East India Company Campaign Hands-On Preview

This historical naval strategy game looks to offer an absorbing blend of trading, diplomacy and real-time battles.
Last month we got our hands on an early section of East India Company, the upcoming real-time strategy game from Nitro Games and Paradox that puts players behind the European conquest of Asia. Whereas the previous taster of the game allowed us to sample only the Tactical Level’s naval battles, Paradox have released a second preview which provides a far fuller overview of the game: twenty playable years as the British from the game’s 1650-1700 campaign.
 
I’m won’t elaborate too deeply on the Tactical Level, as details on that can be found here, but I will complement developer Nitro Games for finding the ideal balance between intuitive controls and accessible interfaces with a complex and expansive mixture of strategic game modes. While the game is intricate to say the least, it never feels that way. The three separate tutorials, each focussed on one of the gameplay modes, and clearly defined objectives throughout make this a strategy game that isn’t daunting when playing for the first time.
 
In all fairness the Port View and Strategic levels are essentially one mode, with the Tactical Level an optional hands-on approach to battles. The oceanic skirmishes of the Tactical Level could almost be considered a separate element of the game – indeed, for those not interested in the economics side of East India Company, it is possible to enter randomly generated nautical battles.
 
The Strategic Level offers a global (or near about) map of your ports, possessions, allies and enemies on a malleable time scale. From here you can order your fleets to set sail for distant Eastern ports, attack nearby rivals, or search the seas for raiders. Should your crew encounter hostile fleets, you have the option to commence the Tactical Level, commandeering enemy ships and their cargo either in real-time or directly. If you’d prefer not to bloody your hands you may choose to have conflicts auto-resolved; while this solution obviously isn’t guaranteed to end in victory, with a possible twenty fleets at your command the conflicts can be surprisingly time-consuming. Fortunately, it is possible to alter the difficulty and level of realism for a more arcade-paced experience.
 
Your primary and secondary goals in each campaign are fulfilled by gaining the correct quota in rare materials such as spices, diamonds, furs and precious, precious tea. How you go about meeting the necessary trade quotas is entirely up to you, and given the xenophobic tension that once ran through these nation, an indirect (or “underhand”) approach is often the order of the day. Negotiate pacts and alliances with other nations, or trade them rare commodities for other items or favours – it is possible to exploit another nation’s lust for a specific resource by trading with them under the conditions that they attack a common competitor. The better your trade routes and supplies of rarest materials, the stronger your diplomatic influence with other nations. Be prepared to play dirty, as even in the early stages of the game combat isn’t guaranteed to go your way. In my first encounter with pirates &nd