A good game, but not groundbreaking. Graphics apart, Rise of Nations was much better
First things first: The game looks great. Really. It's a major improvement over Rise of Nations "so-so" graphics. BUT there are some problems here. The gameplay is kinda slow BECAUSE they chose to make the units so big and flashy. When you see minuscule units small, it's ok because of the scale. When huge units are small, they feel REALLY small. Even worst, units have some animations that delay reaction time, adding a lot of frustration to any atempt to micromanage your army.
Then I startet wondering... maybe this is a macromanagement game. Maybe micro is not that important here... then , boom, there's no way to say it. Not only the building part is really simple (along with a very simple resource system, if not shallow in comparison with Rise of Nations one), but because you use hero units.
Now, hero unit WERE taken from Warcraft 3. There's no way to deny it. They work EXACTLY the same here. Yet, they probably didn't like the "Creeping" for WC3 (If you didn't play that game - your heroes gained levels on XP, and you killed neutral beasts to gain XP and make your heroes powerhouses)... and in RoL they have no XP. Your hero can waste whole ARMIES and it will still be lv 1. How do they grow? On CASH. So, for some reason, they feel an artificial adition to the game.
Back on the graphics - the developers love to say a lot about the organic cities, they should look like real cities... but the huge units and slow gameplay really make them seem more like small sand castles inside some small holes than the metropolis they should be.
Don't misunderstand me - the game is not bad. It has a LOT of fun potential because of great design and interface designs. Yet, all of that positive potential was already in RoN. The hero system simply didn't work with it, they wanted to be trendy and ended up with a spaghetti game, with many mixed sauces.
In my personal experience, RoL feels like one of those attempts to remake a good game with a great graphics engine only to discover that what made the first game great doesn't work as well in the new one. The "softened" economic model, along with the very artificial and "detached" hero system make me, tough feeling a little sad, say this is a "ok" game, not a very good one and sadly inferior to it's predecessor.