East Indian Company : Collection

[Gaius Marius]

Impulse is having a special Paradox games sales this week, and one game caught my attention: East Indian Company, the entire collection, for 7.50$

I was hoping someone here might be will to share their game experience so I'd know if its worth the price paid.


Thanks,
Gaius Marius

[warty goblin]

I played it for something like...fifteen minutes, since I wanted to shoot some ships with some other ships. I found the controls weird, and didn't feel like coming to grips with them. Most of the game is I think focused on economic stuff, which I didn't try because if I'm going to spend hours staring at spread sheets, I expect to be paid.

Since there's a lot of good stuff on sale, here's some more recommendations I actually have played for noticeable periods of time. I would definitely recommend King Arthur:The Roleplaying Wargame/the King Arthur Collection. I only own the base game, but it's quite fun. It's essentially a Total War clone, but with an actual focused story-driven campaign that ties into the battles and hero advancement very nicely. And while the graphics may not be quite as eye-popping as the more recent Total Wars, they have absolutely superb atmosphere; the game always looks like a game about big fantasy armies stabbing each other should look.

I'd also highly recommend Elven Legacy if turn based tactics are something you like. It's brutally hard - even on easy several maps can take multiple tries, but the basic unit progression and army management is solid and enjoyable, and I at least found the story to be one actually worth telling. I don't say that lightly, it's an award I'd extend to at maximum five games I've ever played. I own, but have not yet gotten to, the expansions

[Thorcrest]

The game itself is very simplistic, buy away and then sell at home, check the prices of the goods before leaving and make money... very seldomly sell anything away from your home.

The combat is fairly slow and the controls for it are rather poor, but it looks fairly nice.

The game itslef is very easy until everyone starts hating you since you are far better than the competition and then the game gets to be a bit of fun, but since the combat is slow and difficult auto-calculate usually gets used, but the computer always seems to favour against you arbitrarily to a ridiculous extent, and since you can only take ports using auto-calculate it'll usually cost far more than common sense would dictate.

All in all the game is fun if you enjoy trade simulators, which I do, but it doesn't really do a great job of being a trade simulator, since, like I said, you generally just go out and home, rather than having routes to numerous ports to buy and sell different commodities all in one run... it usually amounts to selling what ever is available back home in whatever port you set sell to and then getting as many Main Trade Items as you can and then Home to sell them. The later parts of the game gets a bit for better trade but the neutral ports usually have little to nothing in them since everyone, and I mean everyone, is buying from them since no one can buy from other people's ports.

Also, playing as Portugal is a huge advantage as you get to start slightly closer to both Africa and India, so you can get further before your ships need to re-supply and it takes just a little less time to get to where you want.

All in all, maybe a 5 out of 10. Fun if you just like a simple, nice looking trade game, but not very detailed or difficult, excpet for combat, which I never quite got the hang of right.

[Gaius Marius]

Thanks!

So I won't it. Better go with the family.