Hello,
Is it worth getting East India Company since I have Commander? I have the Colonial Navy DLC as well. Does East India Company do anything Commander doesn't? Apart from having India in it, obviously.
Hello,
Is it worth getting East India Company since I have Commander? I have the Colonial Navy DLC as well. Does East India Company do anything Commander doesn't? Apart from having India in it, obviously.
I have both. EIC really isn't going to do anything for you that COTA doesn't. EIC's shortcomings led to COTA's improvements, such as better battles, bow & stern chasers, more complex economics, more ships, etc. The only thing I liked in EIC that isn't in COTA is the ability to have ships automatically intercept. You could set different levels, such as avoid, attack pirates and enemies, and attack all. In COTA, there are times I want to attack my enemies and station ships off their ports, but since you can't look in all places at once, ships sail past me.
I have both as well.
I agree the economic side of EIC does not compare, to COTA. I feel that Nitro left some of the best parts of EIC behind. A couple of the really nice feature of EIC were :
1)The ability to transfer cargo and/or captured ships to your current fleet or create new fleets.
2)The ability to see all the port and access the ships in any port for trading.
The one feature I wish to see in both games, would be the ability to issue transit orders, meaning go to port, from the port menu, rather than having to go to each captain. In many cases the same fleet captian face is reused.
I don't agree with your comments about better battles. I feel the COTA battle are bland by comparison to those of EIC. The battles can be bigger in CoTA and fleet formation keeping is better. However, EIC allows you to pick which ships are in a formation. In CoTA formation commands apply to all ships of a fleet. The only thing that has improved with regard to the battles is the additon of better islands. But they left behind the unending shore line. Getting caught on a lee shore was a serious problem.
In EIC the weather conditions vary from battle to battle and even within the battle. It did Morning, Fog, Rain, Evening, Nighttime. EIC has higher wind speeds and the waves really add at lot to the game. I have started a battle in a raging storm where you can barely detect the other ships and as I fought the battle the storm gradually lessened, the rain slowed & eventually stopped. The wind and waves dropped with the windspeed. The only thing missing is having the wind change direction.
In CoTA the wind speed for all battles during that session appears to be set at game start. Meaning that you have to close the progam to get a different wind speed. The Max I have ever seen it is 8. In CoTA the ships move at two knots even with no wind, which appears to happen often.
The negative thing about the EIC battles the frequency of the wave seems too fast, meaning the waves come too close together, but that may be a function of their time compression. It seems as if they have tried to compress time to make the game more exciting. A fast gun crew could load & fire in about 100 seconds. A normal crew maybe 120. In the game, at slowest speed it takes about 20 seconds to load and fire. But likely found that the ships move too fast. So to compensate I have come to believe the ship speed was altered to compensate. I think they would have been better served by giving the user more to do with the speed being realistic.
Greg.
I'd grab it for naval combat alone. But in addition to that it's still a very solid strategy game with serious economic challenges, especially if you run it at highest difficulty. Finally it costs like nothing at this point, so why not see what Nitro started with?
"Our officers of cavalry have acquired a trick of galloping at everything. They never consider the situation, never think of manoeuvring before an enemy, and never keep back or provide a reserve."
Gamersgate have the Complete set for £11 I think. More than I paid for CotA, but that was on sale at Christmas. I am tempted though, especially with the pirate content.
I picked up the EIC collection and CoTA on the Christmas sale. I have not gotten the Pirates DLC add-on for CoTA yet.
The Privateer add-on and Pirates bay add-on are both fun. In both cases the empire building concept is pretty much out of the picture. So the game become more about naval battle.
Enjoy.
Greg.
Well I grabbed EIC Collection today. Enjoying it so far. I've spotted a few things that are better than C:CotA and, frankly, I rather wish I'd bought this first. Knowing me I'd still have ended up with both, though.
What exactly is those things taht are beter in EIC? :-)
"Our officers of cavalry have acquired a trick of galloping at everything. They never consider the situation, never think of manoeuvring before an enemy, and never keep back or provide a reserve."
Well now. I have to start with the basic premise itself. In EIC you're playing the East India Company. Your interest is getting rich through trade, and eventually, conquering land in India (and elsewhere). You build ships, you sail to exotic places and buy goods that you bring back to Europe for vast profit. Everything related to the period besides this goal is irrelevent.
In Commander: Conquest of the Americas you're trying to colonise the New World and bring back its rich resources for your own nation's benefit. However, it's built on EIC and uses EIC's concepts, which don't always fit. You have nowhere to buy goods until you found a colony, and when you have only one colony all you can do is take goods from it home, and take colonists from home to it. There's little point trying to trade with the other nations also colonising, they're just in your way. You can't land in their colonies and buy or sell goods. All you can do is attack them.
Frankly I find EIC much more enjoyable, simply because it's the game that was originally designed and it works for this purpose. CotA needed a new engine and new concepts. It's not a trading game, it's an empire-building game based on money. EIC is about trade and accurately reflects the various East India Companies of history, with their beginnings as commercial ventures and later moves into imperial powers in their own right.
In terms of actual, discrete features I prefer, I like the whole map approach, allowing you to interdict foreign trade right into European waters and all the way to the Far East, as well as the variety of trade ports and goods. I like the financial focus that really fits the theme and the increased frequency of battles. In EIC, you get attacked by pirates and by foreign companies regularly; in CotA battles happen when you fancy it as often as not. Pirates are a much lesser threat, the other nations don't attack (in my experience) and the whole thing seems bolted-on rather than being part of the game. The only things I miss are the specialists for fleets that were introduced in Privateer and didn't get retro-fitted to the Designer's Cut, and the slightly more polished graphics. I am loving the rough seas and variable winds, battles in all weather and all hours. I'm especially loving pirating French shipping to damage their company!
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