Well after a fair few hours, i'm still of the same opinion, below may also be the start of a review on the main site.
The introduction and setup for the game are pretty straight forward, there are only a few choices to make (campaign, difficulty, sea battle realism & nation) from there you also get the choice to have tips and whether you want to do the tutorial missions. The tutorial missions are basically the usual, getting you to know what button does what type of thing.
From there you enter the world map. The game map covers Europe, around the cape of good hope, horn of Somalia, India, Mauritius and Dutch East Indies. Each city has a MTI [wiki]Main_Trade_Items[/wiki]
and a number of generic trade goods for you to fill the spaces up with as you travel around trading to your hearts content.
Graphics wise, think the last Sid Meiers Pirates!, it looks similar (on the 3D map) to a Gamebryo engine. That's generally a good thing, everything is easy to understand and recognize which is all you want. In the sea battles, it's alot like Empire (not like AOP at all) it's all tactical, you don't really
control your ship from a "on the deck" perspective, it's a birds eye view.
With the gameplay the point of the game is simply to make money, that's it, no way to really spend it or like in Patrician/The Guild use that power and influence to make you rise up in the society. Also in Port Royale you could build your own manufacturng plants. What's actually disappointing is that there really are only a few good models for economic games and Nitro have not done their reseach on them to find out what worked well and how, Ascaron despite all of their other faults could make a good economic game standing on their head.
Also as mentioned in the "
Changes to Make" thread the sea battles which initially were ok as it was new and shiny are quickly getting bothersome, you need to enter the battle each time if you want to run away as auto resolve means that you want your fleet to defend itself which in alot of cases is just plain crazy (ie me=merchant, pirate=many guns). Apart from that even if you do wish to fight it out, it's a long and tedious exercise with even a simple 1v1 ship battle taking 5-10 minutes.
Apart from that the trade is simplistic, I really need to emphisize that, both Patrician & Port Royale were leagues ahead when it comes to both ease of trade and variations of traderoutes. With EIC there is no great depth other than auto route here, auto route there, watch the values in the home port and if they get too low autoroute somewhere else. Also some of the choices we took for granted such as multiple city/item trade routes and delivering to the warehouse, warehouse auto sale on price increase, etc. are not included. Strange as East India sells itself as an econimic game first and everything else second.
Capturing all trade items really does nothing, it gives you a better chane of negotiating a better deal with other countries for sale of the items as you control 100% of supply although the to negotiate the items need to be in your home port. However, the autoroute does not allow you to take items from a warehouse and deliver to your home port warehouse so if you plan on doing this it has to be done manually every time. (Autoroute only buys items from a town then sells them at the home port, and you cannot choose what items or amounts, just a port..)
Mods are another thing thats a bit concerning, the mission scripts seem also quite simplisting and generic. I was thinking about making a quest for the slave mod with you having to buy slaves for the King, but then there would be a pirate waiting to stop you or something but I cannot for the life of me work out how to pick a port, a ship, make a quest country specific etc.. I don't doubt it's possible but as is it with the tools we have at the moment? I should also point out Kim has mentioned their next company blog will talk more about modding and whats possible, so I look forward to that one.
I'm trying not to be to negative and I realise that I have not made many positive comments, the problem is that while the problems on the economic side persist, the good work on the diplomacy and other elements cannot shine. East India is a trading game and if that part is broken no amount of window dressing will help it. It's saving grace is that the developers, Nitro, are an active lot with Kim visiting regularly to get feedback and I am positive that at least some of the issues I've brought up will be address and then hopefully we can all have a group hug and play EIC as I really want this game to work
Mobucks: If you planning on getting EIC for ship combat, probably best not to at this time. It's really not a combat type of game, it's in there but it's not done to the same level as an AOP or such, it's more of a tactical thing at best.
)
