Review for Rise of Nations: Thrones and Patriots
Excellent new nations; great campaigns; governments; launching nuclear missiles. The Dutch are underpowered in aggressive games; even more "clicky" than before; strategic A.I. in campaign is a bit weak.
Expansion packs are often built around themes. Sometimes it's a series of campaigns on a particular subject or a bunch of new units or perhaps an entire new race. Thrones & Patriots, on the other hand, doesn't bother with any of that nonsense. It appears the team at Big Huge Games looked at the original Rise of Nations and decided that if it ain't broke, don't fix it. They just threw a whole bunch of new stuff into the game, including new civilizations, new campaigns, and some new gameplay mechanics. In lesser hands, that could have turned into a random mishmash of unbalanced "features" that messed up a perfectly wonderful game. Thrones & Patriots, though, is a wonderful, well-integrated collection of additions that makes an incredible game even better.
Refight Vietnam.Let's start with the six new races that have been added to the game. Like the eighteen available in the original game, each of the six new nations has their own special abilities, powers, weaknesses, and quirks that diehard players are even now arguing about on Internet message boards. Each nation seems well-designed to fill in some strategic weakness in the original game. The Americans and the Dutch will appeal to (respectively) research junkies/late game players and micromanagers who love squeezing out other players using money. The Persians and the Indians are for "turtlers" and builders, plus they add in the incredibly fun elephant units that didn't make it into the original game. The last two empires are the Lakota and Iroquois, whose stealth abilities will initially foul up a number of the more common multiplayer strategies.
The beauty of each of these empires is that they all display the incredible balance (both internally and with respect to the original eighteen) that were the hallmark of Rise of Nations. I don't envy the developers the task of making sure that now 24 different sides available in the game are all fun to play, strong enough to be viable in any game situation, yet don't have any huge disadvantages against any other nation. Somehow, though, they pulled it off.
Granted, I'm quite sure that even now, dedicated players are busily looking for killer strategies and exploits, but after playing each of the new nations against players across the 'Net, I certainly couldn't find any major weaknesses. In fact, any elements I disliked about a particular nation could easily be attributed to that nation being incompatible with my own play style. As a defensive research person who races to the endgame, for example, I loved the Americans and hated the Dutch. Whenever I played them, the Dutch's advantage in commerce and comparatively slow knowledge acquisition inevitably found me with more money and fewer resources than I really needed and being overrun by players two technological ages ahead of me.
The American sack of ... Havana?The rest of the game's new on-the-battlefield additions include three new "Wonders" and an old Civilization standby -- governments. Governments are created when the brand-new senate gets built. As players advance technologically, they get to choose three of six mutually exclusive upgrades along with a new "Patriot" ¿ber-unit similar to the "General." Each of these decisions offers a possible domestic or military benefit. In practice, that means that you can steer the development of your civilization at various points to take advantage of the strategic situation. A mostly peaceful player can get a few military bonuses to help defend him, and a more aggressive player can get help making sure the economy runs smoothly.
The beauty of all these additions is how utterly natural they feel in the context of the game. Indeed, it's easy to imagine a scenario where someone who hasn't played the game in a couple of months might be shocked to realize that something like governments hadn't been part of the game the whole time. That's because no one particular element of the game stands out by dramatically altering the way the game is played. Rather, each of the new features merely opens up new strategic options. They make an already rich game even richer without fundamentally changing what made it so good in the first place.
The new units, races, and Wonders are reason enough to buy Thrones & Patriots -- especially if you enjoy multiplayer. What really puts this expansion pack over the top, though, are the additions to the sadly underrated single-player campaign.
It's cold in here. There must be some war in the atmosphere.
Thrones & Patriots adds four new single-player scenarios to the game. Three of them focus on a smaller slice of the world. Gamers can try to follow the footsteps of Alexander the Great, conquer Europe as Napoleon, or re-live the European colonization North America. The only one that gives a truly global challenge is "The Cold War," which lets players re-create the infamous game of nuclear brinksmanship from either the Soviet or American point of view. These campaigns are uniformly excellent, and all of them offer fascinating and endlessly repeatable challenges.
Unlike the original campaign, the maps that players fight on during individual skirmishes are not only better in design, but also more accurately reflect the regions they're supposed to represent. Fight a battle in the Northwestern territory during the American colonization campaign and you'll be facing a landscape filled with dense forests and narrow clearings that play to the strengths of the two new Native American civilizations. Re-fight the Korean War during the Cold War scenario and you'll get an excellent sense of the awesome strategic challenge that faced American and South Korean war planners when it came to pushing past the 38th parallel -- along with the potential political costs of doing so.
Even better, new "meta-game" gameplay mechanics have been added to the scenario that make each of them more tightly focused and do an excellent job of getting you into the mindset of the game. The Cold War scenario, for example, adds the ability to build and place nuclear missiles on the map along with a "Defcon" meter that reflects the mood of your opponent. Make too many bold moves and nukes are flying like there's no tomorrow. The Alexander and Napoleon scenarios offer players various choices relating to how conquered peoples are treated that have profound effects on how the game plays out. The game's diplomacy and negotiation system has also been beefed up, which allows much more of the game to be played out on the strategic map instead of the battlefield.
History repeats.
Probably the worst thing that could be said about Thrones & Patriots is that the developers missed an opportunity to clear some of the extremely minor issues that were identified when the original game was released. The A.I., for all its virtues when it comes to managing the individual movements of units and citizens, can be a little too strategically brain dead. This is especially noticeable in the Cold War scenario where it's fairly easy to beat the Soviet Union with an industrial output victory. The game is still very "clicky," and the new senate building makes this worse. There are so many upgrades, units, and pieces of technology to research in different buildings that the use of hotkeys and micromanagement is a necessity, not an option, especially in online games.
Still, those are quibbles put in more for the sake of completeness than anything else. Thrones & Patriots proves once again why Big Huge Games is in the process of building an almost flawless reputation previously held by RTS stalwarts Blizzard and Ensemble. It's an extraordinary addition to an already extraordinary game -- one that fits so seamlessly into the original title that once you've played it's almost impossible to imagine a complete Rise of Nations experience without it.
Reviewer System Specifications
Pentium 4 2.53 GHz, 1 GB RAM, Windows XP, DirectX 8.0, 128 MB GeForce4 Ti 4600 video card, SoundMax sound card, 16x DVD-ROM drive, 120 GB hard-disk space, Mouse, Keyboard.