81% Diverse Units Action Intensive Limited Negotiation

The game offers a good number of civilisations to take control of, from old colonial powers of the British and Spaniards to the war mongering Nubians and Mongols. Each nation has its very own set of military units to go alongside the game's generic armies. This diversity of unique units is a very nice touch which certainly adds variety to playing with different powers. 

Unless you play in scenario mode, you build your nation up from pretty much ground up, with just a few farms, some timber cutters and a library. You use your key resources like food, wood and iron to both populate and build new structures as long as you have sufficient knowledge in your library. As intellect is gained, so are ages and world wonders through time which are nicely represented with thier own distinct graphics and sounds. 

While time seems at first to speed along, it can be slowed down significantly in the options and there is always your trusty pause to allow for a quick review of the map-wide situation. Careful control of game's time is vital in laying down the foundations of your empire with relative peace.  Well.. thats until your neighbours cry havoc and unleash their dogs of war. 

Combat is controlled by point and click and make for some pretty exciting exchanges. Units are pretty smart and use their capabiliites to the full, though each have both their advantages and drawbacks against other types of units in the field. This scissor-paper-stone element encourages experimentation with all available types of military and it wont be long before you find some of the special units are actually quite vulnerable once you learn how to counter them.

While Rise of Nations is fun for individual campaigns against others on the same battlefield, the world domination mode is actually quite weak. Gone are the interactive animations of your opponents, or their messenger boys who you can verbally jostle with. Actually, negotiation is virtually non-exisitant and much can be achieved simply by buying your opponent off, especially at lower levels. Not that there is no diplomatic interaction, all of the options are there like military alliances and peace treaties etc, its just that the CPU opponents really seem to lack personality.

Visually RoN looks great especially at 1600x1200. Animations are smooth and the audio is superb. While graphics aren't 3D a good deal of work has been done to make sure each unit and building is clearly recognisable even with zoom at its lowest setting.

While Rise of Nation's promised both a good level of RTS and turn based action, in truth only the top level of the game requires for any turn-based prompt from the gamer. The world map, closely resembles the board game risk. It has to be said that some outcomes to battles and conquering neighbours almost seem random. Of the five global campaigns I played, most of the European powers didnt seem to last very long as I stared in disbelief as the Baantu and the Mayans waded through the Americas and Europe with ease. 

A good comprimise might've been an option of turn-based or real time combat rather than many battles in different areas of the battlefield happening concurrently. One game that mastered this was Fallout Tactics, where such an option brought the best of both worlds. Rise of Nations does ask a lot of the gamer to continously stop and start the action manually. 

With all that said however, the heavy emphisis on RTS makes for a great game for those who loved Age of Empires. The idea was obviously to make the as game action-intensive as possible so as to make for some serious speed gaming. There certainly is a lot here to have fun with short term, but this does get repetitive fairly quick and if you're more of a fan of detailed turn based control and management of the more traditional global conquest titles, Rise of Nations might fall short of expectations.
 

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