East India Company is another helper Wonder. The tech being helped is
Corporation. (It also requires
Navigation, but that's to avoid it acting too strangely.)
Corporation is in a weird situation right now. I call it a "shadow" one-trick-pony tech because it looks like it has a lot but really does not. The only thing that Corporation can call its own is
Wall Street; it also used to have the bonus to Whaling Boats before that was removed. All of the current in-game corporations require at least one Industrial or Modern Era tech, and all of those techs go through
Steam Power. I haven't removed Corporation from the corps because I don't want to mess anything up with the
Realistic Corporations option. (I did remove Corporation from the Corporate stores once I started pruning redundancies.) I don't really want to use Corporation mechanics on EIC, so it is a regular Wonder.
The difficult thing for me is giving EIC a distinct identity so that it is different from
Adam Smith's Trading Company. I don't want to lose Adam Smith, as it is a great fit for Economics (although Economics is a very healthy 5 tricks without Adam) and Renaissance Wonders are hard to come by. So the mechanic that I went with to give EIC its own identity is that it provides free
Spices (scaled by world size, like Hit Movies from Hollywood). I'd be interested in anything else anyone wants to suggest; I thought about something related to Vassal States if it was doable in XML. One thing I have at least considered is borrowing the idea of Platyping's
Empire State Building and have EIC produce
random resources, although I would limit it to a list of luxury tropical resources and leave out all of the animal and strategic resources.
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