In the past, we've had some GREAT real-time strategy games. We've had some GREAT empire-building games, and we've had some GREAT meta-strategy games. We've had GREAT micro-management games and GREAT games that were just plain FUN. While RoN (I like to think of it as Ron Howard in Happy Days, goofy-but-friendly and an all-around great guy) doesn't beat those GREAT games at their core strengths, it's the first game that brought them ALL together in a package that's seamless and can appeal to all those different kinds of gamers. By preference, I'm a builder... when I play Civilization-series games, I build out, corruption be damned! The high point of my game is the acquisition of railroads and the intense push to connect every city in the empire into a web of instantaneous travel. I can fight the wars, but I rarely start them; I'm content to obliterate those opponents that tempt fate by striking at me (excepting, of course, when they wipe me off the face of the planet *grin*). I've always tended to have my best results with turn-based games; never having been particularly dextrous, I'm simply not a spaz-gamer. I'm definitely not a first-person shooter kinda guy... I *never* win those games. I like strategy, and play quite a wide range of board games and card games... including, as Martin Mull would say, German games with names like Gunther.

Rise of Nations is really several games in one. There's the quick skirmish, the medium-length battles; there are in-depth continent-building sessions, and even a grand overarching conquest game, which starts on a world map that should immediately bring you back to the last time you played Diplomacy, or perhaps Risk... down to having bonus resource cards to play that you win through successful battles. This is the meta-game, where you attempt to take one of the 18 pre-defined historical civilizations and, well, Conquer the World! You've got one "army" to start out with, and as you gain territories with strategic resources, you'll gain additional armies. Each army represents your ability to start a scenario, with a limit of one player-initiated mini-game per turn. Generally you'll start off with an attack into uncivilized territory to gain control of the resources therein.

Each scenario is of a semi-random type; from arriving with naught but an army and an objective to take to starting with a full-fledged city and attendant unit resources with the goal of controlling a certain percentage of the map; to being dropped in with a City and having to hold off the enemy forces for a set period of time... the variety keeps the games fresh over and above the random map-type of variables... which is just a hint at the depth and breadth built into this game. There is, of course, a complete scenario builder, a "skill-test" series of linked contests, and quick-and-dirty single-battle games. There is LAN and Internet multi-player with the amusingly-named "cannon-time" ability to slow things down a bit when things get especially tricky. All the options are covered here; no expansion packs to get extra abililities that felt like they should've come with the base game.

It's all in the details...

It's hard to start describing RoN. Every time you try, you quickly realize that the part you're trying to start with is linked inexorably to the part you haven't described yet.. so here's a laundry list of bits and pieces:

Units: There are a decent variety of unit types that stretch the 8 ages of the world... each of the 18 historical civs has it's own sets of unique units, of course, and all the units have advantages and disadvantages, not unlike you'd expect; pikemen hamstringing cavalry, archers raining fire arrows onto buildings, bombers dropping tactical nukes and wiping significant areas of the map completely... You can group units into command groups, most units are upgradeable, and there are special "citizen" units that do your building and resource-harvesting. There are land-based military, sea-based military, range-of-fire units; siege units, supply units, aircraft and anti-aircraft; merchants and caravans.. oh my!

Cities: Unlike a Civilization-style game, your cities are real presences on the map, and you build them granary, farm and university at a time. Like in the later Civ-style games, each city has a "border of control" that's influenced by the civics and buildings that city creates. Each of the buildings you add to the city adds unique capabilites; barracks allow you to produce infantry and archers, for example; libraries introduce knowledge resources and act as the center of control for your technology-tree decisions; lumber mills increase nearby forestry efforts; and Wonders of the World (yes, you can build a beautiful Statue of Liberty in your own backyard!) give local or global benefits. Some buildings will, during later ages, allow you to research improvements to your units or harvesting abilities; some will affect combat and zone of control... and that zone of control is more important than defining the borders of where you can build; enemy units inside your territorial boundaries take constant attrition damage... which can of course be ameliorated by building and sending supply wagons out with the infantry...

Resources: Forests and Mountains and Farmland and Oilwells and a slew of specials like cattle and gems and vineyards... specials are harvest through the use of the merchant unit; farmlands are in essence buildings placed by your citizens and provide your food WHEN manned by citizens; mountains yield metals for mining and forest give you the raw timber you need to build things, again, when manned by working citizens. The game tracks your wealth, food, timber, oil, knowledge and metal, and advances or buildings or actions will usually require a specific amount of these resources to get started... there are caps to your production rate based on your commerce and civic tracks of your technology tree...

Technology: There are four basic tech tracks: military, civics, commerce and science. In addition, as you build up those four, there's the overall "age" track that depends on the others and controls access to improvements and new abilities. As you build up the resources you need, you can have your libraries start researching specific blocks in the track; for example, until you research civics I, you can't build a second city... the industrial age level of science introduces pharmaceuticals, and so on; as with so much of RoN, nothing here is exactly *new*; but the elegance of how well it all meshes together is... well... elegant!

Civilizations: There are 18 historically-accurate civs there, from the Aztecs to the Greeks to the Turks... each has several special units and special abilities, such as the British ship-building speed and Highlanders; the Mongols proclivity for fast cavalry production and "Golden Horde" units; the Nubians strength in areas of commerce and Camel Raiders... and so on and so on and they tell two friends and...

But what do you mean?

Let's say it again, because it deserves repeating: There is breadth, there is depth. The interconnectivity of the aspects of the game is at once complex enough to scare you and simultaneously so well-meshed that it fades into the background and almost immediately becomes second-nature. As I discovered the various complexities, I quite honestly began to fear that there was no way I could, as a very casual gamer, pick up on all of it well enough to handle it while running, not in the turn-based-mode of my favorite games, but running in real-time... on paper it looks like trying to play all of a 3000-year Civ3 game in the span of a one-hour Tiberian Sun blast.

You wouldn't think it possible... but it is. I definitely see Brian Reynolds' hand here. This kind of severe attention to gameplay balance vs richness of experience has been a hallmark of the games he's been associated with, and seeing it brought here to the real-time arena is a joy. For a game that balances so many factors, it still literally has a learning curve of an hour or two; and this from someone who hasn't played a real-timer in... oh a couple of years.

The Dreaded Cloudy Lining. Or something like that.

Now, that's not to say it's all perfection and light. Like the lady in our preface, RoN isn't perfect. The graphics, while immersive and *good*, are not the incredible 3D experience that's going to tax your ATI or NVIDIA $400 graphics card. The buildings are 2D, while the world, units and their animations are a blended 3D. The effect is quite workable and makes large-scale battles a real blast to participate in... but you're not going to write home about shadows and pixel-shaders. While the game had no major bugs that I ran into, running it on a 128MB system (the minimum required) did cause a crash about 80 minutes into a 90-minute scenario when my paging file came up empty. Of course, I hadn't saved since I was too busy trying to take the Korean capital... The game ran fine on my laptop (RoN in bed! Okay, maybe I don't want to think of it as Ron Howard...), and even with VERY large armies and very active cities, it didn't slow down noticeably.

Sometimes things do get a little busy on screen and it can be difficult to pick out the unit you want; nothing the real-time true-fan would have difficulty with, but us old codgers might occasionally curse out loud the third time we selected the wrong citizen... Well, okay, I did curse out loud. And it wasn't a nice word.

Enough... did you LIKE it?

Still, when it all came down to it... Rise of Nations passed my critical test; the "I've GOT to play ONE MORE TIME" feeling, even at 3 in the morning... putting it in the ranks of games like Diablo, Asheron's Call, Civilization II, Alpha Centauri, and Lemmings. Oh, and Powermonger, which I was occasionally reminded of, too, while playing RoN... which reminds me, I've written enough... the Aztecs are calling and they're bringing Atlatls... time to break out the Manchu Musketeers!

ps... the lady's imperfection? A ring, of course... but you knew that was going to happen, didn't you?