A really decent game with some VERY stunning visuals. If you like getting lost inside a historic journey, then you'll greatly enjoy COTA. It's made even more better in that their are several equally decent expansions & DLCs available.

Solid trading game that I have enjoyed, especially at the discount price I got it at. Nice amount of options to ensure replayability. If you like port royale/patrician, then you should give this game a try.

I like the advisor missions to give yu a little direction and working toward something.

Can get a little tedious at times, but if you can get past those times there is a real fun game to be had.

It's not a bad game, tho, it doesn't seem to be as good as the East India Company. It could be much better. Graphics are not so good and you can't have a nice view of the cities.

an overall nice game with trade based gameplay and good game mechanics.beautifull 2d graphics and with the patches available a good value for money parchase to the genre!

if you like games like port royale this is a similar game

Commander: Conquest of the Americas is a fun game. The feel of this game has a mix of 3 other games that I enjoy; Colonization, the Port Royale game series, and AGEOD's Birth of America II: Wars in America. There is more to it than that, but I seem to get a feel of each of those games unfolding at times during game play. It is fun to play, though it was a little problematic in the beginning with learning game play. But I think that was my own fault because I tried to play in the ways of the games I listed above that I said the game felt like. Once I surrendered to the game's originality itself, the game was really fun to play. I highly recommend this game to all.

Mediocre game. Just not a lot to sink your teeth into and get hooked with. The game is centered around developing colonies by taking colonists from your home port in Europe and placing them in newly founded colonies. These colonists will develop the raw materials and process them into finished goods (with the correct building upgrades). The morale of your colony will influence how productive it is, and how many people are willing to become colonists. Most of the time spent was setting up trade routes, which I found boring, or building/upgrading improvements in my colony. A lot of time is spent in this one just watching time pass by as you are waiting to build new ships or accumulate gold. The naval battle themselves look nice, but I got very little enjoyment out of them. Not a lot to do in the colonies themselves outside of clicking the build button to make an improvement or upgrade a building. Okay game if you can get it for a bargain.

Like most Paradox games, this has a steep learning curve and sometimes can feel like a chore to learn. It is very worthwhile to take the time and effort to learn this game as it will be very fun and rewarding when you finally figure it out.

Some may find the early game trade and empire building to be monotonous but that is quickly remedied by automating basic tasks like trade routes. The real heart of the game in my opinion is the tactical battles. Leading whole squadrons of ships into battle against you enemies fleets and raiding merchant ships to cripple their economies while building yours!

What a predictable game! It can only be the favourite game for those who hate surprises, challenge and spending days or weeks playing them.

Playing Commander: Conquest of America and its add-ons will allow you to enjoy beautiful graphics and learn a few things about naval warfare of the 16th century.

Other than that there are a few things you can also do in the game: You can transport colonist to your colonies, have your ships return to Europe loaded with precious goods which you then sell to expand your merchant and military fleet and build your cities so that you can bring more colonists and sell more goods and get more riches. There is also a diplomacy button, which allows you to contact AI players offer them a pact or an alliance or even a trade deal. All that is however costly as for the AI to accept such a deal you will have to sweeten your offer considerably. When micromanaging your trade fleets becomes time consuming you can also set up automatic trade routes. You can also give orders to your fleets to carry out other duties like hunting down pirates or ships owned by the AI opponents. Which brings us to combat action. This is another interesting part of the game as you can find a lot of things while you are chasing other ships, such as watch TV, read a book, call friends until you catch up enemy ships trying to flee. Until they are within range of your cannons, it may take up to 15 minutes even if you use time accelerator. In the meantime, what you can do is simply press a cursor key to maintain course. To be honest, the game offers much more realism when it comes to naval combat. But it may take up to three quarters of an hour to resolve a single battle. I have played other similar games which are a combination of strategy, city building, business simulation and I was never disappointed as much as by C:CotA. Patrician III and V were good examples in terms of game complexity and even as their battle part was simplified, they did manage to pin me to my PC for much longer, which was not possible even with C:CotA's mesmerising music.

P.S. Controlling the game also could use some improvement. The game would be more enjoyable if the player could simply hit a key once to carry out an order instead of several times repeatedly and if the mouse was more responsive.

I was a big fan of East India Company which I rated five stars, so I was really looking forward to this sequel. I was very disappointed. Mechanically, the game is about the same as EIC. There are, however, two crucial differences. The first is geography. In EIC all the ships needed to travel around Africa to get to India. That meant I could win the game quite quickly by raiding the shipping of other countries because they all passed near one of my West African colonies. In this game ships have the whole broad Atlantic Ocean to cross, so it is difficult to grind the enemy down when its colonies are spread over a wide area of the map. Since I could not defeat an enemy by attacking its shipping, I was forced to capture its colonies. That is the second difference, and this is where the game really breaks down. To capture a colony you must first destroy its fort if it has one. Ships of the line are best for this, but they are only available late in the game. I used five frigates to destroy a level one fort (there are three levels), and lost one in the process. OK. Not too bad, but now I had to eliminate the defending garrison which had been reduced from 1000 to about 900 by the bombardment. My frigates only had 117 men left after the encounter, so I brought in five galleons with 250 soldiers to attack the garrison. This is done with auto-resolve. The result was that my 250 soldiers AND THE GALLEONS were destroyed. Just how the galleons were destroyed by a garrison without cannon is unclear to me. There are sailors on the galleons as well as soldiers. If all the sailors were involved in the battle, then perhaps the galleons that they served could be considered to have been lost. There is, however, a minimum number of sailors needed to operate the ship. In real life, that skeleton crew would not have taken part in the battle, so there is no way that the ships could have been lost. At that point I gave up on the game. There is no way to win. All you can do is trade. That is tedious and boring. As I said, I was very disappointed.

Just like East India Company - if you like that you'll enjoy this.

Though I find it very difficult to get into a long game, nor can I properly trade between colonies appropriately or sometimes disembark passengers to make room for commodities at my colonies. Changing trading settings for a fleet also resets the trade forcing them back to the port, which forces you to wait until the boat gets to a port... and by port I mean the colonies because you can never see the boats come into or out of your home port like in East India Company.

I bought this for full price after reading what it was. While the system with cargo and all is good... That's as far as it goes. You sit and wait for something to happen. You build or buy ships. You conquer a city or two. I loved both Colonization and Pirates and was hoping for something more modern, but was disappointed. Play another of CIV, EU or CS or whatever.

In the games defence I must say I never play games on more than normal difficulty, but I can't see how that would improve.

The game has so much possiblities. The fighting is great but the whole redundancy factor is terrible. Once you start your trading it's game over. Same thing over and over again.

Commander: Conquest of the Americas is the sequel to East India Company. It uses the same basic engine as the previous game with some upgrades to graphics.

Where it differs from the previous game is, obviously, the setting. You begin with a single fleet of a few ships and a handful of colonists and you must sail to the Americas, find a colony site and settle. Unlike East India Company, where the ports were fixed in historic locations, the colonies in Commander are not. Each game will have different colony sites available and thus ports in different places, with access to different goods.

Once you've founded a colony it begins producing goods, depending on the resources of the site you chose. These might be gold or silver, iron, whales, spices, coffee or many other commodities, all with their own value back home in Europe. You buy the colony's goods (remember this is based on EIC) and sail back to Europe where you sell the goods, hopefully at a large profit. You sail back either with goods produced in Europe to sell to your colonists, or more colonists or soldiers to fill your colony and help it expand. The more colonists, the larger the colony's sphere of influence and thus the more goods it can access, the more goods it produces and the more you can tax from it.

This is the basics of the game. Once your first colony reaches a certain size you can found a second, and so on, giving you more goods to sell in Europe for money.

Also unlike EIC, Europe is not on the game map, and ships are split into two types, coastal and ocean-going. Ocean-going ships can sail to Europe, coastal ships are not robust enough to survive the Atlantic waters and can only sail around the American coast. Coastal ships also have the limited range mechanic from EIC, while ocean-going ships can go anywhere without stopping for supplies. Coastal ships are only useful, therefore, for chasing pirates, attacking the ships of other nations or moving goods or people between your colonies. You might set up one colony as a hub and have your ocean-going ships sail from there to Europe and back, while all other goods are shipped into it by coastal vessels and colonists shipped out.

Additionally to these mechanics, you have four advisors who constantly bother you with missions and advice. You must keep their satisfaction level at an acceptable standard or they have you removed from office. The Royal advisor is a generalist, but mostly interested in prestige and power for your nation, so wants more and bigger colonies, more wealth, and so on. The Economic advisor only cares about your cash flow. The Militar advisor only cares about the number of warships and soldiers you have, while the Archbishop is worried about the wellbeing of your people and international peace. I find this system annoying and the missions intrusive as well as being difficult to achieve on the harder difficulty settings. Especially when the military advisor wants to see five new ocean-going warships come out of your shipyards when you've got no money to pay for them.

Problems with this game are fairly numerous. It's stable and runs fine, but gameplay issues are niggling and largely down to the re-use of EIC engine. For a start, you're not running a trading company here, so your cash flow and bank balance just aren't done right. You shouldn't be buying goods from your colonies and selling them like a trader, they should be shipped home and sold and you given a tax rate on that activity. You can tax the colonies to help offset the running costs of each one, but the colonists get very upset very quickly at taxation.

Another niggle is that, playing as Britain (it should be England in 1500) you still use the East India Company flag, not the English Cross of St. George.

Additionally, you can't explore in-land so you only get the coastal resources, which is annoying since you can see resources on the map that are forever out of reach. Some kind of inland exploration and colonisation mechanism is needed.

No land battles is annoying, as we've moved away from the maritime focus of EIC and we're colonising the Americas. We should have a land battle engine here.

The other countries you compete with are pointless as well. They rarely attack you, and given the removal of Europe from the map it's very easy to hide your shipping in the vast Atlantic and avoid any naval battles. In EIC you got attacked at choke points like the Cape of Good Hope, but in Commander it's all open water. Gone, as well, is the strategic element of taking key ports to deny the enemy resupply sites. Ocean-going ships don't need supplies.

All in all this is a decent game, but for every step forward from East India Company there's a step back, and I think this means that the predecessor was the superior game.

Commander: Conquest of the Americas is a good game, but is really mainly aimed at lovers of the trading/colonisation genre. The combat is interesting and pretty well done, but I would not play this game purely based on its tactical RTS potential. There are other games which would give you a far more satisfying experience for that. The biggest downside of the game for me is that after a while you don’t really have that much to do on the campaign map. The tactical choices you need to make are incredibly limited, and I don’t think you could replay the game very often before you find you don’t have all that much new to experience.

Commander Level Up

Commanders can level to gain useful abilities

The main reason to keep playing the game is to unlock more buildings and ships – but you can’t really do all that much with them afterward. Sure, you can transport even more goods – and have even stronger ships in combat, but the real question is what would motivate you to do so? I’m not sure what exactly is missing in the game – it does give you limited missions, and your commands gain levels which gives them additional abilities. But there isn’t all that much you can actually *do* with that in the game. The map is explored pretty early on, once your trade routes are set-up they operate independently and well… I don’t know. It’s not a bad game in any way, shape or form, but it also did not grip me.

So should you buy it? If you like this type of game, it’s probably worth a shot. However, at £35 retail, I’m not so sure you’re getting a good deal. The game is £25 on Steam and can be found even cheaper on Amazon, so if you can find a bargain, go right ahead – but ensure you watch the videos so you have a good idea what you are getting yourself into.

Commander: Conquest of the Americas is a game that combines trading, resource management and strategy. The game is developed by Nitro Games who brought you East India Company. This game was seriously broken and the developer took this engine to build their Commander game. While Commander: Conquest of the Americas has improved there are still some very annoying elements in it. As the title suggest the object of the game is to conquer the America’s. At the start of the game you can choose between one of the seven European superpowers of the 16th century, each with their own strengths and weaknesses. You’re given a small fleet with which you can start your first colony. The number of viable colony spots is very limited and their location is randomised so that each campaign will be different.

Once your first colony is up and running you can transport resources from it to your homeland to earn money while at the same time transporting new colonists back to the colony. When your population grows you can start new colonies and gather more resources. You can also build a host of different buildings in each colony that serve different purposes. You can upgrade your resources by processing them into specialised products which will fetch better prices at home. You can build churches and taverns to keep your population happy, build dry-docks to create more ships, etc…

You’ll have to micromanage each colony in detail, plan for future problems and set up your trade-routes with great care in order to avoid bankruptcy, riotous colonists and invading enemies. When you manage to get a strong fleet you can attack (or defend) rival superpowers either by auto-resolving the fight or by diving into it RTS or by direct control of your ships. Your fleet commanders each have specific abilities that can help you in these fights. Unfortunately the ships do not always respond they way you’d like them to so there is a lot of practice needed here before you can actually win naval battles.

You also have four advisors that frequently assign missions to you, these involve trade, religion, law, and military missions. These advisors are supposed to teach you the game mechanics but they frequently fail to tell you how exactly to achieve success. Later missions are quite simply unattainable in the limited time frame the advisors allow.

The graphics are good at first sight but upon closer inspection they’re lacking detail, some parts also have texture glitches. Likewise, the interface is quite buggy. You’ll frequently find yourself clicking over and over on the resources around your settlement instead of activating the colony. This, in it’s own right is somewhat of a dexterity game. The game does a bad job at explaining how it works, which gives it a very steep learning curve. Several simple options are simply not available. For instance, I’d like to know when a building is finished without having to do the dexterity game every five minutes. The first time I played it I was heading for bankruptcy after only a few years because the game didn’t tell me what buildings had an upkeep cost. Likewise I thought I’d create two fleets so I could tailor my trade routes better to my needs but for some inexplicable reason my second commander is unable to sail to his home port. This guy has quite an expensive paycheck but for another totally inexplicable reason I could not fire him. And as always with this type of game, the enemy AI’s know exactly what to do, causing them to set up their third colony right next to your doorstep while you still struggle getting enough colonists into your existing settlements.

Furthermore, there is little to no help available in the game. Your best place to find it is on the official forum.

After a while I find myself playing the game with muted sound because my commanders keep repeating the same sentences over and over and there’s no way to shut them up.

All in all this game feels as if it’s unfinished, various minor nuisances could have easily be addressed with some proper game testing before release. The interface has what web designers refer to as a very low usability and the naval combat engine has been done way better years before the release of this game.

Score: 4/10

After several hours of game play on this game, I do not see how people can rate this as 4 stars. I found this very buggy, got a very rude response on the forum by the moderator when I was trying to install the patch and the advisors constantly conflicting with each other by mid game that you are doomed to fail, even in the free campaign. (The war advisor always trying to get you to build more ships when you really don't need them..even if your country has the most warships in the game.)

One bug I came across was that in one game I tried to play, a schooner was constantly entering and leaving port that was set up on auto trade causing me to go bankrupt in a hurry.

Don't even try to attack a colony without the advisor's telling you to do, or you will loose all your ships, which probably will happen anyways.

Empire Total War actually has better naval battles, but at least here the AI does the ships into a proper position for you, and your not stuck micromanaging each ship's movement in RTS mode. I noticed that someone complained about ships moving around in circles...but that is how naval battles were fought in those days..either trying to attack the enemy's stern or bow, this was done by moving in circles or a series of S turns for one to get the advantage of the wind. (preferably the stern where the ship was the weakest.)

Speaking of wind, it really has no effect. Ships moving against it don't turn faster then ships moving downwind... that was the first major disappointment I came across. The second one was wind speed and vessels only moving 1 to 3 kph. And battle in the rain or storms???? Come on, show me one major naval engagement of the day that one actually occurred. (Gunpowder has to be kept dry in order for it to work.) An in reality, ask any sailor, the ship moving against the wind turns faster then the ship moving downwind. (Tall ships of the day actually would spend weeks sometimes before a battle trying to get the best wind advantage.) Good news is though, the AI makes it harder to cross the T, which was something I found very disappointing in TW:Empire. In that game all I had to do was cross the T you pretty much won the fight, which got boring. No commander in their right mind tried to avoid that as much as possible. The AI in this game does a pretty good job of not allowing that to happen.

The auto trade is actually more of a joke. Not only is it time consuming to set up but you get no warning if item you are trying to trade or colonists you are bringing gets up to the maximum amount, so you suddenly stuck with a squadron that has 160 items worth of gold that is not unloading anywhere. I might also add that was another bug too, ships were not unloaded properly when they went into port.

Even though I am not one much for graphics, they were not that outstanding but it works. For instance on the cutters, I noticed a major error, the mast was more towards the bow then the stern. Reality was that it was vise versa, which gave them the maneuver advantage. Water reflection was nice as well if I wanted a nice romantic battle.

Economy is fairly easy to figure out, that was not an issue with me...its based on supply and demand. The major disappointment here is the production. For every 500 to 1000 colonists, you would expect some increase in production of a certain item, probably by 1 to 3%, but that does not happen. It appears the only thing they are good for is expanding the "sphere of influence" and causing you to go bankrupt by keeping their morale up by having to buy buildings you cannot afford.

Unfortunately, there are no detailed financial and accounting reports, which are very much needed in this game. In order for me to figure out if each ship was full, I had to pause the game, click on each of my cargo fleets to see if the cargo was full, then go back to the colony figure out how much of each item it was producing then go back to the autotrade button on the fleet and readjust. If you don't set the game on pause to go through the long tedious process, next thing you realize is you have 3 new missions and two of them will have expired by the time you have figured it all out. If your ships are not up to capacity, you might as well click the escape key and and click on "Quit Game." Also, its kind of strange that gemstones silver and gold seems to be quite common in this game and iron is rare and hard to get. Complete difference of reality here. (I was geology major in university so yes I do know what I am talking about.)

Iron was labor intensive to get, but it was a lot less then getting gold or silver out of the ground, and more plentiful too.

Silver seems to be the one resource that will win you the game, or get you farther along before those colonists and advisors make you go broke.

Really good game! Somewhat reminiscent of Sid Meier's Civilization IV: Colonization but feels more polished (and is eventually much more difficult but deep).

You choose one of Europe's major factions and set sail for the new world; your aim: to colonize as much as you can, get rich and thwart your rival's aims in the process!

The graphics are good, nothing outstanding but cool nonetheless.

Sounds: Ok... serviceable.

Gameplay: Really good! The game does feel like a 16th Century Colonization game... it excels in capturing the epoch's essence.

My only qualms with it is it steep learning curve and its lack of tutorial (you may have an assisted playthrough, in which you have advisors who somewhat tell you what to do... but it isn't as helpful as a tutorial gets).

Still, I think it deserves a 4/5...

I am a relative newcomer to Nitro Games. I bought East India Company Complete a few weeks back and loved it. It appealed to me first and foremost because of the tactical ship battles, but also because of the balancing of elements at the strategic level, and the very effectively streamlined balance between realism and gameplay. EIC was the precessor to Commander: Conquest of the Americas. I understand that there was quite a bit of improvement between the original release of EIC, and the changes made with patches and the three DLCs that are now all packaged together and availalbe in the "Complete" set here on Gamersgate.

For anyone who likes Civ, who is an Age of Sail fan, who likes trade games, tactical naval battles, or is just simply a pretty eclectic strategy gamer, I think that both EIC and CCotA are good recommendations. At this stage I'm reviewing CCotA with only the Colonial Navies DLC and it is October 2010. I know there has been at least one, perhaps multiple patches for CCotA at this time. Hopefully, there will in the near future be additional DLC, and/or patches that will balance and tweak a few remaining issues that I perceive with the game. Having said all of that, I would more strongly recommend EIC than CCotA but it would be a minor difference. I think EIC is terrific and that tells me that Nitro does a good job of revising their initial releases into excellent final form, and suggests to me that, future revisions to CCotA are likely to improve the game substantially. My only concern on this point is that: I've been posting a lot on the CCotA forums at Paradox, and it seems to be a pretty dead place. That may not indicate anything in particular, but I do hope that CCotA gets a bit more refinement. I don't think it has fully achieved its potential yet.

The review by sambrookjm I think does a good job of describing the game in general, and I agree with almost everything he has said, although I'm rating it a 4 out of five stars instead of 3/5.

Overall, I disagree with the generally very critical perspective of 7d3m9d31h7; I think that a lot of the points he is critical of are likely to be issues of personal taste. For example I like music and sound okay, think the "going back and forth" between home port and colonies is a reasonable basic dynamic for the game, and like the economic constraints of the game too. Certainly the game is challenging, and the economics are a big part of that; but I believe that for many tastes, this will be a welcome challenge. The AI certainly is not "unbeatable," nor is the game "impossible" from my standpoint. Naval battles are a lot more than just "circumnavigate around them and fire" and IMO, reflect what I understand to have been the basic tactical parameters of naval combat in the age of sail.

So what are the areas for improvement?

In EIC, we have waves. There appear to be no waves in CCotA, and moreover wind seems to play a lesser role as well. Some of the minor changes in the battle interface between EIC and CCotA seem to have been debatable (no more battle cam; scrolling through camera views in direct control mode seems a bit more awkward; the cannonfire arcs on the compass are less distinct) but others are definite improvements: use of fleet commands as in the Battle of Trafalgar DLC from EIC, ships do not switch out of grouped mode when you switch between Direct Command and RTS mode. One of the consequences of changes to the wind/wave model in CCotA is that I find I am much less able to catch fleeing enemies, something which I think is a bit of a let down. Overall I think the balance of gunfire power, hull strength, etc. are reasonable, but sometimes the way various ships behave seems a bit out of balance. As an example, cutters seem to have a lot more firepower than I would think just based on EIC. Collisions between two carracks whene boarding have been far more suicidal than I would've thought. These are all things that could be improved in future revisions to the game, and I hope that the community and devs will continue to communcate about them and work on it.

Overall there are some problems with the GUI in the game. The controls are a bit clunky and laggy on my machine, even though EIC works just fine. Some of the controls overlap one another (e.g., the formation commands overlaps the right-cannon fire icon) making it hard to avoid clicking the one you want. I agree that the buy-sell clickies for the warehouse and trading post can also be a bit clunky, as are the commands to view fleets at different levels (click once you see the fleet and its command options, click again you see its in port command options for the port where it is located). Again, all stuff that could easily be tweaked.

I don't think any of the deficiencies in the game are things that represent fundamental design flaws, but one thing that I find really lacking is a set of more detailed financials windows. In particular,

The game is a good economic simulation, but there are some big problems with it. Hopefully, they wll be patched in a later date. (I'm writing this review based on patch 1.03)

Using the warehouses in your home port and your cities is not overly intuitive. Expect to buy, sell, and re-buy items quite a few times before you get the hang of it. Even later on, this can still happen once in a while. This is especially frustrating when you are in the early game, and every little bit of money helps.

If you don't find a city that has gold, silver, or gems early on, you are at a huge disadvantage. These items are far more profitable than the other possible items your settlements may have. Tobacco and Whale are the second tier items. Items that cannot be refined are nearly useless.

So far as I can tell, the trade advisor always wants you to increase the number of items that you bring back to your home port. This isn't a problem until you conquer an enemy city. These cities usually have a huge amount of items stored in their warehouse. Shipping these back to your home port makes your trade advisor very happy due to he increased number of items coming in from the new world. However, he expects that increased flow to continue. This means you either need to continue storming all of the cities in the New World, or have your trade advisor furious with you after the supply of items in the warehouse is extinguished.

The final scoring was a bit of a let down as well. Rather than give you a numerical score (You got 423/500 points! Well done!) you get a "Your final score is - Moderate." based on how pleased the four advisors are with your performance during the game.

There are some good points to the game. The automated trade routes can be extremely helpful in cutting down micromanagment, but a bit of warning would be nice when something goes wrong with one. For example, if you try to bring people to a city that cannot handle any more settlers, you won't get any error message or warning. All that will happen is you don't bring back the goods from the settlement, which means lost revenue. Eventually, that ship will return to the home port to pick up more settlers it can't bring to the new world, and you end up with a fleet that is carrying a couple hundred people, but can't put them in the city.

The graphics are beautiful, and the ship combat is realistic. The ships cannot turn on a dime, and strategy is required in combats against fleets of roughly equal strength.

My recommendation is either wait for a few patch cycles for some of these annoyances to be fixed, or a price drop.

This game is a F completely (F as in Failure)

You begin by choosing your country representation.

From there it devolves into total chaos.

Gameplay involves going back and forth from the mother country port to the colonies.

What is wrong with this game is the convoluted economic scale which weaves throghout the entire game.

As the starting player you are not given even near to the amount of money you need to fufill the orders of the "advisors"

You must placate the "advisors" or watch your status in the game drop (which will eventually cause your termination)

Bankruptcy is imminent throughout the game and once your character enters a negative balance he is finished.

Despite the "advisors" being there,there is unfortunately little to no help with the daily mundane duties your character is asked to do.

At no point do you actually "see" your colonies at work or play except through the wide scale (up in the air) pilot-map view.

The econonomic strategy of the A.I. is essentially "unbeatable" unless you have a degree in economics.

As far as the battles, well they can be described as "poor"

You circumnavigate around another ship and fire at it incessantly...that's it

Either you defeat it or it defeats you.

There really is no help from the interface.

The main reason this game deserves an F is again it's insistence on maintaining an A.I. strategy which is (even on easy) basically impossible to defeat

Also the sound in the game is essentially music in the background (outside of battle noises that's it)

I would rate sound as F as well.

The music is second rate and sounds like the chaff you hear waiting in a telephone queue

Very good game. An improvement from EIC with more content. I like the production stages of resources. The naval battles are good but can become lengthy if you are trying to acquire a ship and are only sailing 1 knot faster it will take a long time to catch and board that ship even when playing at 4x speed.

This game is very similar to East India Company in several ways. The ships are all the same, the captains get promoted in the same ways with the same enhancements. If you play the game mainly for the ship battles, then this game is pretty good but the battles will be almost identical to the ones in EIC. In the single player game, which is the only way I have played it, if you are mainly interested in trading and building towns, then this game leaves much to be desired. Except for purchasing town improvements, you have no control over the growth, or production of your towns. For me, after I have all the colonies founded that I can found (generally seven) then the game becomes a simple matter of watching the trading ships sail and meeting special goals. By about 1600, the game is already very boring to me and it still has fifty years to run!! It's not even possible to fight wars sometimes. Your "advisors" will often insist that you make peace. When it's all over, you get no stats or anything, just a simple screen that says how well you did (in one or two words.

Its a really good game and i would say it reminds me Sid Meyers Pirate or Port Royal more than EIC. It needs some major tweaks in UI though. Patch 1.03 fixes some things but it needs a lot more, especially when you have to manage many fleets in the same port.It lacks some tools for a central management of all fleets and all colonies. On the positive side game is very stable. I played about 10 hours and had no crashes or cpu hangs. Its a game of great potential.

Its a nice game where u choose to open a colony in any location you want and get settlers from the homeland. Construct colonies and build ships and gather resources to create a great trading empire and a strong navy. The navy is nessasry to stop pirates and if u want to war with other nations. Its fun game you can trade with the natives too. It will be very appealing to players who like to play trade games and colonizing games.

This game is a huge step forward from it's spiritual predeseccor (East India Company). The game has a much larger replay value, because players can now choose themselves were to found their colonies. There are also vastly more possible trade options because of the addidtion of the production stages. When your settlement has fur for example, you can build factories to process that furr into usable products and sell them for more profits. All together I would say that this game is a hugwe leap forward from EiC and should be bought by anyone who is interensted ithe concept.

Based on the first day´s impressions, this is a very good game. No bugs so far; the interface is good, although East India Company veterans will have to get used to some changes. The manual could go into a bit more detail, though.

I was pleased to notice that the developers did not grow complacent after the success of the previous game. Commander is most certainly *not* East India Company set in the Americas (although there would not have been anything wrong with that). Plenty of new ideas here, and I´m sure I haven´t discovered them all yet.

So, the bottom line is, if you liked East India Company, take a look at this game. If you liked East India Company and Civilization IV: Colonization (or the original Colonization, for that matter), you´re practically guaranteed to like this game.

i like this theme games.played patrician2-3,age of sail 1-2 and others..this game is a good mixture of patrician3 and age of sail i think.

+++ Best navy battles

++ Good colony management

+++ Best automade trading.

+ Good advicers

-- Lack diplomacy, hard to make negatiations.

- Hope to see buildings in colonies like patrician.

Final : There are some need improvements but its a really good game.if you dont play before this theme games this game is good for starters, if you love theme must buy it.