Rise of Nations Gold Edition - Conquer the world today?

[Dracos]

So, upon arriving back at school, I was beset by fiends.  Fiends raging and screaming and bearing games to play.  Like any red blooded gamer, I swiped what they had and joined them in a game.  That, as it turned out, was Rise of Nations, a game I had heard much about but had not yet played.

Rise of Nations, very thoroughly, demonstrates the direction that these games should be heading in.  It uses lots of clever ai to help with many of the miniscule tasks in the game.  It realizes the sheer amount of tedious motion that takes place ordering around the peons and does a level best to take care of that.  The citizens in this game can be set, for all of them, to either do nothing when idle or gather, repair, and/or assist with building for any nearby tasks.  The result being that you can spend more time focusing on strategy, building direction, etc and not have to worry about assigning every citizen to go mine.  As long as there's a place to do it, they'll go ahead and do it themselves.

The folks who built this very obviously played a fair deal of starcraft because a lot of the design decisions clearly build upon that style of interface and deal with some of the annoying problems it had.  Providing alternate ways to win besides wiping everyone out is one nice one I haven't touched much.  Having automatic hotkeys to quickly circle around open research opportunities, idle citizens, military, and generals certainly made the interface a lot nicer to work with.  Letting special abilities be used when in a hotkeyed group with other units was perhaps the most awesome bit.  No more having your dark archon be totally useless for horde assaults without using two hotkeys.  Now you can just send in one set and have the special abilities get used in the group.  Good stuff.  

Truthfully, while not perfect, the game has pretty much the best interface for doing this style of game I've yet come across.  Reactive, clear, and with plentiful helper tricks to speed things along.  I would say it is one step down from allowing just customized strategies to be dictated for controlling how things go.  Good stuff.

Also very good is that the combat system is both transparent and deep.  The units all include little bits of information telling what they are good against in rock/paper/scissors fashion, but at the same time there's a variety of both ground and air units for every group.  The importance of singular special units also really adds to the whole thing.  Rather than it being an advantage to have entire units of the same type, it encourages mixing and matching and doesn't limit to the size of the hotkeyed group.  So far, I've also not found tremendous need to do micromanaging of battles, which is a good thing.  I could be wrong but it hasn't seemed to be that relevent an overall strategy anymore.  There are still advantages to it, but not on a critical difference of being totally slaughtered if you don't.  This alone would represent a tremendous improvement from many past strategy games which often reduced to micromanagement of battle troops at the end game.

Overall, it's been a pretty addictive and fun game.  The most important elements clearly having a lot of focus on them.

Dracos