Rise of Nations (RoN) is a very unusual game, or at least it seems that way to me, because it's part real-time strategy (RTS), part turn-based strategy, and part board game. Think of it as some bizarre cross-breeding experiment between Command & Conquer: Generals (C&C:G), Civilization III (C3), and Risk. It's also unusual insofar as the clear bulk of the developers' efforts was spent upon the RTS portion of the game, both single-player and multi-player, rather than on any sort of larger campaign. RoN doesn't fit perfectly into any single genre, but that's arguably part of its charm.
Still, I had a hard time getting into the game. I bought it shortly after it was released and was excited to try my hand at it. I ripped through the tutorials with growing delight, appreciating on many levels the game's unique mechanics. Then I got to the single-player campaign and was like a fish out of water. I had no idea what I was supposed to do and the game wasn't very helpful. Sure, it has tooltips to illustrate this and that, but it didn't seem at all straightforward to me. It's only been over the last few months that I've gotten back to RoN, and I'm glad to say that I did.
RoN is quite visually attractive. I think it's pretty obvious that the developers are using a hybrid engine, but that's fine by me. To explain, it's clear that the buildings in the game are two dimensional sprites, because of their great level of detail, while the terrain is provided via texture-mapped three dimensional polygons. I don't expect too many gamers to notice this, and even if they do they shouldn't care; i.e., what really matters is how it looks overall, not what's under the hood.
The terrain looks good. The buildings are very beautifully detailed and seem largely appropriate to the various historical and cultural settings. They're a bit square for my tastes, but I suppose not every RTS game can look as fabulous as Warcraft III (W3) or C&C:G. The variety of different units in the game look good and are animated very nicely. The special effects are downright impressive in some cases; I particularly like the smoke resulting from firearms and artillery. Suffice it to say that everything in the game looks more than good enough to get the job done.
My only real gripe with the visuals in RoN is that they seem kind of bland somehow, and I honestly can't figure out why. Maybe it's because I've been spoiled completely by playing C&C:G, which has the most impressive visuals of any RTS game made to date. I don't know. What I do know is that the visuals in RoN strike me as a bit behind the curve for some reason. They remind me of the never-quite-cutting-edge graphics of C3 and most other turn-based strategy games. To be clear, however, this is a very minor complaint. RoN looks more than good enough to get the job done; it just doesn't have the wow-factor of some other games.
The audio is a mixed bag. On the one hand, some of the sound effects are wonderful. When artillery fires, for example, it really makes you feel like you're hovering over the field of battle. There is a certain throaty "BOOM!" to cannon fire and that's great. Yet on the other hand, some of the sound effects are kind of lame by comparison. Seriously, the first time I heard my troops clashing with swords and pikes I thought it was 1992 again, and I was playing Darklands. For those who never played it, Darklands was the cutting edge game of its time. In fact, it's still worth playing today if you can get it to work (check out this fan site for more information if interested).
The reason I mention Darklands in this review is because its sword-on-shield sound effects, which were generated by frequency-modulated (FM) synthesis on the old Adlib/Soundblaster cards, sound quite a bit like some of the sword-on-shield sound effects in RoN. In other words, some of RoN's combat sound effects are a bit weak. Fortunately, this is true of a small minority of the sounds in the game. The majority are much better done, though I don't think they're going to win any awards.
In the plus column, the music included with the game is quite good, though there is not much of it. Maybe I've been spoiled by games with fabulous music—of which Starcraft (SC), Rogue Spear, and Undying are but a few—but I really appreciate a powerful soundtrack. RoN has a soundtrack that's pretty good, but it just isn't gripping in the way that other games are. Better still, the voice talent used is professionally done. RoN didn't scrimp on the voice actors, and that's a good thing. It only comes into play in the tutorial missions, but it's still important.
My biggest complaint with the audio has got to be the overall sample quality. Some of the samples, particularly some of the voice-over work, have relatively poor signal-to-noise ratios. Or maybe it's just that the samples have been compressed too heavily. I hear a certain amount of distortion with some of the voice stuff, and some of the sounds are kind of "flat". There are also some cases in which the levels of the various voice-over clips aren't balanced relative to each other. In short, the audio is good enough, but it's not as outstanding as some other games. Do bear in mind, however, that I have pretty fussy ears; you might not notice or be bothered by any of these things.
The interface in RoN is pretty darned good. RTS games frequently bug me because of the degree to which they require me to use the mouse. It's not that I'm some kind of keyboard-only curmudgeon—I'm a curmudgeon for sure, but I'm not that kind of curmudgeon—it's more that I much prefer games that let me use keyboard and mouse together. RoN is particularly nice to use in this respect because it supplies keyboard shortcuts for almost every task. That's wonderful, insofar as it lets the novice get started with a mouse while allowing room for growth into using keyboard shortcuts for faster response times.
Of course, the menus are also nicely done, and all the menu options are well organized. I haven't had any trouble figuring out how to create games, load up different scenarios, etc. RoN seems quite straightforward in how it makes its options available to the player. For the most part, everything works much like a veteran gamer expects, and I imagine it probably seems intuitive for the newcomer as well.
The one complaint I will lodge against the interface is that I don't think it's particularly obvious how the strategic map works. The single-player "Conquer the World" game is entertaining, and it reminds me quite a bit of the board game Risk. When I fired it up for the first time, however, I was pretty baffled for a while. I couldn't figure out how to move stuff, I didn't understand the conventions for the information displayed, and so forth. This wouldn't have been such a problem if there had been some kind of quick help, tutorial, or getting-started advice, but such aids were provided only for the RTS portion of the game.
That was a bit of an annoying omission. It's not like the interface for the single-player game is positively inscrutable. I'm saying that it's unusual enough that either (1) it should have been made more intuitive or, (2) some kind of tutorial should have been provided. Once you get the hang of it it's no big deal, but expect to remain a bit in the dark until then.
The game mechanics are a big win for RoN. This is a game that gets just about everything right, and that seems like quite an accomplishment to me in light of how much it offers. RoN borrows the concept of a particular age from the Age of Empires series and pairs it with an interesting multi-path research tree. This makes for relatively sensible technological progression, with some advances not being available at all until the "mind set" of a particular age has been adopted.
As interesting as that is, however, the economics of the game strike me as downright brilliant. RoN takes Civilization-style caravans and static resource deposits and marries them to standard RTS-style resources that require more workers to exploit. Yet, far more sensibly in my view, RoN doesn't fall prey to the kind of economic stress that a game like SC inflicts, all because resources are never depleted. In a game like SC, decisions regarding when and how to expand can easily cost the player the game, but this isn't the case nearly as often in RoN because the resource fields don't deplete. Yes, the drive to expand is still there, but the decisions surrounding it are removed from the make-or-break category, and I think that's wonderful.
A still greater compliment for the game mechanics is that its resource, production, and research models all mesh in a very special way. In every other RTS game I've played, I've always found myself getting stuck on one critical path; i.e., because I'm short on one resource or another I can't build or research anything until I've acquired more of said resource. Because RoN makes use of so many different resources, and because the various production/research options use different resources, I almost never find myself completely stuck.
At the beginning of any battle, for example, one will typically be short on either food or timber. When short on food I build/research things that are timber-intensive, and when short on timber I build/research things that are food-intensive instead. This is something of an oversimplification, given the presence of other resources like metal, oil, and knowledge, but it should convey the general idea. The point is that RoN doesn't leave the player hanging like so many other games. The only resource that frequently hampers me is knowledge, but that's got more to do with the pace of research than anything else. As such, I can typically work around it by building stuff instead.
In summary, RoN is pure brilliance in the way it handles resources. There's no other way to say it. From the sources that don't deplete, to their balanced use in building/researching, all the way to the very welcome ability to buy and sell them as needed at a market, the game does more than any other to make the economy important, workable, and yet entertaining, not frustrating. I just can't praise RoN's resource model highly enough; it's simply the best.
Moving on, I should state that I've never been big on board games, with the possible exception of Risk. Despite my general dislike for such things, RoN's board-game-like strategic map is a lot of fun. By maneuvering armies, playing strategic cards, strengthening and/or capturing vital territories, etc., one makes a substantive difference in how the RTS battles play out. The strategic map even determines how the geography will be laid out.
If you're attacking from north to south across a body of water, for example, then you can expect your opponents to be across the water to the south on the low-level RTS map as well. Granted, that seems like a simple thing, but not too many games get that detail right. Overall, the single-player campaign is a lot of fun to play, even though it can be a bit easy to beat until one cranks up the difficulty.
In the minus column, if this can truly be called a complaint, is that I'm getting a bit tired of rock-scissors-paper. I know that developers use the model because it ensures balance. For those who never learned the game as a child, rock destroys scissors, scissors cut paper, and paper destroys rock (though I confess that one never made much sense to me). Applying this to the game, light infantry beats archers, heavy infantry beats light infantry, and archers beat heavy infantry. This isn't the only such triangle of opposition in the game; it's just one of many that confront the player. The point, of course, is that for any given unit one side might build, there is always a counter available to the other side.
Unfortunately, in my view at least, this leads to a relatively bland style of play. Rather than creating strike groups of a particular unit, the player inevitably assembles groups with every unit. In the earlier ages, this amounts to infantry-only units with light infantry, heavy infantry, and archers all in one. That way, they're going to be effective no matter what kind of resistance they encounter. The same approach extends throughout the rest of the game. I suppose it does help stave off highly lop-sided defeats when one player discovers that his huge army of artillery is easily pickings for a mass of cavalry, but it can be somewhat boring by comparison. I guess how much of a negative this is depends on the player; take it as you will.
I guess I should also complain that certain mechanics are not at all obvious. For example, I had no idea that units could be given different stances (e.g., aggressive, defensive, etc.) until I read a third-party guide for the game. I also had no idea how to build an offshore oil platform. I thought it was some kind of special resource, but I couldn't get merchants to go grab it. It took me a while to figure such things out on my own. Suffice it to say that the game manual and tutorials are a bit light on information.
In one sense there is a lot packed into RoN, while in another sense there isn't. On the one hand the game features a large number of resources to manage, lots of different buildings, a large research tree with interesting and useful options that differ from age to age, a large number of unique cultures as which to play, a veritable ton of different units in various categories, a slew of wonders of the world, all kinds of great terrain features, special resources, ruins, and a partridge in a pear tree. Seriously, when one considers the sheer amount of stuff packed into this game it seems unbelievably vast.
Yet on the other hand the variation may be only skin deep. It was hard to care, for me at least, about whether I was producing archers or musketeers. They both fall into the "ranged infantry" category. In the same way, the rest of the horde of units tends to collapse into a small number of similarly well-defined functional categories. The same is true for the vehicles. Further, though the strategic map allows a fair amount of interesting options, every battle plays out pretty much the same in the RTS engine. There is very little difference to be had. I completed my first run through the single-player campaign in about eight hours, and one battle in that campaign felt pretty much like any other. That makes the game seem a whole lot smaller.
Still, between the single-player campaign and the on-line multi-player battles, I've easily logged fifty to sixty hours of play with the game. That's a good value, even if some of the variation is largely cosmetic. I suppose it's fair to say that RoN delivers enough variation that the player will likely be engaged for quite some time. The game content is compelling enough to deliver despite the complaints I've made.
The AI is also pretty easy to recommend. I absolutely love the way RoN handles workers. It was an unceasing source of frustration to me in other RTS games that idle workers are... well... idle. Workers without anything to do in RoN are motivated; i.e., they'll go find something useful to do. They'll sniff out unworked farms, mines with open slots, buildings in need of construction, and so forth, without any intervention from the player. That's a wonderful change from other games, and I applaud the developers for getting it so right.
It should be observed, however, that like every other RTS game I've played the pathing system can be problematic, particularly with large units. I noticed it most often with artillery. I'd tell them to bombard something and the front rank would get into firing position, stop, and open fire; meanwhile, the rear ranks would spin around pointlessly, trying to find some way to get into firing range. It forced me to micromanage my artillery and other large units a bit, which was annoying. Still, the pathing system in RoN is better than that found in a lot of other games.
Oddly enough, this is probably the game's greatest strength. Yes, the single-player campaign is fun—I think I've conquered the world a total of three or four times now—but the multi-player aspect of the game is where it really shines. Why, you ask? That's easy: the players have the entire game's sandbox in which to play, yet a typical game won't last more than an hour. All of the ages and their units can be used to pummel the other player(s) into the dirt—assuming, of course, that the game type allows it. RoN's Internet matchmaking service provides all kinds of different game modes and allows broad customization of their rules as well.
Perhaps most important of all is the fact that there are always players on-line. Unlike a number of other games I've played, I've never had a problem finding opponents in RoN. The matchmaking service allows the typical pre-game chat, creation of games, and other such amenities that gamers have come to expect. Granted, there aren't as many players as one finds on Blizzard's Battle.net at any given moment, but there are more than enough to have a good time.
Yet there is one charge that must be levied against the multi-player aspect: the matchmaking service is buggy. Even with the final patch I've had the matchmaking service lock my entire machine, which isn't supposed to be possible under Windows XP. It's a pretty repeatable problem for me. If I log on, click the button to create a game, and then click the back button, my machine is locked hard about 20 - 30% of the time. I don't know what's going on, but it seems like at least one nasty bug has been left unfixed. In contrast, the single-player campaign is flawless; I've never had the game crash when not on-line.
In the final analysis, RoN is a really good RTS game, surely one of the better RTS games ever made. It's not my favorite RTS game—that would have to be SC—but it has definitely earned its place on my hard drive. Perhaps best of all, for the newcomer, RoN is quite approachable. It is a bit light on instruction, particularly where the strategic map is concerned, but it should come pretty naturally to anyone who likes board games.
So, if you're an RTS fan there's no question: run out and buy a copy. It's quite cheap these days, and it will easily give you a lot of fun hours of play. If you're intrigued by RTS games but haven't tried one yet, then definitely check it out; RoN might be the game that sucks you into the genre. Finally, only those who absolutely despise RTS games should avoid it. It's easy to recommend RoN to everyone else.
04/14/2004