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Rise of Nations is a real time strategy game, developed by Big Huge Games and published by Microsoft on May 20, 2003. An expansion pack, Thrones and Patriots, was released on April 28, 2004.
Overview
Rise of Nations was innovative amoung other related real-time strategy games in that one could only build within one's territory, resource gather rates were capped at various stages pending further research, and the costs of units and buildings ramp up with each successive unit or building.
Due to these and other complications, the game also lacks an aspect that was typical and annoying of other real time strategy games: near perfect build orders that emphasize luck of the spawn and clicking ability. Since villagers (resource collectors) increase in price as they are built and resource gather rates are limited by scientific advances in the library, any precise build order will rapidly become useless after about 3 minutes when the game becomes very fuzzy.
Also, since one's buildings can only be placed within one's borders, rushing with an obscure far flung barracks immediately next to the enemy city is diminished and the emphasis is instead placed upon economic development, strategic decisions like city and building placement, and timing. The amount of required micro-management ability to play Rise of Nations decently is less than other games due to various hotkeys which allows greater time to be spent on command decisions rather than their implementation. One of these useful micro-management reduction features is the infinite queue. Once activated for a particular unit, the infinite queue would pay and begin production of another unit as soon as the last completed as long as resources were available.
One's borders can be expanded by (among other things) the construction of cities, so that ones power becomes based in that of large economic cities of great importance to one's victory or defeat.
There are three initial resources of going concern in Rise of Nations - food, wood, and wealth. The first two are gathered via farms, fishing, and woodcamps. The third by establishing trade routes, various temple upgrades, and rare resources. Upon the onset of the second age, two more resources become available - knowledge and metal. Knowledge is by far the most important and is collected by scholars in universities that must be purchased with wealth. Metal in mined in mines built on impassable mountains that are present in the landscape and is paramount for a successful military until it is eclipsed by oil in the Industrial Age.
Each of the 18 civilizations in Rise of Nations has its own set of unique units (the Japanese have the superior Samurai as their heavy infantry unit for example) throughout the ages as well as an unique graphics set. Nuclear weapons in the game produce a realistic and devastating mushroom cloud animation and dogfights in the sky between fighters are well animated.
The end conditions are also made to be historically neutral in that one can win the game by a capital capture, territorial superiority, researching four dominating technologies, or the usual wonder and score victories.
Rise of Nations differs from traditional real time strategy games in several aspects: The game introduces the concept of national borders that can be influenced by the construction of cities or fortresses and researching of certain upgrades. Units that end up in enemy territory without a supply wagon receive slow but steady attrition damage. Scouts and spies are immune to this effect. Also, wonders provide important bonuses to the nation that constructs them, rather than simply adding points to a score or immediately starting a victory timer. Finally, there is an Armageddon clock that if it reaches zero, all civilization will be destroyed from nuclear war and it is an automatic gameover.
Rise of Nations uses a 2D engine to render buildings and terrain, but a 3D one to render units. Both single and multiplayer (via LAN or Internet) games are supported.
The single player campaign, Conquer the World, is comparable to the game Risk, except that attacks take place during in-game battles that can last as long as 2 hours, depending upon the scenario. The expansion added four historically themed campaigns - Alexander the Great, the Colonizing of America, Napoleon and the Cold War.
Resources
Main article: Rise of Nations Resources
Resources also undergo a significant departure from the RTS norm in this game, being shown as constant flows of resources rather than as expendable resources, as in Warcraft, Starcraft and their various sequels. This simplifies the resource gathering aspects of the game, allowing the player to concentrate more on combat.
In another interesting twist, units and buildings 'ramp up' in cost, increasing their price as their numbers in the game increase. This causes the player to employ more balanced armies, instead of armies heavily composed of any particular unit. This is used to avoid the sort of problem encountered in games where certain units were so underpowered as to make them unusable, and other units were so overpowered as to make them unstoppable.
There are three initial resources of going concern in Rise of Nations - food, wood, and wealth. The first two are gathered via farms, fishing, and woodcamps. The third by establishing trade routes, various temple upgrades, and rare resources. Upon the onset of the second age, two more resources become available - knowledge and metal. Knowledge is by far the most important and is collected by scholars in universities that must be purchased with wealth. Metal in mined in mines built on impassable mountains that are present in the landscape and is paramount for a successful military until it is eclipsed by oil in the Industrial Age.
Resource production is capped by commerce caps, determined by the level of commerce research you have achieved in game.
Gameplay
There are roughly two extremes from which to approach the game - pure economic boom or pure militaristic rush. The purely boom player will sacrifice everything else, especially military, towards the investment good of a powerful economy later on capable of fielding massive armies. The rush player will sacrifice economic gain early on in the hope of a quick capital sack or at least causing more damage to the opponent's economy than was incurred preparing and carrying through the rush.
Overall, a combination of these two approaches is superior as the pure economic player can be suprised by an early attacking army that destroys an important city or harrasses forward builders and wastes building resources. Similarly, a rush can be easily countered in this game if adequate scouting is done, which leaves the rushing player with a crippled economy and an almost certain loss in a few minutes. Thus, many of the best strategies involve light raiding of the enemy resource gatherers whilst booming economically.
Since every unit in the game has its counter unit (pikemen kill knights for example) and terrain and military tactics matter - a keen sense of generalship is required to make the best use of one's army. Indeed, with sufficient skill in creating proper unit distributions in an army and fielding that army, it is very possible to defeat a numerically superior enemy in Rise of Nations.
In a manner similar to chess, slight strategic mistakes early in the game can turn into major tactical woes later on. For example, a poor and hasty placement of a city in an empty piece of land when some more reconnaissance would have shown a superior woody placement site can lead to severe wood gathering problems later on since a lumbermill cannot be built to increase gather rates for the city-isolated woodcamp. Also, for rushes, simply using the wrong villager can initially cause only a two second delay that later becomes a 15 second daily that makes all the difference in the enemy's preparedness.
Expansions
To date there has been one expansion for Rise of Nations: The Thrones and Patriots Expansion. The additions included some possibly unbalanced civilizations including the Americans and a government feature. By constructing a new building, the Senate, a player could research various government technologies that would allow various military or economic bonuses as the game progressed.
Tournaments and Champions
An Elo ranking system is currently in place courtesy of BHG to rank players. As of whenever the list was last updated, the highest ranked player in the world is PCA_Frogman with a rating of 2441.
Recently there was a world-wide online seeded single-elimination tournament named "Expanded Hostilities" hosted by MrFixitOnline wherein each player could only use a civilization once. The winner, although probably not the world's best due to missing players, was DaRq_Vorfidus.
Playable countries and their powers
Main article: Nation Powers
External links
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