Anyone else played Rise of Nations? The idea is basically Age of Empires plus Civilization 3, sped up. A lot.
I’m a fan of Civ 3, but I’m terrible at the game and can never come up with a strategy more sophisticated than “build up as fast as I can to get the space race victory”. And I always feel like I should like RTS’, but never do because I’m terrible at those as well.
But I’m enjoying this game a lot. Its unit hierarchy, and the whole building tree for that matter, may be a little simplistic, but there’s just something cool about seeing the armies go to battle around borders. And the border expansion, my favorite bit of Civ3, has a really cool effect attached to it in Rise of Nations. I just started a “Conquer the World” campaign, and it seems so far as if they got it right – a ton of replayability and a good combination of turn-based and real-time strategy.
So I’d be interested to hear what any “true” strategy fans think of the game.
I have mixed feelings about it and am a huge player of all the Age of’s, including Mythology as well as the Civ series. RoN has finally nailed down a virtually flawless unit control system - select entire army, auto rally to control group or unit, drag box select miliary units without villagers, etc… There are finally real bonuses for flanking and a more significant bonus for the use of counter units. On the other hand, resource gathering and research tech trees have been seriously dumbed down. The dumbing down of the research is the most troubling aspect because that was such a significant part of the Age of’s gameplay. It’s become slightly less strategic but significantly more tactical - It’s taken on a Command and Conquer feel. I thought that there was going to be some real meat to the turn-based part but Conquer the World is a REALLY dumbed down version of Risk. I also sort of miss walls though I understand why they’d be left out. While it’s a great game the improvements over Age of Empires/Mythology aren’t enough to make up for the dumbed down aspect of other areas. If I hadn’t already played so much AoE2 I would probably play alot more RoN.
I’m bouncing up and down over this game. Finally, an empire scale RTS game done right. Shame the society aspects hasn’t been a bit more indepth, but it looks like a really good game.
I’ve played the demo that was over on FilePlanet and I enjoyed it, but “Bigass Horde” was the only tactic that worked for me.