (or war) with your peers via the usual system of offering gifts and resources in return for other resources or agreement sover shipping rights, etc.  Poor relations can lead to hostilities, which should usually be avoided due to the incredibly high cost of war, which in turn, limits the number of ships you can for trading, as many will be required on the front lines.  It's important that you intelligently manage your finances between ship building, weapons development and buying up stock as a lack of any single one can lead to business ruin.

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