Rise of Nations is a great game but with some major faults, I have been playing the game since the beta and got the marketing gold, I have beat the "conquer the world" on moderate and have played around 40 online games (35W 5L). First off the music in the game is just plan bad and the unit sounds are just adequate. The gameplay has some really good ideas behind it, the research tree for example is really well incorporated, the waypoint system they use was a really smart idea where your peons will automatically go and gather resources. The normal game speed also seems just a bit to fast, they really need to just slow down the game just a bit on the normal setting. The slow setting right below normal is well just a bit to slow. The other major thing I found is with siege units, if you build 5 of them you can reduce a city with 5 shots which takes about 5 seconds. I don't know where in history you could actually move Trebuchets in the first place, the only reason they have wheels is for the recoil, I guess someone failed history. Since games like AoE and WC lets you move them it's not right, you could move catapults but very slowly they don't move half the speed of your knights come on.. The fact is for a game that's trying to be realistic, it's just way off. It used to take 40 well skilled engineers and about 2-4 weeks to even build 1 Trebuchet the expense for a project like that was unbelievable. The other thing that's very frustrating is someone online can just build like 30 spies and bribe your entire army then turn them on you. I like to know where in history something like this has ever happened?? The fact a spy can even bribe units is just ridiculous. You can use explores to fine spies but the fact is a normal army will have 1 or 2 in a army but if you build a small army and take them out first then you can use the spy tactic you basically you just won the game. In the later ages the game starts moving really fast, you really don't have time to think, who ever gets nukes first pretty much wins the game, I would have liked a feature to ban them from the game. On a good note the game does have some nice multiplayer features like being able to set the age you start in and end in. You can also change how fast or slow, expensive, cheap you research techs. Even on the slowest setting the research is still to fast. The reason I say this is because it seems that you pretty much only fight once in each age.. I would have liked to see some time before you went to the industrial age like the 100 year war. Overall Rise of Nations is good but not great and defiantly not a classic, it's a fun game, that will have you playing for hours but the fact is with a few smart choices this could have been the best RTS of all time.
Rise of Nations is a blend of RTS and TBS elements and no game has been more successful at combining both of these styles of strategy. The game plays more like a real time game than a turn-based game overall, but the tur... Read Full Review
Big Huge Games has taken the concept of Age of Empires light years ahead to create this revolutionary game. Rise of Nations features a gameplay system spanning across 6,000 years, from ancient times to the modern and po... Read Full Review
