Rise of Nations (or RON as it shall from hereon in be known as) is a Real Time Strategy game, written by Big Huge Games with support from Microsoft. This explains the idea for the rather obscure title for this review.
As you probably expect from this type of game, the aim is world domination, with the full scale conquest game starting in the year 4000BC and progressing to modern times with the advance of technologies which that encompasses.
The first task for the player is to decide what type of game you want to play and the associated settings. You can opt for a single game, good if you only have half an hour or so to spare, this type of game can be tailored greatly for example you can choose a small or larger map, there are seven different sizes of map to choose from.
The game also supports LAN and internet play, but I have yet to try this myself so can’t really comment. Since I have lost broadband since moving house I don’t have the will to try this, or the wallet as I now pay by the minute for my connection!
The main part of the game, which most people will be interested in is the conquest mode, where you have to lead your people from the stone age to hopefully the space age, by conquest and technological advancements.
First task is to choose your skill level, easy, medium or hard etc and then decide which race to be, or have one chosen for you at random. This choice is vital as each of the 18 races you can be has it’s own special benefits within the game, not to mention having suitable graphics.
For example if you choose to be British, you have “Power of Empire” which means you can gain more income from those areas you take over and also have special military units such as Longbow Archers and even Lancaster Bombers – but not both at the same time probably. You’ll notice that any cities etc you build look British, whereas the Incas for example have much more “Indian” looking buildings to keep the flavour of the game. As well as having ethnic type graphics for each race, you’ll notice the buildings etc are modernised every time you make a major advancement.
In the Medieval period if you build a fortification you’ll get a castle with battlements, turrets et al and do the same in the Industrial age and it looks more like a Napoleonic fort with emplacements for cannons etc.
The game revolves around two main screens, a World map and the actual in-game screens where the RTS action takes place. The main map is similar to Risk, with the World split into several sectors, usually each representing a country with about 50 locations in total. You also get information regarding armies and special resources shown on the map as well as how your treasury is doing.
You can press a button to see a view of how the whole world is split up, which races are doing the best in terms of percentage of the world taken over and who has been eliminated. You start with just one location, your capital and if that is lost you are knocked out of the game.
You can decide to sit tight on this main screen, effectively missing a turn but building up your strength and money, or go for a battle by moving your army into a neighbouring terretory. You start the game with just one army but can get more if you take over specially marked countries, called resource centres. One strange anomally is that you can cross certain oceans and seas, for example if you are in Britain you can cross into France but not Germany, even if you in the Modern age. Seems a bit strange to me but there you have it.
If you attack a country which nobody else owns, it is considered a barbarian or neutral country and the RTS screen pops up with a fairly easy battle against a usually weak foe. These battles are straightforward military encounters with no need for building up cities etc.
The main event however is when you decide to attack another race, or they attack you! Before you can attack you need to declare war which costs money, but then you are ready to fight.
If you are attacked the aim is to hold on for 90 minutes without being wiped out and if you have attacked you need to wipe out the enemy within 90 minutes.
At the start you have one small city and some military units, with an explorer. A good start is to set the explorer off to “auto-explore” mode and watch his progress on the mini-map at the bottom of the screen which shows the whole area you are fighting in. Get a civilian or two built in the city and as you wait research a couple of advancements in the library.
The key to the game is resources, you need to make sure you have plenty of raw materials for just about everything. These are food, wood, iron, money and knowledge, with oil appearing later in the game.
They are all pretty standard fodder for any experienced RTS player, food is needed for most things and is made when you build and maintain farms, each city can support five farms but each needs a civilian to work one. And guess what? You need food to produce civilians!
More or less any part of the map can produce food, apart from the sea of course (even there you can get fishermen once you research trawlers) but the other resources are harder to track down. Locating you cities is therefore very important, you have no say over the first location but after that you can decide where to found them. Near trees is a good idea to make sure you can chop down wood at lumber-camps and near mountains likewise so you can set up mines to gain iron.
Larger forests and mines are better as more civilians can work there to produce more resources. Build universities to gain knowledge so you can research into new ideas. Money is generated if you build markets and send caravans between cities, with merchants going to special resources which your explorer has by now hopefully discovered, silver etc. As it’s an RTS game by the time you have built a market and the first merchant your explorer should really have found a few of these resources if he’s worth his salt. Oh that reminds me, salt is also a special resource, there are about 20 of them all told.
You can build various other buildings to help your resource production, a granary for example will boost food production. Before you can build a lot of the more useful buildings, you need to research them, which is done at the library.
There are five areas you can research into, Military will allow better troops to be built and more population to be sustained. Civic will allow bigger and more cities to be constructed whilst Commerce allows you to produce more stuff. Science is the area which allows you to come up with new ideas and improvements to existing buildings. Finally, you can improve your Age, for example from Gunpowder age to Industrial.
This is a great undertaking and costs a lot of resources to do, you can only progress a maximum of one stage per battle, which effectively means you are never going to dominate massively against your opponent. There’s no chance of you having Nukes against their bow and arrows for example but it does ensure a closer game and is probably a bit more realistic.
So your aim early on is to deploy the few troops you have to defend your city, send out the explorer and then get your first civilians to work at getting resources. It’s then a case of balancing expansion with the need to produce resources and research into new technology, all the technologies are pretty much as important as each other.
Of course whilst this is going on the enemy is not merely sitting on his hands, but he’ll be doing the same as you at varying levels depending on the skill selected. This is another area where I feel let down slightly by the game as easy is too easy and medium too hard for me, at least so far. I am only fairly green though having only played the game for about three weeks as I got it for Christmas. Yes, normally I have completed a game in this time-scale but RON seems pretty solid, which is a good point. Despite Medium giving me a good kicking so far I don’t think it’s going to be impossible to win, I just need more practise!
One important part of the game is the border, which every race has around their cities. The border is shown on the map and you can only build within this area which you own. If your cities get bigger, or you build strongholds then the borders increase in size to reflect your new power. If your border reaches as far as the enemy border then things get interesting as both sides try to exert their influence on the disputed lands. If you have buildings which fall under the influence of the enemy, if they become stronger in a certain area for example, then attrition means they slowly but surely become derelict and if you don’t do something about it quickly they will be destroyed.
This is a fairly new idea in RTS games, at least I haven’t come across it and it is a welcome addition as it actually gives you a good reason to grab as much land as possible and hold onto it. If you can isolate the opponent in a small area then they will be under pressure as they will find it hard to get enough resources together. It’s far more realistic to implement this in a game of this type as it encourages rapid expansion which is what most of the best despots would have done through history!
Of course eventually it comes down to war, you can’t win this game through peacefull means I’m afraid, which is where the resemblance to Civilization ends. You’ll need to build barracks and stables if you want to produce combat units ready for the final push.
There are dozens of unit types ranging from simple hoplites and slingers up to stealth bombers and nukes. As well as infantry and cavalry you can build siege engines and you’ll need to build supply trucks too as the attrition which affects buildings in enemy territory also affects troops, supplies will help to ease this.
If you have a stronghold you can built a leader, which increases your forces effectiveness and allows for some special orders such as forced march and entrench mode.
The battles themselves are well depicted but move so quickly as to make individual control of units impossible, it does rather fall back to the old cliché of get a big wadge of men and pile into one particular battle, which is a pity as the mechanics of the game would allow for more strategic moves.
When fighting you need to bear in mind some units are weak against certain others and particularly strong against some as well, for this reason it’s a good idea to get a balanced group of different units to help them compliment each other.
The units have enough brainpower to know who and what to attack, but they sometimes get drawn into enemy territory too easily as they do tend to follow the enemy when they retreat. Yes, an RTS game where the enemy actually retreat, I was shocked to see this myself at first. They seem to know when they are beaten and will pull back to a strong zone if needs be and lure your forces into a trap unless you are wary.
The battle ends when you have captured all the cities on the map, or the enemy has done the same to you. I do find that once you have one city the game is a bit of a forgone conclusion, they tend to fling everything into the defence of this one city and after that they are reduced to a pretty spent fighting force, which is a bit of a shame.
Another whinge I have with the game is spies and how they are implemented. You can build spies at strongholds, who can then bribe enemy combat units. In a recent game, I sent a large force against an enemy city in medium level and a spy bribed two or three key units. For the next 5 minutes my forces were engaged in a bloody bit of in-fighting, and once they had killed the turncoat bribed units the enemy turned up with reinforcements.
Bribery is a fair enough part of the game but surely only against isolated units? If you are marching to an enemy capital with 3 trebuchets, a dozen cavalry and archers and some men-at-arms, your trebuchets are hardly going to commit suicide for a few quid are they?
So that’s about it, a really good RTS game with some minor niggles, it rates as one of the best games for the PC this year and possibly the best ever RTS. The extra aspects such as the way research is handled make it seem more than an RTS, you get a Civilization type game thrown in with RISK to boot with the world map phase. However there are equally some extra ideas which the game begs which haven’t been implemented, but if they had been would have made an all time great game. Pity.
The game is playable, fairly easy to learn yet hard to master. Graphically it is pretty and the sound also is good enough to enhance the gaming experience. If you like RTS then this is definitely for you, if not it’s worth considering, but not a “must” buy.
More details
Addictiveness
Compulsive
Originality
Not bad - some good ideas
Value for money
Good value
Longevity/Expected Longevity
a few months
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