During its time, some veterans of strategy games would have eyed Rise of Nations with more than a little skepticism, especially if their expectations have been colored by strategy games that have very similar themes, such as Age of Empires and Civilizations.
However, a first glance at the game's box cover would dispel many assumptions, the first of which is that it isn't really contending directly with Age of Empires and its ilk, what with Microsoft Game Studios itself helping to publish the Windows version of the game.
Another glance at the description of the game would show that Rise of Nations do not just cover the archaic ages that humanity had, but it also includes a representation of the near-modern and modern ages as well.
Of course, these are just first impressions, but upon playing the game proper, the skeptical player would realize that Rise of Nations has a mix of some of the best game designs that had been seen in the strategy genre. It is far from original, but the player is likely to find that this mix is a great blend, as will be shown by several innovative mechanics that it has.
Rise of Nations has not much of a premise, not unlike Sid Meiers' games, which lead designer Brian Reynolds had worked on. The player selects a nation/faction to play as, and then jump into one of the game modes, none of which is burdened with a story.
The Nations are of course the namesake stars of the game (again, not unlike some other history-themed strategy games), though this may seem like window-dressing after the player had examined their designs.
While the promotion of the game has mentioned that there are many units in the game, most of them are shared by all nations, from Stone Age warriors to modern-day main battle tanks. There are unique units for each nation, such as Panzer tanks for the Germans, but these features won't be much of a refreshment to veterans of history-themed strategy games.
There are also differences in the designs of buildings and economies among the different nations, but these concern differences in statistics and building limits instead of different fundamentals in gameplay.
Such tried-and-true designs are of course quite solid, but it can also be a bit of a disappointment. On the other hand, such conventional designs do contribute to gameplay balance among the different nations. The unique units, building restrictions and other minor differences that nations have do give them a bit of an advantage when they do come into play, though they also make the strategies that the players of these nations would take that more predictable.
That is not to say that Big Huge Games doesn't realize this and doesn't try to do something very different though. There are some minor features that encourages the player to think more about how to use units other than just sending them on waypoints towards enemy territory.
The unit designs appear to follow another ages-old design, the rock-and-scissors one where certain types of units are very effective against other types while being vulnerable to certain other types. Big Huge Games does attempt to make such designs feel less old by making it harder to recognize obvious counters and counter-counters. For example, units designated as heavy infantry are usually counters for cavalry, but some cavalry units are designed to crush heavy infantry. This requires players to really know about the opposition that they are going up against.
The upgraded variants of early-game units may also gain new capabilities as the player advances in ages. A notable example is the scout, which upgrades into a commando-like unit that can be used for covert operations as well as stealthy reconnaissance and counter-reconnaissance.
Units also gain extra damage if they attack already-engaged enemy units from other angles; this is the game's way of encouraging flanking maneuvers.
The last, but not least, finishing touch that Big Huge Games has made to have the unit designs in Rise of Nations feel a lot more different from other history-themed strategy game is the sprite designs for units. They may have been drawn and animated using ages-old graphical techniques, but their sprites are very well-detailed such that many of these history-themed units can more than rival their counterparts in other games of the same subgenre in terms of looks. They also happen to have a lot of convincing sound effects too.
(The language used for their voice-overs for them are nation-dependent, but considering that many other history-themed games have already done these, they aren't especially remarkable.)
Anyway, there are two kinds of core gameplay in Rise of Nations: there is the real-time strategy segment, where players rush to build and develop bases with which to churn out armies with, and a turn-based element that will be described later. Nevertheless, the real-time strategy portion of Rise of Nations is the more prominent one.
Typically, at its fundamental level, Rise of Nations' real-time strategy segment plays like another base-building, army-churning and upgrade-purchasing strategy game title. However, there are a few interesting differences.
Firstly, the game designs bases such that they are based more on Civilizations' cities instead of the sprawling complexes that are vulnerable to raids in so many RTS games. The player starts with a single city, and has to both develop this and establish new ones in other places in the map to gain the infrastructure needed to churn out armies with in order to suppress and defeat those of opponents. A player can only have a handful of cities, so much consideration has to be given for their locations.
Of course, in order to develop cities and crank out armies, the player has to gain and spend resources, as was typical with so many strategy games at the time.
Some of these resources would be very familiar to strategy game veterans: food, timber (a.k.a. wood), metal (a.k.a. ore) and wealth (a.k.a. gold). Food is typically needed for just about everything, from the recruitment of manpower-oriented units and their upgrades and the all-important advancement to the next age. Likewise, timber is typically used for constructing buildings. Metal is used for more powerful and advanced units. Wealth is needed for higher-level gameplay, e.g. unlocking technologies and purchasing upgrades.
The purposes of these resources may seem dull to a long-time follower of strategy games (especially those that have played the Age of Empires games), but Big Huge Games has worked in some additional designs to make them far from boring.
Food is gained through building farms, the mention of which would not be eye-opening to a long-time RTS veteran. What would be somewhat surprising though is that farms must be adjacent to cities. Considering that other RTS games had farms that can be plonked down almost anywhere in the map, that Big Huge Games had made the decision to use designs that are more common to turn-based strategy (TBS) games can be rather refreshing.
Anyway, the ramifications are that players are no longer able to hide away clutches of farms to gain food out of the sight of enemies, but their farms are always in danger of being damaged in raids; this means that players are not able to utilize tactics that would contribute to a wearying battle of attrition, as an example like hiding away farms would.
Timber has to be gained from setting up lumber camps next to forests and metal is obtained from building mines next to hills and mountains. These forests and hills/mountains are effectively resource nodes/patches, which are rather prevalent in RTS games, but unlike typical resource nodes/patches, they do not exhaust, meaning that players can continue to gain these resources as long as they can secure them. This is easier said than done, because these resource nodes/patches are very big geographical features that are easy to flank.
The main ways to gain wealth are through setting up land-based trade routes between cities and through taxation, which gives a continuous trickle of income.
Unfortunately, there are no water-based trade routes, which is a disappointing omission. There is an alternative to trade routes in water-bound maps, in the form of special luxury fish shoals that can be fished for wealth, but this is none other than a resourcing method that uses the ages-old resource node design.
Nation-specific perks related to these typical resources (and the less-typical ones too) have been worked into the game. For example, the Egyptian starts with a free granary and can upgrade granaries for free as well as many other benefits that are useful throughout a game session regardless of the circumstances, while Mongols have benefits that are only available if they can control the majority of the map in play, making them a lot harder to defeat if they have gained a strangle-hold.
The implementation of other kinds of resources other than these fundamental four is not new to the strategy game genre; they are intended to introduce more gameplay balance through the economic system, but poor implementation may result in them feeling cumbersome and impractical. Fortunately, Rise of Nations' two additional resources, Knowledge and Oil, are quite well integrated into the gameplay.
Knowledge is only introduced during the Classical Age and is needed thereafter because it is essential to advancement to the next ages. It is also needed to unlock certain high-level upgrades that can be very powerful, such as the ability to create units the instant that they are purchased. They can only be generated through building Libraries next to cities.
Oil is introduced very late into a game session, during the Industrial Age. Oil deposits also become visible on the map by then, and will become hotly contested spots because it is needed for very high-level units that also happen to be important to the end-game stages.
It has to be noted here that gaining resources is not as simple as simply plonking down the necessary facilities. The player needs to send citizens to man them. This game design, which harks from the conventions of RTS games that there has to be worker units milling about resources, can seem rather irritating considering that the rest of the designs for the game's economics are inspired by turn-based games. Of course, it does make raids targeted at opponents' economics viable tactics, but these are also part-and-parcel of this very old design.
Farms and Libraries are not the only facilities that have to built adjacent to cities. In fact, a lot of other facilities need to built adjacent to cities, namely unit-producing structures such as Barracks and Factories. These do not need to be manned by workers (fortunately), but a city cannot support every unit-producing structure.
(Facilities that are built away from a city needs to have a city nearby anyway either.)
This means that the player needs to have cities specializing in the production of certain units. This makes each city vulnerable to targeted raids, but this is a good game design because all-rounded cities contribute to battles of attrition, which are not good for a RTS game.
If the player is running low on certain resources, he/she/it can use the ever-present Market feature to trade wealth for other resources or vice versa, though the prices can fluctuate very wildly. Still, it is a useful feature for players who need that bit more resources to unlock something powerful.
While most other RTS games simply deducts away fixed amounts of resources from the player's stockpiles when units are purchased and placed into production queues regardless of the type of units being raised, Rise of Nations discourages the use of too many units of one kind by increasing the cost of that unit type as the player produces more and more of that unit. This does encourage players to use the strategy of combined arms, but it does restrict specific playstyles, which can be an inconvenience.
In addition to the six aforementioned resources, players will need to manage their unit population capacities. This kind of statistic will be familiar to veterans of RTS games. However, instead of resorting to the usual trope of building houses to increase population limits, the player has to perform military-related research to increase it.
Cities do not just generate resources and churn out armies; they also exude zones of influence onto the map, called "national borders" in this game. National borders can be upgraded to aid the player's own units and impede those of rival players, effectively becoming the player's very direct and tangible way of having a stranglehold on the map instead of just different shading for terrain that gives away the location of cities.
While this feature adds some sophistication to the game, this does seem to make players harder to defeat, which may not be conducive to what is supposed to be a fast-paced game. However, it does somewhat reduce one malaise affecting the RTS genre, which is that armies that have distinct advantages of greater firepower and numbers are very likely to win, with little to no counter for this. Such armies, when they move into enemy territories, can suffer the game's rendition of war attrition, which is simply represented as a small but continuous drain on the health of the invading units. This can be countered with the inclusion of supply trucks in the invading army.
Being under the influence of lead designer Brian Reynolds, Big Huge Games also implements the mechanic of Wonders, which had been established earlier in the empire-building genre.
Typically, Wonders are end-game buildings, made to accelerate a player's victory. Taking a leaf from other franchises like Civilizations, only one of each type of Wonder can be erected in any map in play, and each grants special and unique bonuses. Similarly, successfully completing a Wonder alerts all players to its presence and ownership.
Depending on the settings set for a match, a player can win by building enough Wonders and holding onto them for a certain amount of time, which is not unlike the mechanic used in Age of Empires. However, as a balancing measure, subsequent Wonders become more expensive as the player builds more.
To veterans of history-themed games, the maps that battles are played out in would not seem much different from those that are in games of the same subgenre: there are hills, forests, mountains and weather-dependent terrain types, with the usual accommodation for decals and textures that are applied as battles rage across the map, such as craters that are created from explosions and the tracks in sand and snow that mark the passing of armies.
However, unlike the maps in so many other real-time strategy games, the objects that reside in a map in Rise of Nations generally have gameplay purposes instead of just being useless sprites and furnishings. (They are rather pretty in Rise of Nations though, for a game that still uses 2D graphics.)
There are the aforementioned hills and forests which contribute to the resourcing mechanics of the game, and then there are rare resources, represented on the map as catchy animated sprites.
The player can send merchants over to these rare resources to garner the benefits that they give, which may include bonuses to resource gathering rates and discounts to the costs of the production of certain units.
Defending these rare resources and other resource nodes/patches that are located away from cities can be difficult, so this is where defenses such as towers and forts – and their upgraded variants – come in handy. The player can only build a limited number of these, but they are surprisingly tough to destroy (at least without artillery) and can dish out a large amount of damage in a short time, making them very useful to defend these otherwise very vulnerable places with.
The above-mentioned designs for the real-time battles of the game would have made Rise of Nations more than decent already, but the inclusion of Risk-like elements makes the game even more interesting. These are only included in the single-player-only campaign mode of the game though, which can be a bit disappointing as they could have been very interesting to utilize in multiplayer.
In the "Conquer the World" campaign mode, every contender for world domination starts on a board-game-like playing field that is segmented into territories that resemble borders in the real-world. Each player has one territory at the start and this happens to be his/her/its capital. The player has to prioritize the defense of the capital, as the player's other territories only conveys their benefits if there are direct lines of connection between them and the capital and if the capital is still around.
A veteran of territory-oriented strategy games would rightly expect that the player can only win by expanding and using these additional holdings to generate the resources needed for ultimate victory.
To gain more territory, every player is given a token that represents his/her/its army. Each player starts with only one and may gain more tokens, but there are very, very few ways to do so, as will be explained later.
To initiate battles, a player only needs to move his/her/its token into an unclaimed or rival-owned territory.
However, the (human) player may be a bit surprised by how the early stages of expansion are played out. Instead of an easy start that usually precedes a land-grabbing race, the first battle has the player defending his/her fledgling civilization from wave after wave of increasingly numerous AI-controlled rabble of barbarians for a set of time, using only early-game technologies. This is a thrilling, if rather brutal, start to the campaign.
It also acts as an introduction to the player that not every battle in the campaign would play out in the same manner every time. If the player attacks a territory belonging to a rival and had expected said rival to participate in the battle, he/she would find that it is not for certain that an enemy AI player would start on the other side of the map and have the same capabilities to build bases and armies. Instead, the player may face more barbarian onslaughts instead (at least until the later ages, when this kind of scenario will no longer play out).
Battles where the player has to fight another player does not play out the way that strategy game veterans would think that they would too. There are several scenarios for such battles, which may seem familiar to said veterans.
There is Field Battle, which gives the player a limited number of troops with no chance for any further reinforcement and no cities at all; she/he has to go through similarly limited but more numerous AI-controlled defenders to reach objectives that have to be destroyed. Tactics is a more difficult variant of Field Battle, because the enemy AI gets a city that can produce more units. To even the playing field, the AI isn't given its full repertoire of scripts.
Conquest would seem to be the closest that the campaign mode has to a standard battle, except that there is a timer that goes against the attacker, who loses when she/he/it runs out of time and fails to capture the enemy's main city. Ambush doesn't have a timer, but gives the enemy AI a lot of free units to make attacks with.
These scenarios may seem to be intended to break up the gameplay a bit, but they are of course no substitute for elaborate story-driven scenarios seen in the single-player campaigns of Rise of Nations' peers. In fact, they might eventually become repetitive.
Secured territories grant benefits. Chief of these is tribute, which is needed to upgrade territories so that they become more defensible. Such territories will have the owning player starting out with more cities or more units (depending on the scenario type chosen by the computer). Tribute can also be spent on the game's very simple mechanics of diplomacy, such as forcing peace treaties with AI players, declaring hostilities on them (as players are not at war with each other by default) or requesting allied help (though their units are completely controlled by the AI in the battle to come). However, most players would be spending tribute on Battle Cards (more on these shortly).
Some territories are supply centers that can support the creation of one more army token. It may seem that a player may be able to have more battles every turn with these additional army tokens, but Big Huge Games has thought of the possible gameplay imbalance that may arise from this, e.g. the player may be able to seize multiple territories in a turn and win the session quickly. Therefore, the number of territories that can be won through battle has been restricted to just one per turn. However, this does make the campaign seem artificially longer than it could have been.
That is not saying that the extra tokens are useless though. The player can place these tokens in hotly contested territories to give the player a large number of additional troops when the battle starts, as well as use them to support invasions by another army token. In fact, the player may be able to win battles outright without even fighting them, if he/she/it can have his/her/its tokens outnumber those of the enemy (if any) by three in order to trigger an "over-run" automatic victory. Otherwise, they offer the usual benefit of a large number of units at the start of battle.
(These units do count towards the player's population limit though, potentially locking up the player's army with units that the player would rather not use.)
The above mechanics would not be enough to make the turn-based gameplay of the campaign satisfactorily fun though. This is where the mechanic of Battle Cards can offer some gameplay variety.
Battle Cards are mainly obtained through tribute-funded purchases, though some territories also grant them when these are captured.
Cards can be used before the start of a battle to grant a variety of benefits, ranging from economic or military buffs that last throughout the battle and additional units to even advantages that are unique to certain other civilizations. Cards are understandably one-off benefits, which is a good balance considering the advantages that they provide. Needless to say, this mechanic can be rather entertaining and there may be some replay value to be had from just trying to see the range of cards there are.
If there are issues with this entertaining mechanic, one of them is that the AI does not seem to be good at using its decks of cards. Another is that cards are so good and useful that the player isn't likely to be encouraged to expend tribute for anything else other than more cards.
The last, but not least significant game design in the campaign mode is that the player and his/her AI controlled rivals have to adhere to a shared timeline, which determines which age that all players start at when a battle commences. Any player can only advance one single age during this battle. The timeline advances as full rotations of turns are taken, and so do players' default starting age.
Such designs may seem restrictive, but advancing an age before the opponent does can be a major turning point in battle, and often a certain victory over the AI. This is in contrast with battles that are set up using only the RTS segments of the game, such as one-off skirmish and multiplayer battles, in which the hosting player can choose the starting age, as well as set any limits on the advancement of ages.
Considering that the campaign mode is only single-player, the AI plays a significant role in contributing to the fun of this mode. Fortunately, although it has been said earlier that the various scenarios crimp the AI's smarts to give the player a chance, it is still challenging enough such that careless players are guaranteed to lose. It won't be stopping a long-time strategy game veteran though, which is a bit regrettable. Even the fully enabled AI in skirmish games may not seem much to a grizzled player that has sparred with many AI opponents, though the AI for computer-controlled players seems to be quite handy at responding to requests for help.
The designs of Rise of Nations' multiplayer modes appear to have taken inspiration from those in the Age of Empires and Civilization games, again showing the influence that these two franchises have on the developer.
The host player can set victory conditions such as those mentioned when Wonders are described earlier and the capture of the enemy's first city. There are some more refreshing victory conditions, such as having the winning player's zone of influence cover a large percentage of the map for an amount of time, though this has been seen in turn-based strategy games.
Regardless, these done-before settings for multiplayer matches would not be offering as much fun as the other game designs.
As a history-themed game, the musical soundtracks are typically orchestral and epic-sounding. They are pleasing to the ears of those who like such symphonies, though veterans of this subgenre of strategy games would not find them notably remarkable.
In conclusion, Rise of Nations may not seem to push the envelope of strategy game designs much. However, its innovations, especially its designs of resources and implementation of designs usually found in turn-based games in its real-time strategy segment, would make the game very much worth the time playing it.