East india company is a nice game..

(sorry for reposting but i guess people like to use half page long quotes and answer with one line of text,thereby overshadowing productive replies)

I think EIC is a pretty weak effort. It promised to be fun but got boring after some hours. You should wait for my review which will appear in some days.

EDIT: my EIC review

Although the game is rather old (2004), I really liked "Port Royale 2" by the German software company Ascaron. Although I have no idea whether it was sold internationally I can really recommend it: trade, fights, missions, pirate hunting, becoming a pirate, building your own town. There are a lot of opportunities. In Germany the game is still available as a budget version for 5,-€

Have played and contributed to the New Horizons expansion for POTC (based in www.piratesahoy.net). I didn't care to touch titles like EIC for their bad reviews.

I'd rather take a heavily modded ancient (openended) game and hammer it into my liking than to shell out $50 for some half finished crap.

Port Royale and Patrician impress me with their economic systems and I play them for the managerial challenge. For actual AoS naval combat action, New Horizons.

Look on the bright side guys, at least the pirate genre isn't as dead as modern naval sims, I'll tell you that much. When was the last pirate game released, and when was the last modern naval sim released?

I recently discovered Civ IV Colonization and it is very good. They kept the gameplay from the original and added very nice graphics and sound. This turned out to be one of the best games similar to Pirates I ever played. What a surprise, for I dislike the cartoon style in Civ4, and i didn't expect anything from it. A few mods are in order to full enjoyment, however, like Origins (brings Colonization 2 much more closer to the original), and I also had to do some tweaks to taxation.