Commander: Conquest of The Americas is the second entry for Nitro Games, the development studio responsible for the trading game, East India Company. Commander is an evolution of the gameplay from East India Company and introduces mechanics that I felt were sorely lacking in EIC, namely colonisation and building up your colony/town.
Compared to other trading strategy games, Nitro Games makes more streamlined, simpler(mechanics wise) games. In Commanders, you get to become a viceroy of any of these 5 nations, England, France, Spain, Portugal, Denmark, Netherlands and the Holy Roman Empire. Each of these nations have their own little advantage and disadvantages(bonus and penalties to your colonies or ship/battle abilities). You need to keep this mind that you do not run these nations, you are merely a hireling and in the campaign game, you can get booted out of your position ending your game.
As Viceroy to the new world, you are tasked at finding a spot to colonise the new world. You don’t get to build a colony anywhere on the map, you’ll have to pick a predetermined colonisable spots on the game world. Once that’s taken care of, you’ll have to build up your colony by bringing in colonists from your home port while exporting goods/raw materials you manufacture in your colony to make a profit.
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| Colonising is the name of the game. Build on predetermined spots on the map. |
Managing Colonies
There are a few essential ideas that are important to master to make managing your colonies smooth and profitable. The first is morale. It’s pretty straight forward, the better your colonies morale, the more efficient and faster they become at producing goods. You want morale to be high. Higher morale = fasters turn around times of goods = more profit.
To improve your colonies morale, you can build particular buildings to make your colonies feel a lot better. Churches, courts etc. Building improvements in your colonies is crucial in Commander. You’ll often have to build manufacturies to turn raw material to finished goods that can net you a much higher revenue back in your home port. Each building has it’s own level(for example tannery level 1, level 2, level 3 etc). As you build the higher level of that building it’s efficiency and production times improve.
The user interface isn’t very clear on information you’d expect to see more readily available such as which building is built in a colony. This is exacerbated by the fact that the tutorial is hopelessly unhelpful(which are just text boxes that pop up when you view a particular screen for the first time). It really doesn’t teach you how to play Commander at all. Which might be a weird thing to say for a simplistic trading game like Commander but it is extremely difficult and you can screw yourself over if you made the wrong choice, in either building something too early or expanding too soon.
Things cost a lot, and you’ll be hard pressed to find an interesting game in the beginning. Commander is excruciatingly slow at first. It’s slow to accumulate enough wealth to afford nice ships, more colonies, and build better manufacturies. If that wasn’t aggravating enough, the campaign is a little misleading. To clarify, as a Viceroy, you have four advisors. Royal, military, trade advisor and the arch bishop. Each of these advisors will offer you mission to complete. If you do not complete them by the stipulated time given, their opinion of you sours. If all four of them have very low opinion of you, then it’s game over. You get fired.
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| Some of the UI stuff isn't so great. |
This makes completing missions important to keep them happy. But the trouble is the campaign missions you receive aren’t really the best thing to do to start out a colony. Quite near the beginning of your campaign, you’ll be tasked to build a palace or even a warship. These are extremely expensive and if you just did these, you’d be completely broke. The missions don’t act as a tutorial to help ease the player in to the game at all. The best advice anyone can give you to is to ignore those missions in the beginning and build up you chain of production buildings.
If you get past the slow start which I suspect many people will give up right there, Commander gets a lot better. With finished goods and more profits, the game opens up a lot more. You can build more stuff, and start to build a proper navy. With a proper navy and colony spots on the map getting scarcer, competition among the countries gets more cutthroat.
However, diplomacy is absolutely weak in Commander. In the early game, you’ll hardly have any diplomacy with the other nations or your neighbours. You’ll eventually get offers from nations trying to get you to buy their goods, which in the early game, why would you ever want to do that especially for goods you don’t need? And then there are the nation A or B offering to make a decision for you and are willing to give you a set amount of money. Just what the heck is that? It’s never explained anywhere in the tutorials or in the manual. It seems to improve relation with that nation though.
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| There are coastal fort naval battles! |
Naval Battles
When nations or pirates do attack, you get into a real time tactical battle. There are different settings you could set naval battles, there is simulation, RTS and a direct control mode. The RTS option is the normal way of playing out the battles and it feels accessible and satisfying. Naval battles in Commander don’t play out as slowly as the new Total War games and ships get damaged quicker by cannon fire faster, leading to a much faster pace battle.
Ships automatically follow the leading ship and you can control your entire fleet of ships by just controlling the movement of the lead ship. Removes a lot of micro management that would have been a major issue with any game trying to do naval battles.
Unlike naval battles in other games, naval battles in Commander has terrain. What I mean by this is that there are tiny islands on the battle map or clusters of island that will affect the battle and your maneuverability. This makes sense since if you are fighting in the Caribbean, you’d expect the island to complicate the battle. There are even coastal fort battles where you fight an enemy that has coastal forts around their island. Interesting stuff.
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| The pirates are as puny as this tiny Sloop. |
Pirates Treasure Chest DLC
Nitro Games has released a new DLC content for Commander which adds a Tortuga pirate faction(no diplomacy here). You’ll also get missions to take down a pirate or find pirate treasure(which can pay off quite a bit). These pirates could also be hired as privateers to harass your enemies. A minor content addition which I feel doesn’t add a whole lot to the game.
In Conclusion
Commander: Conquest of The Americas tried to add more depth and interesting ideas onwards from East India Company but fails to deliver an engaging game. It is lackluster on every level and I tried hard to find anything that was good about it. No redeeming qualities and nothing hooked me on to the game. I constantly kept hoping it would get better as I played on, but it never did, at least for me. I was only hoping to be done with playing it and finishing this review. Try the demo first.
UPDATE: Since I wrote this review, Nitro Games has released patch 2.0 for Commander and has put in video tutorials in the main menu. It still doesn’t explain the smaller details that I needed to know. They’ve also tweaked some of the missions so that they don’t trigger at inappropriate time.
Pros:
- Managing colonies is a step up from East India Company sterilised cities.
- Tactical naval battles are decent even though lacking the visual flair of a Total War game.
- If you have the patience to stick with the slow and boring start, it gets a bit better later. Still not great.
Cons:
- Lack of a proper tutorial.
- Expect plenty of restarts since it’s easy to screw things up.
- Starts off real slow.
- Poor documentation.
- User interface is very uneven. There are certain parts the games UI is good(the auto trading screen is quite good and easy to use) and in other parts, extremely bad and finicky. Selecting your colonies is a bit difficult when zoomed out using the mouse and stuff like the colony building screen is awful.
- Weak diplomacy.
Verdict: Disappointing and lackluster
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