For instance, you can build wonders of the world (just like you could in Civilization), and these powerful monuments can provide bonuses to your troops as they stride into battle in real time. Thanks to its turn-based roots, Rise of Nations has other interesting features that aren’t common to real-time strategy games, but these features allow the already varied game to offer you even more options. As such, battles over cities are crucial and potentially very rewarding, and they also make the stakes a lot higher in multiplayer battles, which, despite the game’s epic historical scale, can often be completed in less than an hour. Cities are also crucial to warfare in Rise of Nations, since successfully attacking a city doesn’t destroy it, but instead captures it for your own use. Rise of Nations’ combat is fast-paced, though it also features interesting tactical considerations, such as flanking and rear attacks, as well as special abilities that your general units can use to provide extra defense for your troops, cause your troops to move on a forced march, or even hide your army briefly to set up an ambush. Like other real-time strategy games, Rise of Nations uses a rock-paper-scissors unit balance system–for instance, cavalry are devastating against some archer units, while pikemen can make short work of cavalry. In the meantime, you’ll be able to recruit a wide array of different soldiers from different nations across different time periods. This focus on cities also means that each one will become a distinct community, with its own farms, temples, universities, and so on–actual cities will populate your empire, unlike in other real-time strategy games, where most of your structures are at your main base, while your additional town halls exist in isolation near some resources. Since expanding your empire depends entirely on your cities, the game makes you think harder about how and where you should expand. You can build other buildings only within your borders, and you can build only a limited number of different improvements for each city (such as a maximum of five farms each). Each of your cities has a radius around it that constitutes your national border. Unlike in other turn-based games, in Rise of Nations, cities are a focal part of your strategy. While these new features might seem foreign to real-time strategy players, fans of Brian Reynolds’ turn-based strategy games should know them well. But beyond that, the game has a lot of depth, more so than other real-time strategy games, thanks to novel concepts such as national borders, city assimilation, and more.
Rise of Nations might resemble Microsoft’s Age of Empires games at a glance–like other, similar games, it has a host of different civilizations (18, to be exact), each with unique bonuses and four to five unique units.
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