Customer Reviews

East India Company

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

Well, I was excited for a summer pirate game, I loved the Pirates! series and even dabbled with the pirate MMO that's out there, but as much as I love the genre this game just misses the mark:

Pros: Pretty ship models, multiple ship fleet battles, strategic map and tactical combat for the best of both worlds, and a long campaign through the Age of Sail (1600-1750).

Cons:

Limited map (It's really just coastal Africa, Middle-East and India, and while the game styles itself a "sandbox" experience, you essentially just go back and forth between your home port and a few trade ports, in a very narrow strip of water and no sailing off the borders)

Poor UI: Lots of drag-and-drop, annoying battle camera mishaps and the feeling that nothing is quite as ergonomically designed as it could be (dragging and dropping 20 stacks of trade units every minute or so really wears you out, and the auto-trade system crushes your economy)

Titchy "economy": One big shipment of silk/spice/etc will destroy your market for that product for decades, so you have to micromanage your sales, making the game more tedious than it needs to be.

No replay value: While you can play as any one of the major powers (England, France, Portugal, Sweden, Denmark, Spain and Holy Roman Empire) there is virtually no difference between them besides their start position. No one has their own unique units, missions or objectives, which I just find astonishing.

Port conquest: Just a random coin-toss; Load up enough marines on your ships and if you win the hidden random roll, you win. That was very disappointing for someone who was hoping for at least a Pirates!-style avatar combat to decide such things.

Bottom line: Give it a pass, even at a very cheap price East India Company will annoy you more than it will entertain.

This is a well conceived and well developed game that is a challenge and great fun to play. I had no problems loading the game or playing it on my Dell Inspiron 1520 laptop running Vista. The annoying port loading times that people comment about can be eliminated by switching from 3D mode to 2D mode with no loss in play value. The price of main trading items in your home port will be significantly affected by trade volume, but the decline in price can be countered by building upgrades to your trading posts in foreign ports. There is no need to micromanage. The automated trading system will optimize your trading profits on each voyage. The game has great replay value if you use a little imagination. You can develop different strategies to win, and by playing different countries you will see that the geographical position of your home port can have have a significant impact on your trade income. Naval battles on the tactical map are easy to handle and interesting to watch as your ships maneuver to fire their cannon. The grand campaign runs from 1600 to 1750, but with a well conceived strategy you should be able to win the game by 1675 even at the hard level. Give it a try.

Hello fellow gamers. Well I read the reviews and looked at the homepage for East India Company. I bought Port Royal 2 a year ago at the bargin basement section of Best Buy. THAT was by far the best 7 dollars I have ever spent on a game. So when i saw this game I was very interested. I also own TOtal war Empires and let me tell ya the navel battels in this game are better then the navel battles in TW-empire.The trade is ok but could have been alot better, needs to be a little more indepth. The graphics are awsome and when you consider the game uses direct x 9.0c it's even more inpressive.I have heard people bitching about the load time for ports ect in the game. I havent found any problems with the load times at all.My comp isnt a new insaine gamming machine either. I am running a e8400@3.26 ghz windows vista 64 8 gigs mushkin ram 1 asus9600 gt with 512 ram. It's like 3+ yrs old I think. So if you are looking for a kick butt fps this game isnt for you:)If you are looking for a good game that requires some thought has good graphics and an open ended campain and hours and hours of gameplay this game is for you specaily if you have a taste for anything nautical:)O and also this game is modable..whast that mean you ask???It means that players can make content for the game that outher players can download and use.So if your on the fence take the plunge and buy the game:P

This game is great, but as the title suggest, you spend about 1/3 of the time you are playing the game loading either the ports, battles, or the RTS game play (however, they came up with a patch for this so be sure and fix it). I think this game was done very well, and except for a few minor bugs that they are working out of the system, this is one of the best modern games. I must disagree with the other reviewers on this game; this game DOES have replay ability. From skirmishes to the many different campaigns there is a great deal of entertainment here. If all you are interested in is KILL, KILL, KILL with lots of action then this game is not for you. But if you are a gamer like me who likes to plan and make his moves slowly while you sit back in your chair then this is a great game. This game requires a lot of strategy and long term planing! To get the most out of you company you cannot be hot headed like the gamers who do something only later to find out they made a big mistake. Remember, you are in charge of a company and you NEED to PLAN. If you don't your company will fail, so to decide the best way to profit you need to take a look at the price charts by clicking on your flag. If you like to plan, calculate your risks before doing them, and are willing to watch your company slowly grow over decades, then get this game, you will LOVE it!

Just to begin, I installed this game on a high end PC with Windows Vista and downloaded the patch that many talked about. I never played it without it, so I can't make that comparison. Systematically, my only gripe with the game is the occasional game crash, which happened about once a night. My advice would be to save before planned attacks and after an attack; before because port attacks are a pure roll of the dice slightly based on each side's forces, and afterward because you don't want to have to redo the sometimes long naval battles.

In regard to the gameplay, I really enjoyed most of the aspects of the game to include the naval battles and the campaign goals that helped to guide what you needed to do trading-wise. My first campaign was in normal mode, and I decided to focus on accomplishing mission goals and hold out until the late game to unlock the ship-of-the-line. Overall, victory was accomplished quite easily in which I usually accomplished my main mission goals some 10 years ahead of schedule. As it was normal mode, I didn't expect too much resistance, so the easy victory was somewhat expected since I just wanted to learn the game. My second run through I went through in hard mode and decided to be much more aggressive and try to win the game as quickly as possible. Naturally, you'd think that hard mode would make the enemy more difficult and aggressive toward you, but I observed that only on a minimal level. The best I could tell, the main thing that has become more difficult is that the prices for main trade goods are pathetic. You end up losing money a lot more in the trade process, which is quite aggravating, since the whole point of trading is to make a profit. It isn't like I'm sending all my ships for a single resource. I'm dispersing them as evenly as possible to reduce killing profit based on the supply and demand concept.

In regards to difficulty based on the opposing nations, I suppose that I have been attacked a couple more times in hard mode than in normal, but it's really quite pathetic. The instruction guide says about coupling warships with tradeships, which is good advice, but I would have expected to need that much more than I currently do. I don't know, maybe I've attacked the enemy ships so much that the other countries don't have the resources to actually attack me. In hard mode, the enemy nations do capture significantly more ports than in normal mode, so that does create a little more difficulty in one sense, but in another way it's easier. If you attack a port that is native-controlled, it is significantly more difficult to be successful, but if you attack a European-controlled country, then it's cake. Seems a bit opposite to what you'd expect. That's just me though. I really wish there was more strategy to the concept of capturing ports, but really, all you can do is get a captain with the skills of holding 20% more cargo (and troops in turn) and make sure that his fleet contains warships with a high carrying capacity. Then you go in and pray you win. That's why earlier I said about saving before an attack, because it can really go either way.

All that said, the game is enjoyable and certainly worth the money it's posted for. I wouldn't spend more than $15 on the game, but for the $8 I did spend, it was certainly worth it. I got many hours of enjoyment out of it, and may pull it out of the closet to play again someday, but probably not any time soon.

An interesting game but easily mastered game. Yes, the graphics are nice, and ship models are very good. The game play is rather easy. But the economics model could be better, harder. The game can be won as early as 1638 if a player knows to go after his enemies quickly. Who needs to be diplomatic; just start attacking everybody when you can with a fleet of four cutters. Each time you attack, capture one ship and use it in one of your trading fleets. You start with a cutter; then you should build a sloop (they are fast and rather cheap). Schooners are more expensive, slower, and take more time to build. You need to conserve your money so you have enough to buy and sell goods. I think it best to build a schooner as your fourth ship. When you start attacking other players' ships, make sure your ships are in fleets of 4 or 5 ships, and have at least two warships (cutters in the first 20 years of the game are fine). If your trading fleet is attacked by three or four cutters, go for the enemy sails and then flee. Don't lose your trading ships and cargo. Use your cutters to defend while your trade ships get out of harms way.
Many of the other pros and cons to the game have already been mentioned so I will not list them. But no one has mention how easy the game can be won or how to start playing or that diplomacy isn't even needed in order to win.

the title says it all. I played this game with my friend and loved it. i play it on windows vista (without the patch) and it takes about 3 sec. to load at ports. A little more diversity in the replay would be nice but all in all this is a good game.

P.S. Pirates bay, the add on where you get to play as a pirate, is fun but very hard.

I truly enjoyed this game. The historical content regarding the passages to India and how the various countries went about building the trader were most enjoyable.

game play is good, somewhat repeditve. Tactical action between naval units is difficult to understand and manage. If you just auto resolve you can't capture ships or cargo. Variables in trade good values is an added feature.

I loaded my game on Vista Home Premium and had no problems running. You CAN load a ship full with just one drag of the mouse if you know which buttons to hold (Game even tells you) I have not had that problem with the goods falling in value too quickly but I have not played at the hard level yet. Map is limited but lists the ports you would expect in this type of game(Port Royale, etc.) The game centers around ports in INDIA. I wish they had an autoresolve for sea fights. I'm not interested in those on a tactial level.
There are some bugs that I have reported to support but nothing major. I too wish we could fight for the ports (maybe next year).