Winds Of Trade

So far I have played about 100 hours of this excellent game, and thought I'd give it a thumbs up with a quick reveiw because there are not many reveiws yet, and many of them refer to earlier versions. If you've ever played a Port Royale or Patrician game, you'll get the hang of it pretty quickly, but there are differences, such as the fluctuating market prices, which vary much more realistically. Also, there is a stock exchange, and your decisions regarding buying and selling goods in the various ports will have a direct effect on share prices. You can make big money investing in a company, supplying it with raw materials and selling their products. Countries may go to war, and issue contracts to spy on enemy territory, or transport troops or supplies, or they may undertake public works and require construction materials to be transported. If you're on good terms with a country, you will be able to establish your own settlements in their borders, and these settlements provide you with free goods to sell or supply your own invested-in companies. Companies will also issue contracts for supplies or transportation of their executives to other towns. Towns will grow and establish new businesses as they are supplied with goods and these businesses will level up, increasing their productiviy and profitability. I'm a bit of a pacifist so I've played this with combat turned off, but it's an option. You may be attacked by pirates if you have a valuable cargo, or you may choose to play conquest mode and attack your competitors ships in an effort to bankrupt them. Combat is a hexgrid turn based easy to understand system. There's been some criticism of the random gen maps, but I actually think they work quite well for this kind of game, and offer more replayability than other similar trading games. Each one is different, wih countries, goods production, and investment opportunities changing with each new map. There are even jumbo maps now for those that want them. I think this is much better than either Port Royale or Patrician, which had fixed maps, towns and production and therefore less replayability. Altogether, this is a great game, with a realistic economy; atmospheric music; authentic looking ships that react to the wind direction; lots of variety of goods, types of businesses, investment opportunities; the option to turn off combat, or enable unlockable features, being contracts, loans, stock exchange and settlements from the start of the game; the ability to play as a trader, privateer, smuggler or investor; and lots of replayability. I look forward to playing more, and recommend it highly to anyone interested in trading games.

Ok, so I got this game, when I read that excerpt that said. . . "Winds Of Trade is a strategy game about running an ocean trading company in the 18th and 19th centuries." I was really excited. I thought this game was going to be exactly what the doctor ordered. It looked like a fun, well thought out, simple and yet somewhat deep trading econ game. I read the 18th and 19th centuries, and thought that was wonderful. That is when the whole world was open for trading. You had ships going from the East Indies to America, and from Europe to South America, and EVERYTHING in between. What a WONDERFUL era to have a trading game, in this style, where you can create a company, and make a trading empire that spans the globe. The only thing is, NO YOU CAN'T. The game uses procedurally generated maps?!?! Not only that, but they are TINY procedurally generate maps! You get some fake countries, fake cities, on some fake islandds that make you feel claustrophobic. The map is so small, you do not ever feel like you are in charge of an Ocean Trading Company. It is more like a large lake trading company. At MOST it is a small sea trading company, with the amount of cities in the game from the generated maps, no way in hell you can consider that an ocean trading company. STAY AWAY from this game, if you thought you were getting a game that had expansive possibilities. This game is very limited in scope, which ruins all the fun in my opinion. This game is ONLY worthwhile if the dev realizes that creating Earth, with the hundreds of port cities that were bustling centers of business during the 18th and 19th centuries OR barring that, you add the option to alter the size of the generated maps, to be MUCH larger than what is currently available.. YES, this would be very labor intensive, I am sure of that, but it would mean you are creating something that no other game as done since Uncharted Waters: New Horizons for the SNES. Kalypso doesn't do anything more than small sections of the world in each of their games, which limits those in scope too. If someone could take the time to create the entire world, then that would be something worth spending money on. This though. . .well this is similar to windwar, except turn based battles, and inferior graphics. This game is not expensive, and at it's current price point, it is definitely possible to be a decent purchase, but not with what is available in game at this time. The trading system is very basic, and the maps are so small, most people will most likely be disappointed. You will have to make your own judgement, but I expect many people will refund this game shortly after buying it, because of the things I listed, not to mention other things like not being able to put ships into fleets, not being able to attack other ships, or the fact that pirates are invisible and just attack out of nowhere. That last one actually is ok to me, but the fact that there seems to be no recourse for dealing with pirates, such as finding and raiding their base, does make you feel too powerless. In closing, don't burn your money on this game at this time, but if you really like the idea of this game, just WAIT for the dev to get wise and add some basic features that should have been available on release. I don't think this game is early access, though some say it is. It seems like it should be though, and needs lots of work to be worth more than $3-$5.

I had high hopes for this game; managing ships and sailing around selling goods from destination to destination. However, after 15 hours of play I have come to the conclusion that a lot of work still needs to be done in the game. Some issues that I had playing -You can't jointly carry contract goods in different ships - everything has to be loaded in the same ship. -When loading and unloading ships you have to do it manually for each ship; I'm not against this being an option but when you have a fleet of ships you should be able to load and unload the whole fleet at once. -Difficulty is adjusted on a single slider. Could have been much better to have multiple sliders for starting money and pirate attacks for example -When you are attacked it just randomly happens at the whim of the RNG. Likely the game would have been better if things like Pirates or Faction Ships appeared 'on' the map. -Economy is really easy to abuse. You can ship some Gold for example to a Jewelers shop for a tidy sum; and if there is too much Gold its value doesn't really depreciate enough to stop you from buying it all at a reduced price and then sailing to the next Jewelers shop. -This isn't a combat game but the combat could be fleshed out a lot more. All in all the potential for a good trading simulation game is here but it needs to be fleshed out more to be worth it.

When I launched the game for the first time I thought it was going to be something simple like buying stuff here and sell it over there, but soon I realized things weren't going to be that simple. In the beginning I started to go back and forth between an handful of cities just to win little money sometimes and lost it most of the time. Then I started to check the news, pay attention to the hints and research some more on the market prices and other extra info. That's when the missions became available and it added just another thing to consider when travelling between cities too far away. At this point I'm pretty sure I'm still far for having exhausted all the features from the game :) These are the things I liked the most so far: [list] [*] The gameplay it's really hooking once you get to understand the mechanics of the game [*] The graphics are really nice, some details are missing but overall it's a good experience to watch [*] Music does its job pretty well, never getting bothering and playing well with the ambient sounds [/list] There are some cons, though [list] [*] There should be a little tutorial, I have to confess that it took me a couple of minutes to understand how to move the ship [*] The gameplay can have some slowdowns on a 4k display with a Geforce 860M board on a laptop when using that resolution, which makes sense but it's worth noticing [/list]

Winds of Trade is an interesting game with a lot of potential to be the big trade game of 2017. That said, around launch (mid February 2017) the game is a little rough around the edges, and has room for improvement. In the first nine days after launch there have been four patches that added quality of life improvements and bug fixes, as well as a tutorial to explain the basics of the game. So far, the developers have been very receptive to feedback from the community and seem very committed to work with the community to turn this into the great game it can be. Winds of Trade probably could have launched in early access for a month or two, but what's done is done. The developers are actively improving the game post-launch, so for me that's fine too. If you want to experience a richer, more fully featured game, add the game to your wishlist and "Follow" to get updates for patches, then check back in a few weeks. Current features: - Randomly generated world with 20 cities, spread across a few islands with multiple countries. - 20 different goods, with production trees that require input materials to produce their output. - Prices that fluctuate based on supply, demand and availability. It's not as immediate as in Patrician, which causes some balance/exploit problems right now. The devs are looking into this. - Industries in cities level over time, and new ones might appear once a city grows larger due to being supplied with goods. - Some goods are illegal in certain countries, but smuggling is a real possibility (with risks). - Different ships have different trade-offs, as well as an upgrade system to customize each ship with different types of sails or cannons. Different cities have different upgrades! - Automated trade route system, which unlocks once you have 3 ships. - Contract system with different assignments/quests to transport specific packages between cities, or to supply a city with a type of good. - Option to start the game with all "unlockable" features unlocked. This is great for a second play through (or a third, or a fourth...) - Stock market for non-player companies (think Industries in Railroad Tycoon), that works based on actual performance. This unlocks once you have 9 trade licenses. - Turn-based combat with pirates, though your faster ships have a good chance of getting away from them, and not risking themselves to be sunk. - Colonies, which unlock once you are friendly with a city/country (haven't used this feature yet). - Events that change the circumstances in the game. Two countries might go to war, and they start issuing assignments to transport troops or arms to the front lines. Demand for arms goes up, and by proxy the demand for iron and coal. A country might have a bad harvest, and it will produce less food for a while, affecting prices. This is pretty long list of features, but there are a number of rough edges on using them, or at least some room for improvement. Some of the unlockable features are not visible until you meet the criteria for them, possibly leading you to believe the features don't exist early on. Price tables were not sortable at launch, but they are now thanks for a patch. A lot of places now have useful popups with price information, and cities show how much resources they consume. There are unfortunately no fleets in the game, yet, but you can copy orders from one ship to another if you want to have multiple ships work the same route. You can add ships to control groups, similar to how that works in strategy games, but that is only useful if you are manually trading. Fleets might stand a better chance against larger pirate fleets. The map size can not be changed, which is something quite some people asked about. This might get addressed, but the devs stated they chose this size to balance world size with keeping it small enough so you can know and remember all the cities in the world. In my game so far (4-5 hours of gameplay) I have Trade Offices in 9 cities across two countries, and I don't find myself wishing for more cities yet. Easier management of trade routes and a better insight into trade opportunities between cities is something I find myself thinking about more... because larger cities tend to both produce and consume a lot of different goods and thus you find yourself studying the cities and making notes about what each city needs and what they produce in excess. The second patch added a tooltip to prices in the "for sale" list of a city, so you can put the city's price in context with the lowest/highest price, as well as the average. The fourth patch added insight into a city's domestic consumption of resources, which makes it clear that they consume a *lot* of resources. TL;DR: this game has a lot of interesting systems in it. A game of this complexity is difficult to get right in one go. Luckily the devs are producing patches every few days to address smaller and larger concerns. Check out the discussions, and the patch notes, and use that to judge whether you want to buy the game for its current features and future potential, or whether you want to wait until more of the potential has been realised.

Update 03/11/2017: In the latest Beta the algorithm is finally fixed, so I can give a thumbs up, especcialy for the dev for listening to the users. Thanks Original review: First of all I do like this type of games. The Patricians, Rise of Venice etc. all are my favorites, so I really wanted to like this game but unfortunately I can't. The game has a lot of interesting new ideas, however the graphics are far from the similar ones, but this wouldn't be the problem. The problem is the algorithm of the supply and demand system, which is basically the core of the game. We can call it to an "exploit" (like mentioned here: http://steamcommunity.com/app/576260/discussions/0/1473095331503624096/ ) or whatever, but the game simply fails in its core because of this nonsense issue. However, the solution has done by the other similar games, it would be just a matter of time to implement something similar. [strike]But it seems the Dev doesn't care [/strike].* I was waiting for almost month to get any feedback from the Dev before this review but the time was here to speak up. It's sad to see that such a good idea failed. I won't ask for a refund, I still hope I can change this review to positive one time... *update 30/09/2017: finally something is happening here http://steamcommunity.com/app/576260/discussions/0/1520386297688391237/

Winds of Trades is a trading game that is accessible enough and streamlined for newcomers but has enough features and personality to hold the attention of fans of the niche. Positives + The political and stock market mechanics are well-implemented and offers multiple approaches to the game. + Developter solicits feedbacks and regularly updates game with said feedback. + Smuggling illegal goods is a great feature. + World events that can affect the game add a lot of charm and keep things from being too predictable. + Fairly large selection of ships and upgrades. Neutral o The game's dynamic simulatoin of an economy is both its greastest strength and obstacle; there is a fair amount of menus to help you understand overall prices of all colonies in one screen, but the player seems to be forced to look up each town to understand consumption and plan their strategy accordingly. o Can be hard to predict the level of demand and drop of prices when selling goods, but maybe that's a fault against me rather than the game. o Combat is rather plain, but is fairly balanced. Negatives - Have to manually select each ship when they are in a fleet to trade goods, they are not "consolidated" all at once. - I'm probably being picky here but when selling a good it would be nice to have the tool tip pop up showing lowest/highest price like it does when you buy goods. - I may be wrong here but other than establishing colonies later on you can't build up existing colonies industries like you can Patirician. Overall it offers a good value for the price, looking forward to how this game evolves and what the developer has to offer in the future.

[u]What is Winds of Trade? [/u] Winds of Trade is a trading game with randomly generated maps, but taking ship types, traded commodities and music from the real-life 18th century. [u]What is it like? [/u] In Winds of Trade, you take on the role of a high-sea entrepreneur. You start with a ship and trading office in one city and aim to build a vast merchant empire. In order to do so, you’ll need to haul commodities from place to place. An interesting (and I think good) piece of game mechanic is that in order to trade in a city, first you need to build a trade office there, the price of which goes up as you have ever more offices. Thus, you need to plan a bit and decide where it’s most lucrative to open your next office. Goods obey the basic laws of supply and demand – a product will [i]usually[/i] be cheap where it’s produced and expensive where it’s consumed. There are different places where you can learn about general prices of goods in the various cities – in a dedicated goods prices view or the world map. The accuracy (or lack of such) of the goods’ prices is one of the features that sets Winds of Trade apart from similar games. Most of the time, the reported price of a product in a city will be based on rumors and be several days old, meaning that it’s not necessarily accurate. To get actual, up-to-date info about the prices, you can upgrade your trade office in any city to the 3rd level, which will then give you accurate prices for [i]that city[/i], updated every other day. The game also contains a stock market where you can buy in-game companies shares. Then, if you transport that business’ products (and, in the case of non-raw material goods, supply that business with its needed resource), you can actually have a positive impact on the stock price. The map is divided into fictional countries, and your actions influence your relationship with them – trade a lot with their cities and do random quests for them and it increases, but trade with their enemies and it will get worse. A typical weakness of such games is a lack of direction, which is especially felt when the player has managed to build a successful company. Winds of Trade tries to avoid this by giving the player the option to start with a victory condition, which can be being the first company to reach a company value of 1 million coins, having the highest company value in 10 years or remaining the only trade company in the game. Sea battles (you yourself can go ahead and attack competitors’ ships!) are handled in a not-too-complicated way – it plays out on a separate battle screen, with the players taking turns and giving orders to all their ships during their turn; when two ships come in range of each other, they can shoot at each other with all their cannons and if a ship sustains enough damage, it sinks. It’s a simple system, but works well enough. There are so many things I could write about, like quests, rumors, ship upgrades, smuggling, etc., but this review is already a wall of text, so I’ll just conclude by saying that the game has a large number of nifty features that enhance the gameplay. [h1]What’s good[/h1] [list] [*]A solid market system with some interesting new features. [*]Nice variety of commodities to trade, complete with multi-level industries. [*]Some very nice humor, like a country declaring war on another one because they don’t have anything better to do. [*]Great, baroque-like soundtrack. [/list] [h1]What’s not-so-good[/h1] [list] [*]Even with the in-game tutorial, some things remain unclear, for example what exactly is needed for cities to expand or how to get them to improve their industries. [*]Even with the large number of products in the game, cities are too similar to each other and the player has no real incentive to expand beyond a handful of cities. Whole regions of the map may go unused because there’s nothing there the player can’t get closer by. It would be another case if the game had region-specific goods, procuring which would force the player to establish offices all over the map. [/list]

This game is disappointing. Probably the worst trade game I've played. I've been trying to work out the best way to say why but its tricky. Its poor for a 2017 release, its poor as a trade game, its poor as a sea based game, its poor as a strategy game.... its just not good. Okay, so 12 years prior to this games release, Sid Meier's Pirates was released. An RPG about pirates! Its a better trade game than this. I'm a little incensed that a game (12 years senior to this) with a focus on naval combat can have a trade side note that's better than this trade based game. not to mention, the towns are better, the graphics were better, the map, the sailing, the combat... Every aspect of this game is beaten hands down by a pirate RPG from 2005... not to mention every trade game I've played. The business side is a cheap ripoff of Railway Tycoon, (1990) The Combat is a dodgy version of something like Alpha Centauri (1999) the map is like its out of the mid 90's I mean i could go on, but why bother?

I purchased this game because I have played similar trading games of this type in the past and enjoyed them. However, this one failed to capture my attention. Game play is slow moving and sluggish, so I just could not get myself drawn in enough to play it longer.