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Rise of Nations: Rise of Legends Designer Diary #5 - Magic Versus Technology on Your Coffee Break

Producer Tim Train discusses why you'll be enjoying Rise of Legends' multiplayer mode during your coffee break.

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If you like to play real-time-strategy games in multiplayer, then you know that one of the issues that you often face are long, drawn-out games that take forever to play, or incredibly short games where one side crushes the other in the opening minutes. The designers at Big Huge Games like to play real-time-strategy games in multiplayer as well, and so they design their games to feature fast-paced multiplayer modes that appeal to everyone. To give us some insight into Rise of Nations: Rise of Legends' multiplayer gameplay, producer Tim Train was kind enough to deliver his latest designer diary.

The development team plays multiplayer matches that run as quick as 15 minutes.
The development team plays multiplayer matches that run as quick as 15 minutes.

Magic Meets Technology in 20 Minutes


By Tim Train
Producer, Big Huge Games

One of the most fun aspects of working on an original title is that you get to throw out the rule book. With a sequel, you want to improve on the gameplay of the previous product, but you can't deviate too far from the original before people feel like it's not a true successor to their beloved game. This is part of why so many sequels feel so, "Been there, done that," and why the real-time-strategy genre has felt so stale over the past few years. The most compelling reason to set our next product in an entirely new world was to get away from any expectations players might have for, say, a Rise of Nations II. From the ground up, Rise of Legends is built to take the elements that players love about real-time strategy games and then shake them up into a whole new experience.

At Big Huge, we've always loved strategy games that allow for sharp, intense play styles that suck you into the action immediately. Right from the start of Rise of Legends, we knew we wanted players to feel that intensity in our game. We decided the ideal play time for Rise of Legends would be around the 20-minute mark for two evenly matched players, which obviously would translate into longer games for team games or larger maps. If Rise of Nations' tagline was "History on your lunch hour," the motto for Rise of Legends is "Magic versus technology on your coffee break."

The first time you sit down to play Rise of Legends you notice that everything just seems...faster. You have military units that you can play with right off the bat. Your initial economy just takes a couple of clicks to set up. Constructing military districts at a city yields more free troops, which gives you a serviceable army just a few minutes into the game. From there, it's up to the player to decide if a rush is in order, or if your embryonic army should hang back while you build a larger economy. Either way, you are destined to get into conflict much earlier than in traditional real-time strategy games. Much more of your energy is focused on pure, sweet combat right from the beginning of the game.

One major advantage of this design philosophy is that it eliminates that boring, repetitive early buildup seen in most real-time-strategy games. In a classic real-time strategy, there are often 10 or 15 minutes where players are just collecting resources in order to invest in more economic production, and there's a major advantage to the person who proves most nimble with the hotkeys. There are few interesting decisions, and you perform the exact same tasks in every game, in the same order. In Rise of Legends, we've substantially shortened the early economnic buildup, and you quickly advance to the choice of where and when to attack, what units to invest in, and which weak points to attack. Growing and protecting your economy is still vitally important, but the mechanics of expanding that economy are straightforward and involve no tedious micromanagement.

Like its predecessor Rise of Nations, Rise of Legends will let you disable the early game rush.
Like its predecessor Rise of Nations, Rise of Legends will let you disable the early game rush.

We've also worked to move things along at the end of the game. A common problem in classic real-time strategy is the long, grinding stalemate at the end when the map is denuded of resources. If you have a decent advantage, it's still very difficult to deliver a killing blow. Even when you have an overwhelming advantage, often you have to hunt down every last worker, or scout every inch of the map to find that lone remaining building you must kill. In Rise of Legends, once the war is clearly won, we want the game to be over so you can start the mayhem all over again. To that end, we use Rise of Nations' capital victory model, where the loss of your capital ends the game. However, we also added all kinds of "closer" features, like master units that can wipe the field clean of armies, or hero spells that can destroy hard target buildings with a single shot. The first person to reach these levels of the game will start to bring the proceedings to a close with a grim finality.

So at both the start and end of the game, we've tried to throw out the boring, repetitive tasks and keep the meaty center intact. As Rise of Legends has evolved, our specification for a 20-minute game has become more of an average baseline. Our one-versus-one games in tests have come out between 15 to 30 minutes with skilled, well-matched players, although the five-minute rush strategy is still possible. Team games or turtle strategies can result in hour-long contests where the balance of power swings back and forth. Finally, we've retained the popular "no rush" rules options from Rise of Nations, so players who prefer a more stately pace can still architect an intricate web of cities and infrastructure without fearing an early attack. The common element between these different styles of play is the intensity--when you are engaged with an enemy, you hardly notice the passage of time, whether it's 20 minutes or an hour.

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