25) E is for... East India Company
The challenge: To play through each of the games on my Steam library.
The rules: I have to play at least 1 hour of each game, in alphabetical order.
East India Company is an innovative and excitin......no, actually it's another Paradox map game. But read on, because I actually almost liked this one.
Set during olde worlde times, this is another game about how awesome conquest and exploitation is (ugh). This is a problem with an awful lot of these types of game, so I thought I'd get this big negative out of the way first. It just feels gross to be gleefully conquering ports like this game encourages you to - in fact to beat the game you *have* to do so as it's part of the main campaign's objectives.
Anyway, East India Company is a naval-based 4X game, and is an awful lot like Commander: Conquest of the Americas. Which makes sense as it's by the same people and is almost certainly using the same engine. There are some differences, however, and these differences make an absolutely huge difference in the playability of the game.
The tutorials on this game for some reason are numbered 2 & 3 - I couldn't find tutorial 1 anywhere, but they didn't seem to leave anything out. Unlike most of these Paradox games, I felt I had enough knowledge after the tutorial that I could actually get on and play the game vaguely competently.
There are two sides to this game - the trading / map part and the combat. The map part is fine - you send your ships around India and Africa fighting, trading or both. This game has an excellent feature that Commander didn't, in its 'Auto-trade' button. Instead of trying to work out what to buy and sell, this wonderful button let me just select a ship, select a route, and the captain of the ship decides what to buy and sell. It was so much more fun and I actually started making money!
The second part of the game is the naval combat, which again is the same as Commander. It's in real-time, and is excruciatingly slow, because sailing ships of that era were. Doesn't make for an exciting game though sadly. As an aside, check out Overboard! on the PS1 for exciting, although not at all historically accurate, ship combat.
That's all there is to it really. I was so close to giving this a GGWP but you're so spoilt for choice on these map games, I can't see any compelling reason you'd choose this one. BG.
*You'll notice my Steam Time Played is only 51 minutes. That's because the game crashed at that point, and then just would not start again. I even tried uninstalling and re-installing. Presumably I could fix this somehow but I'm gonna give myself a pass this time :P *
The rules: I have to play at least 1 hour of each game, in alphabetical order.
East India Company is an innovative and excitin......no, actually it's another Paradox map game. But read on, because I actually almost liked this one.
Set during olde worlde times, this is another game about how awesome conquest and exploitation is (ugh). This is a problem with an awful lot of these types of game, so I thought I'd get this big negative out of the way first. It just feels gross to be gleefully conquering ports like this game encourages you to - in fact to beat the game you *have* to do so as it's part of the main campaign's objectives.
Obligatory map screen shot
Anyway, East India Company is a naval-based 4X game, and is an awful lot like Commander: Conquest of the Americas. Which makes sense as it's by the same people and is almost certainly using the same engine. There are some differences, however, and these differences make an absolutely huge difference in the playability of the game.
The ships are really pretty to be fair
The tutorials on this game for some reason are numbered 2 & 3 - I couldn't find tutorial 1 anywhere, but they didn't seem to leave anything out. Unlike most of these Paradox games, I felt I had enough knowledge after the tutorial that I could actually get on and play the game vaguely competently.
There are two sides to this game - the trading / map part and the combat. The map part is fine - you send your ships around India and Africa fighting, trading or both. This game has an excellent feature that Commander didn't, in its 'Auto-trade' button. Instead of trying to work out what to buy and sell, this wonderful button let me just select a ship, select a route, and the captain of the ship decides what to buy and sell. It was so much more fun and I actually started making money!
It's about to go down....in ten minutes or so
The second part of the game is the naval combat, which again is the same as Commander. It's in real-time, and is excruciatingly slow, because sailing ships of that era were. Doesn't make for an exciting game though sadly. As an aside, check out Overboard! on the PS1 for exciting, although not at all historically accurate, ship combat.
That's all there is to it really. I was so close to giving this a GGWP but you're so spoilt for choice on these map games, I can't see any compelling reason you'd choose this one. BG.
*You'll notice my Steam Time Played is only 51 minutes. That's because the game crashed at that point, and then just would not start again. I even tried uninstalling and re-installing. Presumably I could fix this somehow but I'm gonna give myself a pass this time :P *
Comments
Post a Comment