It is a very enjoyable game and I never feel like I need to break out a spreadsheet.

However, this game wasn't meant to have the same kind if micromanagement as the Ascaron games. If you are expecting the depth of the Ascaron games (which I absolutely love), you're not going to get it in this game. I can't believe these reviews and I think most of them are nostalgic or short sighted. They already have a solid engine and great naval battles system at hand, they also have a ton of experience, maybe if Patrician 4 fails, Nitro will deliver us EIC2 and it will be the game we're waiting for since Port Royal 2. Being a long-time Total War games fan I developed a strong dislike to mini-campaign but I hope it worked out financially and allows them to continue their work. Still, I am thankful to Nitro that they dared to resurrect the genre by creating a new game for it even despite how much I am disappointed with mini-campaign direction they chose for the game later. Also next Patrician is scheduled for Summer 2010 since someone else bought the name from Ascaron upon their bankruptcy, we'll see how that works out, it will either ruin Patrician name forever (far more likely option) or will create another legendary game we will be talking about even years after it becomes obsolete. There's a new Nitro game coming sometime soon, this time more about Pirates than trading, I have high hopes for it and I won't be disappointed for it not being complicated enough. But I understood as early as my first playthrough that EIC wasn't meant as Pat4 or PR4 and will never become a substitute for those so I didn't have hopes very high for a bigger map, more goods and so on. This game as much as it was fun to toy with for a while (and I have spent a great deal of my time playing EIC while waiting for HoI3 patches), especially in naval battle department (which I still am custom-battling time to time if I need to kill some time), economically and mathematically was never a challenge I expected and wanted. So (to my big disappointment), Nitro were never going to complicate the thing more to make it a bigger challenge for us old-school Patrician fans for whom having whole trading empire written down in Excel along with normal gaming isn't something strange.

The whole idea for EIC was to create a game more accessible to people and easier to play than Pat3 or PR2.

Port royale 2 map