A unique blend of trading and age of sail combat.
Being developed by Nitro Games and to be published by Paradox Interactive, East India Company is one of those games that are rarely made, let alone made well. The setting is the age of sail where the wind was the mighty mover of ships and where cannonballs were the pinnacle of technology. Your task is to lead one of eight companies, each affiliated with a different country, to riches all the while sweet talking or blasting your rivals into submission. We sat down with a preview version of the game to see just how things have been progressing.
Each company starts off with a home port which will serve as your initial base of operations. Here you can issue repairs to your ships, move cargo around, purchase new ships, conduct negotiations and diplomacy with your rivals and build or upgrade structures amongst many other things. The game will allow you to siege and take over ports and subsequently manage those ports so eventually your list of places to look after will increase. From port you will also be assigned missions or tasks to complete. Some of these are required and have time constraints while others will be optional. These will give the player a direction and course of action instead of just offering a sandbox game.
As you build ships you are able to assign them to fleets. You can control up to 20 fleets at a time, each with up to 5 ships. Once you tell a fleet to leave port you can assign it to a trade route, tell it to patrol a specific area looking for bad guys, or use it to attack specific targets. What stood out here were the tools the game provided to either give you direct and full control or let it automate for you. For example, you can select a fleet made up of trade ships, assign it a trade route, and it will automatically buy the goods you produce, sell them at the remote location, buy the goods they produce, and sell them back home, all the while stopping automatically to resupply.
You can further assign AI reactions to your fleets, such as if they should be aggressive in attacking others or told to flee at the first sign of danger. Your fleets are lead by commanders that you can hire at your home port. From battles they will gain experience which will raise their level and allow you to choose new skills for them. Skills come in the form of passive or active (manually triggered) and can be used to generalize your commanders to make them overall more efficient or lead them down a more specialized route. As your commanders gain levels they will also expect a higher pay and over time will retire so you cannot use them indefinitely.
While trading resources to make your company wealthy is of paramount importance on the road to success, the highlight of the game will likely be the naval battles. Here players can chose whether to have the game auto resolve battles for you or let you conduct the fight yourself. The games combat engine looks to be very appropriate and models ships and surroundings with noticeable detail. These engagements can be played in one of two ways: an RTS mode or direct control. RTS mode is the default and basically allows you to left click on ships to select them and right click to attack or issue move orders. Another small but noticeable feature we spotted was that ships can be instructed to use specific ammunition types or make intelligent (we hope) choices themselves.
One option we really found promising is the ability to instruct your ships to form a line. This places your strongest ship at the lead and allows you to make a powerful battle line that can more easily focus fire on a specific target. Should you desire a more hands on approach the game lets you select a ship and go into direct control mode. This allows you to control the ship using the WSAD keys along with manual firing and control of the ships sails. We are uncertain if direct control will provide any notable advantages but since you can switch modes at will and an indefinite amount of times it will certainly be an easy thing to experiment with.
Another detail that we really appreciate is the ability to control the flow of time on the world map ranging anywhere from paused, half speed, regular, or up to 4x speed. This allows you to have all the time you need to manage your empire and vast naval capabilities. During battles you can also pause the engagements with the space bar giving you the time necessary to micro manage the situation. Such features, combined with some of the others we have previously mentioned, show a clear intent by the developers to give players choice in having the game operate at the players desired pace and sophistication.
Overall East India Company leaves us with a very favorable impression. Its interesting combination of trading and naval warfare should broaden its appeal and give it a unique flavor. The product is due out soon and will hopefully rekindle mass interest in a genre that has been sorely lacking.
Sylvester "Annex" Rozylo
Executive Editor
