Is Rise Of Nations as good as it is said to be?

[Sneakgab]

I'm starting to have doubts after looking at it's homepage. It seems like a worse version of Empire Earth in some ways with less graphics and far less units and unit variety. The politics,diplomacy,trading,e.t.c that the game boasts of seem to be sparse and of little importance. The politics and diplomacy only occur in the singleplayer campaighn (''excuse for being to lazy to make a real campaighn by just making a map campaighn'' type nonsense means that only the multiplayer is significant) and from visiting forums trading does not seem to be very important (The ''trading'' of valuable materials is just setting up a merchant camp at the rescource mine in question)

Correct me if I'm wrong, but this is the way the game seems without having played it.

BTW, don't comment on how good or interesting the map-campaighn might be, as regardless, I hate single-player campaighns without a storyline

[Khan]

Well there is wuite a lot of units and varience, and the game does have a different 'feel' for the different races, but largely you are right. The single player is very feeble, like a watered doen version of the total war series. Trading does play a bigger part than you think though. Trading routes can be set up between yours and your allied towns increasing your income, but this soon becomes tedious as you get more and more cities. The system of rare rescources is also very boring and tedious as the first few minutes of the game consist soley of scouting out the best resouces and acquirting them (exageration).

If multiplayer is your thing then this game is certainly not for you. It is very laggy (I have ADSL) and there are very few people who play it anyway.

So, yes, you have this game down pretty well.

DO NOT GET IT

[Sneakgab]

Thanks, I thought the sites were exagerating for some strange reason... I mean... 9.4 for graphics lol, one look at just a screenshot shows that the graphics do not deserve 9.4

[Khan]

Yeah a 7 would be generous and the zoom is absolutely useless. The zoon in is not detailed enough and the zoom out is not far out enough for a good overall management screen.

[Timenn]

The graphics are not really bad, but they are also not very good.

About the units, the unique units of the nations are not very important. They are just the bit stronger versions of the normal ones, and they are soon replaced by the information age units, so that at the end no nation has unique units left anymore.

But the Nation's powers are quite useful. They make some difference, but not really that much. It makes you prefer some Nations above others, but if you play with Nations which you prefer you are not really better then that you play with Nations you don't prefer.

The zoom is not very helpful. You can best have the middle zoom (of three possible zooms) and you can't rotate the camera.

The way you gather resources takes time to build up, but when you have done that you don't need to look after it anymore, you don't need to seek new forests or build new farms.

If you are playing the game for some time you will have your hands full of upgrading all kind of stuff, spend time to your military and building new cities with the resource improvements. This is annoying when you are playing the computer who has many hands and eyes to control everything, and you are limited to one view and one order at the time.

The game is practically rush or be rushed in the beginning, but when you are at the later ages you can build units so fast that while you are fighting a battle both sides can bring in enough reinforcements to make the battle take ages.

And you have also Airborne units from which a group of 10 can level an entire city + the resource buildings if you don't have enought fighters to protect the, since you can't do that by building ground based anti-air.

The sounds are not really good, you don't hear nice sounds when selecting and moving units, except for a dog barking when you move and select your scout.

The music at the other hand is quite good, and varies and there are special tracks for combat situations.

Multiplayer is indeed laggy (I tried it over LAN) while both computers + the network were fast enough.

Overall I would say that the game is quite nice to play, but it bores after a too short time. Especially since there are no scenario's except for a campaign which you can compare to the Emperor - Battle for Dune campaign, but then it has no missions within the territory fights, and there are no special missions (like the Heighliner/Homeworld/Emperor Worm) even not when you attack a Nation's capitol.

[bob_fox]

It's not too bad. I like the graphics (call me crazy), but the gameplay's far too 'light' for me (compared to Age of Empires, for instance). And...NO WALLS - that's crazy! Otherwise the game's quite fun...for a while, as Timenn just said.

[Tio_Holtzmann]

this game apparently won gamespot's pc game of the year............and strategy game of the year.....don't sound too much fun to play.

i'm like "what?!"

it looks like just another strategy game. i'm sorry but there have been far far FAR too many bad strat games coming out.

sorry for sounding nihilistic - i just feel that more people like the rts-style of good, accesible strategy rather than anything that gets too complicated, like rise of nations seems to......

[Timenn]

Well, I wouldn't call Rise of Nations very complicated. There isn't much variation in the units like you have in Emperor were every unit really has a different effect. And in Rise of Nations every unit does a different amount of damage against specefic unit types. Like you have a "good vs infantry" infantry and a tank unit. And also both a infantry unit and a tank unit which are "good vs vehicles", but nothing more. To recall the classic Emperor again, the Mongoose was really different then the Assault Tank for example, although they both had anti-armor weapons, they needed to be put to use in different domains.

And the fact that you need to worry about much things at one time (resources/upgrading/building cities/military) doesn't make it complicated, but "more work" is a better term.

Don't worry about all the prizes going around on the internet, they don't mean so much as all the reviews done by many people on all kinds of forums

[Apollyon]

It's fun but gets boring fairly quickly. It *is* the best AOE type game though (not hard hehe).

[Timenn]

I disagree with that. I think the current last Age of Empires game is the best of the Age of Empire type of games (Age of Mythology)

It's a lot more fun to play since you aren't wasting so much time with boring things as you were doing in Rise of Nations, and you have more variated units, with all those myth units, and you have more classes of units then one (4 pantheons to choose from)

Sure it is nice in Rise of Nations to climb up all to the Information Age and to the future technologies, but isn't enough to counter all the fun things in Age of Mythology, where you have also a campaign with fun scenario's, which Rise of Nations doesn't have.

(Of course these are all opinions)

[Khan]

I agree AoM was the best game (for me) from the AoE series.

[Terror]

Nah, i'd say AoE 1 or 2 was the best. For it's time probably AoE 1... but i enjoyed AoE2 most of all.

AoM was somewhat of a letdown to me.

[jav barri]

get medieval total war you fools, or wait for rome tw mmmm

[Khan]

I already have M:TW, and I;'m already an admin on an RTW board, what more do you want?