Publisher: Paradox Interactive
Developer: Nitro Games
System requirements: Windows XP/Vista/Windows7; 2.0 GHz processor; 2GB RAM; 4GB hard disk space; Shader model 3.0 video card; DirectX9 compatible sound card
Genre: Strategy
ESRB rating: Teen
Release date: Available now

Having missed out on East India Company and its expansions, I did not know what to expect from Nitro Games when Commander: Conquest of the Americas came across my virtual desk. Reading up on the literature before playing showed me a game with both strategic and tactical elements. I imagined I was going to be playing a “sailing ships fighting and colony management” kind of game. While it has both elements, Commander is really a game that is very much in the tradition of its predecessors by Nitro: this is a game that is first and foremost about money. In Commander, you establish colonies, set up trade routes, defend those same colonies and trade routes, and try to expand your empire in a rational way that supports your home country’s need for mercantilist economic growth. Patient and careful empire management, not mindless fighting and conquest, is the key to long-term victory.

Set in the New World, Conquest has players found and manage their colonies. The catch is that everything, from tobacco to colonists, is micromanaged by the player. To get a colony up and running requires not only an initial expedition, but a continuous stream of colonists transported by your merchant ships from home. In turn, your merchant ships will also ship out the colony’s exports to your home port. This cycle only gets more complicated as troops from home are shipped to defend your colonies, your colonies begin to demand manufactured goods from home, and your trade demand outstrips your allotment of ships, requiring expensive investments in more merchant ships and warships capable of defending them. Exploration also plays a vital role early in the game, as players will want to not only grab lucrative colonies as soon possible, but also grab colonies with ideal geographic locations. This ensures that your colonial empire is organized in such a way as to make trade easy. Rather than having your merchant ships wander all over the Atlantic coastline, you can organize your colonies to act as trading hubs to facilitate the movement of both goods and people.

In that sense, colonies are not themselves meant to be very profitable in Commander, although well developed colonies earn decent tax revenue. Instead, it is the movement of resources, people, and manufactured items that will make you wealthy. To that end, it has a nicely automated trade system that lets the player build automated trade routes to cut down on micromanagement. Players still get mileage from optimizing the movement of goods and people across their colonial empire, but Nitro Games has wisely included this feature so that you can focus on more immediate concerns. Because trade is all important, naval battles are also a priority, and the game comes with a decent tactical system for fighting on the ocean. But don’t let that fool you; this is a game that is primarily concerned with making money. It just so happens that using naval forces will allow you to maximize that trade while minimizing the trade of your enemies. Raiding enemy shipping is merely capitalism by other means in here. And since colonies have to fit into your trade structure in order to really be profitable, there is no reason to rush early and conquer colonies from your enemies. If you can’t set up profitable trade with a colony right away, then conquering a colony will hurt your bottom line. I made this mistake in my first game, bankrupting my empire by conquering England’s colonies within the first few years of the game and having them drain my coffers dry when I had too few ships to conduct trade in my new acquisitions.

The game also has an interesting mechanic wherein the players are forced to consider other objectives than just their own. There are four AI advisors that give you missions to complete. These missions come with rewards in the form of money and other baubles, but more importantly, these missions affect your standing with them. Failing missions and ignoring their advice makes individual advisors unhappy. If enough advisors are angry with you, you lose the game no matter what your current position is. Further complicating this is, advisors sometimes have mutually incompatible goals. There is simply not enough time and money to do it all. On the whole, the player that can keep most advisors happy most of the time will prosper. And players who don’t want to be bossed around by a bunch of AI busybodies can always play in the sandbox mode that turns them off.

I generally had a good time playing through the game, but it has some odd problems that really made my life difficult at times. Perhaps the weirdest problem is related to attacking enemy colonies. Since there is no ground combat in the tactical game (ship vs. ship only), all attacks against colonies with no active ships are auto-resolved. This would be fine, except that the game gives bizarre results when attacking colonies. I’ve had large fleets with huge numbers of troops vaporize after attacking moderately defended targets. While ports certainly do have shore based defenses, it is odd that a fleet of 20 ships would be completely wiped out before someone decided to turn around and leave. I mean, it’s not like cannons on the shore can follow the ships back out to sea, is it? This issue is not a big deal early in the game, but in the late game it becomes a real chore to attack enemy colonies even if you clear out the defending naval forces and shore defenses first in a tactical battle. I also found that the game’s documentation and tutorials were insufficient. This is a fairly complicated game, but reading the manual and doing the tutorials did not reveal the full extent of the game’s mechanics. A final annoyance was the diplomatic AI. It suffers a bit from irrationality, refusing peace deals that are really to its benefit and making strange trade offers that make no sense.

Aside from these issues, I felt the game was pretty good. Trading and management games may not be my favorite genre, but that’s no reason to knock Nitro Games. Commander: Conquest of the Americas will keep all you merchant traders occupied and gleefully building reserves of cash, while forcing you to hold on to what you’ve gained via military force.

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