Drew and I have spent the last several months working on the second edition of John Company. What began as a small cleanup is growing to a more comprehensive redevelopment. I'm pretty excited the process, which is, in general, yielded a cleaner and more powerful central model.
This morning, I've been spending a lot of time looking through some critical sources I used for the first game, history books, espeically things like K. N. Chaudhuri's astounding and detailed The Trading World of Asia and the East Indian Company 1660 - 1760. 
Along with another half dozen or so books, this volume formed the backbone of the model I built for the first edition of John Company. However, as Drew and I have adjusted the event system, it became clear that the old economic model had severe limits and needed replaced.
To do that, I've readjusted our research strategy. Rather than relying mainly on secondary works, we're drawing a lot more on primary documents, such as advertisements and memoirs to inform the scope of player activities in the different corners of the company.
This is partly coming from a lesson I've been learning while working on Oath about vantage points. When working on huge subjects, it's important to really ground players in a single perspective.
John Company 1e, for all of its merits, sometimes created a bit of a fly-by effect. The event system was a good example of this. One player would run it. India would shift in one way or another, but it often felt abstract because the players weren't grounded properly.
So, in thinking through exactly how much power a regional president or writer might have and the kinds of pressures upon them, I'm doing my best to look from the ground up.
Thankfully so many folks on the ground floor wrote about their experience. James Forbes has an excellent memoir that recounts his early career in the company and his slow movement through its many offices. You get lots of peeks into the risks of being a clerk in the company.
At the same time, there is so much unsaid on every page! These memoirs were meant for public consumption and are tightly curated by their authors to present a certain image of India and the British trade operations therein.
I don't have access to nearly as many documents from Indian merchants but much can be triangulated by simply looking at the same event from a few different perspectives and using secondary sources. (I'll do a full thread on this later because the results are fascinating!)
So far this effort has largely reinforced the general narrative and argument of the first game which emphasized the degree to which the Company's military elements got ahead of both executives in Leadenhall and their superiors in the subcontinent.
But my hope is that this research help us improve the game's new economic and event models and will make the pressures of the game's subject more immediate to its players. In this effort, there's simply no substitution for first-hand accounts.
