Publisher: Paradox Interactive
Developer: Nitro Games
System requirements: Windows XP/Vista, 1.6 GHz Intel Pentium CPU or equivalent, 1 GB RAM (2 gb for Vista), 128 MB DirectX 9.0c-compatible video card with Pixel Shader 2.0, DirectX 9.0c-compatible sound card, 6 GB hard-drive space, 4X DVD-ROM drive, Internet connection for multiplayer
Genre: Historical RTS
Release date: July 28, 2009

When shooter fans like me play strategy games, we soon discover that we have to use parts of our brains that have gone without exercise for a long time. There are resources to gather, units to build, budgets to consider; a tough assignment for those of us who are used to pointing and shooting to get our video-game kicks. Such is the case with Nitro Games and Paradox’s historical RTS East India Company, a handsome and involving game that suffers from just enough annoying quirks to threaten its considerable fun factor.

EIC places you in command of one of the most successful business ventures the world has ever known. Beginning in the 17th century, seven European nations and the Holy Roman Empire developed a stranglehold on the known world’s trade routes. These enterprises, known as East India Companies, not only were responsible for the health and success of their host nations, but they also had absolute dominion over the high seas from Europe to Asia. Your job, as Governor General of one of these companies, is to make the decisions that lead to either the growth or the demise of your trade empire.

EIC‘s single-player mode includes four campaigns, lasting from 50 to 150 years in game time. Three of them give you missions to complete and goals to meet before a certain year, while the fourth is more or less a sandbox mode. The Grand Campaign (the longest of the four) starts you off with a step-by-step tutorial in which you learn the basic mechanics of the game; oddly, the most lengthy of the modes is the one that new players should choose when playing for the first time. After a few game years, you’re on your own to nurture or sink your company. Your most important goal is to transport and trade various items from your home port to customers in India and Africa, but you’ll also be conquering and maintaining ports, leveling up fleet commanders, and fighting pirates and the navies of the other companies in epic sea battles. But if all you want to do is fire cannonball fusillades at enemy vessels, Battle and Quick Battle modes put you in charge of up to five ships as you try to send enemy fleets to Davy Jones’ locker. EIC’s multiplayer component, in which up to 10 players can test their naval battle tactics in four familiar game modes, couldn’t be evaluated because Nitro’s MP servers were all empty; not surprising considering the game hadn’t been released at the time I played it.

EIC’s basic features make it as easy as possible for you to get your company off the ground. The interface gives you everything you need to know and is tucked nicely to the sides of the screen (perhaps too nicely; when displayed at high screen resolutions, some of the icons are small enough to make you squint). The game comes with three detailed tutorials (other than the one attached to the Grand Campaign), but they have some annoying bugs (ships don’t execute move commands in the strategy tutorial, and there are typos everywhere, which could be the result of localization errors). EIC‘s biggest positive is the graphics presentation, which is top-notch, especially in the sea battles. Conflicts between two fleets of five ships each on calm daytime seas consistently ran at 60 fps, even at 1920 x 1200 with almost all of the graphics options maxed out. Night battles look especially good, with a full moon providing an eerie backlight to the conflict. Sound effects provide lots of atmosphere, with whipping winds, crashing seas and the shouts of angry sailors pouring out in nice positional audio. As for the AI, the ship captains are usually good tacticians, but they’re also lousy gunners; some of them ignore their closest targets and instead select the ones farthest from them. You can take control of an individual ship during battles, but aside from an intriguing new perspective of the war, the direct command option is more trouble than it’s worth.

A list of unfortunate problems threatens to make EIC more work than play. Most of your time is spent waiting for things to happen. Loading screens always appear when you switch from the port view to the strategic view. They don’t stay up for long, which ironically can be a bad thing, since there’s important information on the loading screens that never stays up long enough to be completely read. Nitro has thankfully included a time-dilation feature that increases the passage of game time up to a factor of four, which compresses an entire year into two minutes. But leaving this feature engaged makes it easy to miss mission deadlines while you’re dealing with other matters. During my second time through the Grand Campaign, I stopped getting side missions around 1630; this made it almost impossible to gain enough cash to fund the fleets needed for my empire to thrive. The waiting problem is most egregious in the battle mode. You can’t select more than one enemy ship to attack, and your fleet disregards your targeting orders and fires on whichever ship they like, so your job comes down to making sure that rogue ship captains don’t sail off into the horizon instead of turning to the battle.

Patience is something that shooter players don’t have in their repertoires, but RTS fans need to have it to succeed, especially in East India Company, in which most of your time is spent clicking the mouse and watching the attractive graphics do their thing. But there is a shipload of annoyances that threaten to ruin all of the good work that Nitro has done with this RTS. But I’m hooked anyway, despite the occasional brain cramp (hint: save early and often!). Fans of the genre will have loads of fun with East India Company, and it’s just accessible enough so that newbies can get in on the action with a minimum of heartache.

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