East India Company now in open beta! (Sid Meier's "Pirates!" clone, sorta) - Games

I apologize in advance for any misspelling, typos, or anything of that kind. I had three of my fingers burned a few hours ago so I can only type with one hand. I also am sorry for not having much content as well, but I'm gonna use the same excuse. [b]If you liked "Pirates!" you will love this game. The download is on fileplanet and has a 15 minute queue, so download it while you view this thread.[/b] [url]http://www.fileplanet.com/promotions/east-india-company/[/url] East India company is a game set for release next tuesday on: [quote=Official website]Amazon Wal*Mart US Best Buy US Gamestop Game Steam Direct2Drive Impulse GamersGate Gamestreamer [/quote] And due to my hand I'll let the official website do a little more talking for me. :P [quote=Official website] In East India Company, players will enjoy building the World's most powerful trading empire and engaging in fierce battles in both single player and multiplayer modes, all within a breathtaking cinematic environment. Players will fight, manage and rule their trading empires from Europe to the Far East with eight nationalities to choose from: British, Dutch, French, Danish, Portuguese, Swedish, Spanish or the Holy Roman Empire. Starting modestly, you will build your fleet, establish connections to far away countries, and keep rival nations at bay. Choose from a wide array of ship classes, including a variety of transport and military vessels. Create diverse fleets and assign each of them specific trading routes. Control and upgrade well situated ports as you form your strategy for domination. Conflicts and wars are inevitable. When hostile fleets engage each other, the spectacular naval battles are fought on a real-time tactical level. Devastating broadsides are fired with a deafening roar and cannon balls tear through enemy ships and their crew. For greater tactical depth, you can, at any point, take direct command of any of your ships and feel the battle close up![/quote] [quote=wiki]The game features real-time naval combat when enemy ships engage the player's fleets, and real-time land combat when the enemy tries to invade one of the player's colonies. East India Company combines trading, naval warfare, and management. Players can create a fleet to conquer the enemy with powerful warships and privateers.[/quote] You can control up to 5 ships on each side in combat, which may not seem like that many, but they tried to focus more on more hands on control over your ships, rather than standing back and just giving a few orders. There are two distinct modes in the tactical battles. The default mode is Real-Time Strategy i.e. RTS-mode. This mode is instantly familiar to anyone who had played RTS-type of games during the last ten years. You left-click to select and right-click to initiate an action. You can also drag a box to select multiple ships at once or hold CTRL while giving a move order to plot the course you want them to take. Battle in this mode is easy enough to grasp and execute. How good you are in making most out of the current tactical situation is of course another thing. What is unique in EIC, is that at any point you can take Direct Command of any of your ships. In this DC-mode you command a single vessel manually: Turn it, change sail modes, select ammunition types, select width for the cannon fire arcs, give orders to fire cannons and hopefully have paid attention that enemy is on your arc of fire. Basic camera angle for DC-mode is outside the ship but you can also jump to a deck view. Deck view has several preset camera locations: poop deck, sides, fore and aft. You can also turn the camera even while in this view mode. To help you pay attention to your surroundings, you can activate the Battle Cam. It’s picture-in-picture view that can be set to show a view from aft, fore or either side of your ship. While in DC-mode with your fleet’s flagship, you also have access to any active skills your fleet commander might have. Commanders can also have passive skills that are in effect all the time. In the campaign you choose the skills for your commanders yourself as they level up. Coming up with nasty and powerful combinations and then using them effectively in battle to crush your enemy is great fun. [quote=official website]Single-player features: * Spectacular cinematic and epic naval battles * Two Command Modes: Give orders to all your ships in RTS mode or take the helm of a single ship in Direct Command-mode * Unique combination of war and trading * State of the art diplomacy AI * Eight playable nations: England, France, Holland, Portugal, Denmark, Sweden, Spain and the Holy Roman Empire * Over 10 realistic ship types; from small sloops and cutters to the East Indiaman and warships * Realistic yet fast-paced naval combat * Hire fleet commanders who will gain new skills and increase the abilities of your fleets * Take over ports and protect your shipping routes to create the largest trading empire Multi-player(Internet or LAN) features: * Supports up to 10 simultaneous players * Player statistics tracked on the EIC game server * Several game modes for with single and team approach * Raise your ranking by thwarting your opponents[/quote] AWW YEAH, epic ship combat with 5 players on each side. All this brought to you by Paradox interactive, the publishers behind Europa Universalis III, So you know they didn't push the developers to make it simpler. Anyway, enough with combat, onto the trading aspect of the game! [quote=Official website] First, let me introduce myself. My name is Kim Soares and I am the lead designer of East India Company. In these designer's blogs I'll try to give you some insight into EIC that you can't read from anywhere else. I think that best first subject would be the whole high concept of the game. We can go into more detail from there in later blogs. One major reason why we ended up doing EIC and not, say sport game or shooter was the fact that history of east India companies just cried out to become depicted in a game. Commerce and warfare are recurring themes in games, but rarely, if ever, these two themes are as closely combined as in EIC. Many strategy games have modeled commerce in some way: Settlers, Hearts of Iron, Warcarft, Age of Empires... Tycoon games are commercially oriented, but you rarely actually concentrate on trading in them. Rather you run business of some sort, be it a zoo or railroad company. In East India Company however, trading is the goal of the whole game: In campaigns your goal is to lead your company to dominate all trade from East Indies. Everything you do is just means to this end. Of these means, warfare is the most dramatic. Waging war is very expensive, which creates an endless circle: to beat other nations economically, you need to wage wars, and that requires lot of funds that you get from commercial success. decoration Protect your traders To be able to trade from East Indies, you naturally need ships. There are eleven ship types altogether: five trading ships and six warships. Although trading ships are armed to some extent, they are no match to warhips of other companies or to pirates. So, the first step on the road to becoming a military might is to buy some warships to protect your traders. All your ships are organized into fleets. You can have a maximum of twenty fleets and each fleet can have a maximum of five ships. In order to protect your trading ships you can create mixed fleets that have both ship types in them. Other possibility is to create fleets of wa rships that you then assign to escort trading fleets. If a fleet with escort is attacked, attacked party can choose to fight the attacker with the escorting fleet instead. decoration Ports are key element Ruling ports is extremely important. This is because of two things. First, the Main Trade Items or MTI's, i.e. the items most valuable, can only be found in certain ports. Spices for example are only produced in Surat, Bombay and Goa. Ports ruled by companies are off limits to other companies and they are not able to acquire any trade items from those ports. Ports that do not have MTI's have secondary trade items, but their real value is in their ability to supply fleets. All fleets have limited range and they have to regularly visit ports to automatically replenish this range. This represents the fact that ships had only limited supplies of food and fresh water. If you are unable to visit ports to supply your fleets, you can find yourself effectively cut off from the East Indies. These two facts make ruling the ports so important. Ports can be taken over by simply attacking them with fleet of ships. It helps a lot if the fleet is transporting marine detachments. When you have a port under your rule, you can start upgrading buildings inside. It is worthwhile to upgrade fort and barracks, as you can expect your rivals to pay you a visit sooner or later. All this military power costs money. To afford it you have to trade successfully. And to trade successfully you need military power. Welcome to the world of East India Company![/quote] Well, the beta client finished downloading. If you want to read more while you want for your download to finish check out: [url]http://www.eic-game.com/[/url] [editline]07:40PM[/editline] I forgot! Screenshots: [url]http://www.gamershell.com/pc/east_india_company/movies.html[/url] videos: [url]http://www.gamershell.com/pc/east_india_company/movies.html[/url]

Loved Pirates!. Download in a sec.

Looks like it could be very nice indeed, I'll download it overnight.

Bleh, I was thinking about Rome/Byzantines.

The Holy Roman Empire lasted till the mid 1800s. Just so you know.

[QUOTE=Edthefirst;16147758]The Holy Roman Empire lasted till the mid 1800s. Just so you know.[/QUOTE] Bleh, I was thinking about Rome/Byzantines.

-snip-

I loved Sid Meier's Pirates, this looks very fun. Protip Venn: Open beta.

Didn't know fileplanet still did Open Betas, and I thought by 15 minute queue, there was a 15-minute window where people could sign up for it. tl;dr I'm an idiot

This is kinda bad, the ship combat is like a crap version of Empire: Total War. Wouldn't go to say It resembles pirates at all..

Is anyone else having issues logging in when you get into the game?

how do you even make a login oh, it's emailed to you

fuck I love Pirates! I should play it again

Been looking forward to this game for a year now. Thanks for the heads up, can't wait to try it. :dance:

Yea, nothing like pirates. misleading title :(

This is nothing at all like Pirates. OP needs to play the games he compares this too before posting. Anyways, decent game. Ship combat takes a little getting used too, I also wish there was a better visual hit indicator aside from stats popping up. I'd like to see their sails, masts, and hull actually take a beating and break as it gets bludgeoned by cannonballs.