Now that Spain has declared war, I have to fight a lot. Spain has nearly twice as many ships as me, but she's not very smart. It's been trivially easy to hunt down her ships with a pair of frigates. It's a lot of busy work, but it can be gratifying.

The picture above is an example of how the sea battles in East India Company can be pretty cool. I've got a pair of frigates, the St. George and the Deptford, drawing up alongside both sides of a Spanish flute, the Benedicta. I'm trying to capture the Benedicta to take her cargo. So the frigates are going to unload grapeshot to thin out the flute's crew. Eventually, enough of them will be dead that the Benedicta's morale will drop so low she surrenders.

The above image is from the moment I've told the frigate on the right, the St. George, to fire. At which point I discovered East India Company models friendly fire. As you can see from the little floating numbers indicating damage, the bulk of the grapeshot has hit the Deptford. Oops. Sorry guys. I guess this wasn't a very sound tactical set up.

But then there are all the ways the sea battles in East India Company aren't cool.

I like the basics of combat in East India Company. It's a good concept. There's some good game design here. I like that each side is limited to five ships, which makes for manageable battles. I like the way captains have certain useful skills and even spell powers, even though they are neither realistic or balanced. I like being able to play using the fairly realistic "simulation" mode, which makes for very slow and very tactical encounters. I like the limited ammo that means some ships have to be very careful about when they fire. I'm even okay with having to manually jump among ships to set their sails and steer them. And I love the graphics. It's a lovely game.

But on the whole, there are too many annoyances that should have been avoided. There is no way to accelerate time during these battles, which can get long and drawn out. The rules for evading, which is often the point of a naval battle, are weird, contrived, and hard to determine. There is no indication of a ship's speed or the range between ships. There is no indication of the direction a given type of ship should sail for maximum speed. You have to enter direct control mode for a particular ship to check important things like firing arcs and range. The minimap isn't helpful enough. There's no indication of the effects of weather or time of day. Ships starts off too close and at seemingly random positions.

But the biggest problem is that naval battles feel so out of place with the strategic level of the game, where all the trade and ship management takes place. East India Company is two very different games. And when I'm playing one of them, I don't necessarily appreciate having to stop to play the other. This is a problem I've had all along with Creative Assembly's Total War games, so it's more of a personal issue. But it certainly comes up for me here, especially once the game breaks out into war.

And that's pretty much an inevitability. You can only avoid going to war for so long. And once you do, the gameplay will bog down for long hours into a series of battles and evasions. You can auto resolve these, but this presents two problems. Firstly, you can trust the auto resolve to screw you over when you least expect it. That's just what auto resolves do. But secondly, you cannot capture a ship or its cargo unless you manually play the battle. One of the main benefits of naval warfare is not available unless you invest significant time.

And this is ultimately what's killed the game for me. East India Company is the first game from Finnish developer Nitro Studios, and as much promise as it shows, it also shows an enormous amount of inexperience. It's too much of a grind to duck constantly in and out of an awkwardly interconnected naval battle module and strategic trade game. As gorgeous as the former is, and as intriguing as the latter is, they both suffer from too many amateurish mistakes that effectively kill my desire to play. Which is a shame, because I'm exactly the target audience for this game. If you can't win me over, something's gone terribly wrong.

(Click here for the previous East India Company game diary.)