Commerce is the cornerstone of East India Company, so its only natural for it to take up most of your time, as it requires careful planning each step of the way. Your vessels are engaged in a two-way trip between your home port, the only trading point in Europe, and foreign cities far away into the East. Deciding which goods should be traded is going to make all the difference between prosperity and bankruptcy and the game presents you with a few tools to assist you in this subtle operation.

Arguably the most useful instrument in choosing the merchandise you want to export and import is the trading panel, providing you with all the information you need about the prices of goods that are being sold in every port. Basically you get a lucid view about the demand of goods in each city, so you can load up the ships with the most lucrative commodities to maximize the profits. Naturally the most expensive goods are the ones generating the highest revenue, and these are called main trade goods, available in most Indian ports and some African ones.

Once again a question arises and you'll have to decide between investing your time in micromanagement, or settle with the more straightforward way of setting automated trade routes. Taking care of each ship individually and personally choosing the purchases in every port will result in higher income at the end of the year, but this can easily turn into a tedious activity that will weed out the less dedicated players. Another major inadequacy of automated trade routes is flooding the home port with certain goods, that eventually leads to dramatic decline in their value, greatly reducing your profit.