The first Governor-General of India was Warren Hastings. Under his dispensation, the expansion of British rule in India was pursued vigorously, and he British sought to master indigenous systems of knowledge. Hastings remained in India until 1784 and was succeeded by Cornwallis, who initiated the Permanent Settlement, whereby an agreement in perpetuity was reached with zamindars or landlords for the collection of revenue. For the next fifty years, the British were engaged in attempts to eliminate Indian rivals, and it is under the administration of Wellesley that British territorial expansion was achieved with ruthless efficiency. Major victories were achieved against Tipu Sultan of Mysore and the Marathas, and finally the subjugation and conquest of the Sikhs in a series of Anglo- Sikh Wars led to British occupation over the entirety of India. In some places, the British practiced indirect rule, placing a Resident at the court of the native ruler who was allowed sovereignty in domestic matters. Lord Dalhousie's notorious doctrine of lapse, whereby a native state became part of British India if there was no male heir at the death of the ruler, was one of the principal means by which native states were annexed; but often the annexation, such as that of Awadh [Oudh] in 1856, was justified on the grounds that the native prince was of evil disposition, indifferent to the welfare of his subjects. The annexation of native states, harsh revenue policies, and the plight of the Indian peasantry all contributed to the Rebellion of 1857-58, referred to previously as the Sepoy Mutiny. In 1858 the East India Company was dissolved, despite a valiant defense of its purported achievements by John Stuart Mill, and the administration of India became the responsibility of the Crown.
I can live with the relative lack of information related to fleet power and number of ships of the other companies. After all incomplete info was the norm of the era and also makes the game a bit more exciting. I think that the biggest issue is the lack of diplomatic interaction with the other companies. I wanted to see complex trade treaties focusing on different goods and alliances related to bits of the ocean...
The lead designer is a smart guy who knows his stuff but I think the design here got a little lost in features that were ancillary to the experience - the naval battle engine and the port view for example.
And on the day of release, the first patch comes out that lets you disable the 3D port view, cutting loading times by a huge amount. If interface fixes come in the next six weeks, EIC might be worth a look.
If you think Microsoft or Google are powerful companies, a little historical perspective is in order. The companies that controlled trade between Europe and India from the 17th to 19th centuries had their own warships and could break governments. The British East India Company was, for all intents and purposes, the real government for hundreds of millions of people. Only when this governance provoked a bloody revolt in India did the age of businessmen/pirate kings come to a close. It's a great story of a commercial empire that flourished under the protection of the Royal Navy, and collapsed once Parliament decided that the extortion of the locals was really a job for politicians.
East India Company Walkthrough Strategy Guide So much space wasted on this beautyIt's a complicated story, too, so you can forgive Nitro Games for just sticking to the easy stuff. East India Company is a trading game. Buy exotic goods in the East and then ship them back home for big profits. You can choose from eight European powers whose only difference is how far they are from open seas -- Portugal has a big advantage, time-wise. With enough warships you can conquer foreign cities and limit your competitors' access to those goods and ports of call. The name of the game is accumulating money to expand your fleet so that you can accumulate more money. Drive everyone out of business, or conquer India, and you win.
There used to be lots of games like this. East India Company is a seafaring Railroad Tycoon -- the price you get for your goods will depend on how glutted your local market is. It is a more unfriendly Trade Empires -- your rivals have lots of guns at their disposal. It is a more civilized Merchant Prince -- no need to explore the world or kill the Pope. So, East India Company is a relic in almost every sense of the term. It is a holy balm for those aging gamers who want a more relaxed pace than RTSes usually provide. It is rare and almost an anachronism. And it is, sadly, just a piece of something larger -- a disembodied digit when you want the whole hand.
East India Company is a very good half of a game -- but the missing half is where much of the longevity would be. The biggest problem is the game's purely economic focus. There is diplomacy and naval combat, but the diplomacy is fairly inert and the naval combat mode is slow and uninspired. So you are left with an experience that is all about shipping cargo for no reason -- easy mission goals aside -- beyond making more money. And that money gets immediately reinvested in the company. This gets a little dull after a while, and the promise of new ships in 1700 is hardly enough to get you through the Grand Campaign.
East India Company EIC Strategy Game Guide Diplomacy is important, but not important enough.Compare those three older games I mentioned. Each of them offered something that lifted it above a simple buy-low/sell-high game. Railroad Tycoon let you directly compete in your opponent's markets, fighting them for a share of the passenger traffic or running fast routes to take all their materials to your own factories. Trade Empires had an elaborate resource chain that challenged you to find the most cost-efficient way to produce manufactured goods. Merchant Prince had money as an avenue to political power, letting you compete for offices and open cities to the world, often on a randomly generated map.
This is a revival of an old game model that takes out much of what made the best of those historical business sims so compelling. Pirates on their own don't make sea commerce interesting -- unless you're the pirate, of course. The best East India Company can manage is the prospect of war, which is appropriately exhausting. When relations deteriorate, roving enemy fleets mean you can't just leave your ships on autopilot. And if you lose access to a resupply port, your entire enterprise will go belly up. Even if you win the war, you might have little money left to rebuild your fleet. But the foolishness of the artificial intelligence works in your favor, since it is willing to just keep sailing its ships into a channel you are protecting. Yeah, it needs the money. But it can't get that money if you sink everything on the ocean.
Lots of bars and numbers, but never the ones you wantThe small stuff starts to grate after a while, too. The stylized map with the fleets in motion instantly makes this one of the best-looking strategy games of the year. The deep browns and light blues are attractive, and the exaggerated size of the ports gives a visual cue about what is really important. But there is a lot of wasted space that could be used for other information. There are no on-map hints about how well you are doing, or what the relative prices of the important goods are. Why bother showing me the Russian interior, where there are no ports, when I have to open a menu to see how far silk prices have tumbled? Each foreign port only has one major good, after all.
This may be a small thing, but the decision to keep the strategic map simply for sailing means a lot of missed opportunities. You spend a lot of time in port view, building ships and upgrading your structures. There is no reason you should not be able to do these tasks without waiting 10 seconds for a load screen to show you a waterfront. The attractive faux watercolors of the loading screens are meager compensation, considering there's no real need for them at all. There is a difference between clean and stingy.
Truly efficient trading requires you to get into these port views a lot -- automated trading is easier, but wastes money filling holds with crap when what you really want is to spend that cash on a new Indiaman. There is no way to set multiple waypoints for a ship so that it can take silk one voyage and spice the next. And there is no way to automate the export of tools to ports and goods to warehouses. Automatic shipping means automatic sale.
Losing a few of these ships is heartbreaking.Information that you might want is simply unavailable. You don't know if you are attacking a large trade fleet or a small war fleet until you've already committed your ships to the attack. You're only told about a rival's number of trade ships, which can be less important than its number of cargo holds. Likewise, a rough warship count is useless to me if all my rivals are sailing archaic tubs instead of frigates. Ships are described as "fast," but there is no information on how much faster they are than larger boats. Will my schooner be able to make two more trips to Goa per year than my galleon? More importantly, how much time (i.e., money) will I lose by attaching a slower escort ship?
This is not, in the end, an issue of competency as much as one of thoroughness. East India Company is well made, if not well thought out; attractive if not user-friendly; evocative of the age it portrays, if a little shallow. While it is a fine way to kill a few hours, anyone hungry for a more satisfying trading game would be better served by picking up last month's Dawn of Discovery. East India Company shows glimmers of insight, and demonstrates that Nitro Games is a studio strategy gamers should keep an eye on. But it isn't quite there yet.
The region was the historical centre of the Maurya, Kalinga,Utkal,Sunga and Pala empires that ruled much of the Indian sub-continent at their prime. In medieval India, it was incorporated into the Mughal and then the British empire. After independence in 1947, the states joined the Indian Union and took their current from after the States Reorganization Act of 1956. Today, they continue to face problems of overpopulation, environmental degradation and pervasive corruption despite significant economic and social progress.
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