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If you liked East India Company you should try:
Anno 1404
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East India Company Review
Game Name: East India Company
Developers: Paradox Interactive
Price: £30
Release Date: Out Now!
Review by Andy Yates
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 That's the problem with evil corporations.
You're against them completely until they say "Hey, fancy a job? You'll be in charge of the whole operation..." and then suddenly you're sending marines out to their watery graves fighting against France (or Spain or Germany or, um, Switzerland) for supremacy in the Indian Ocean.
Ok, maybe Switzerland isn't involved, but that's pretty much the gist of East India Company. The core of the game consists of trading for popular items between Indian ports and your home port. It's like many other trading games in this respect: buy silk low, sell it high back home! The trading system itself is neatly organic, rather than prices staying the same in each port it fluctuates depending on how much of a certain type of cargo you've recently sold. For example, if you sell a boat load of Tea at your home port, they won't be paying the same high price for a while until they run short again. The more you sell the lower it pushes the price so you've got to keep the trade items varied to make the most profit.
When entering a port to carry out the trading the game loads a 3D representation of the Port to act as a backdrop while you move cargo around. What's annoying is the time it takes for this to load, it feels like a speed bump in the flow of the game. The most frustrating thing was if you realise you've not got enough cash to buy the current cargo and want to switch to your home port to sell the cargo you had stored in your warehouse to increase your funds. This meant closing the current Port screen, which also takes a bit of time, and then loading another, then doing the same to go back once you'd sold the goods.
Otherwise the trading is good fun, checking out the prices and sending your fleets out to quickly make some trades and hopefully some decent cash. There are also automatic trading routes that you can set up, but only between a foreign port and your home one and because of the dynamic trade prices they quickly start to loose money rather than making it.
The game contains a series of campaigns you can play through, each one provides a number of challenges given to you periodically. Most of these involve shipping a certain quantity of specific trade items back to your home port, for instance shipping 500 tonnes of silk back to your home port before a certain date. I am so glad they put this in because otherwise the trading side would be a little too easy and the whole game would just be another "get bigger than the other players" game with no other goals. There is an option to win a campaign by holding all ten Indian ports for ten years, but doing this is quite tricky and is generally not worth the risk.
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