RISE OF NATIONS

Here is another attempt to try to convey to you what it's about. In order to do that I will assume that you all know AOC and so I will talk about similarities and differences to that. I will not go too much into detail about buildings, technologies and units. There is a ton of information about that sort of thing around. I will concentrate on what I think RTSUK people might want to know (well, okay, what I would have wanted to know).

Please consider that all this information is based on the Beta version and may not be accurate in the retail version. Usually at the end of a games development there is a lot of work done on play balance, performance and stability. Also, please bear in mind I have reduced the quality of some of the pictures to save bandwidth so don;t rely on the quality as being in-game quality

Interface

The menu screens seems very polished and refined, they had a big lift from beta 2 to beta 3 version. The menus are nicely animated and responsive and the options dialog seems well laid out with plenty of tool-tips explaining what settings are.

Zooming

There are three levels of zoom in RoN, controlled by the mouse wheel. These are, close up myopic (AOM/EE style), medium distance (AOC style) and now a lovely zoom out (RoN style) so you can get a good overview of big battles but still retain reasonable control. You can never please some people, after playing a while on zoom out I find yourself wanting to zoom out further.

Hotkeys

, You can set up multiple profiles.

Selecting units

There are a number of little niceties here. Various hot keys that have increasing scope if you press them multiple times, the home key selects all of the currently selected unit(s) and there is no limit to the number of units that can be selected. By default (can change) whenever you mouse drag over your units you don't get any civvies and you can scroll the map as you drag to get more than a screen full.

Graphics options.

Very important this. RoN is very demanding on computer power so you have to be sensible on the eye candy you enable. There are a host of settings that you can configure to be off, low or high detail. Sensible use of these can save you quite a few fps for little loss in eye candy. E.g., turning fog of war of saves quite a lot and what happens is you get a sudden transition from seen to unseen rather than a black fade. The edge is also tiled rather than smooth. No effect on game play, (may even be clearer) but can save a lot of fps. One thing I have found though, the best bit of eye candy is the unit animations and I would say that this is worth having at height level because the fps his isn't much for this. All the low detail options still look okay (unlike AOM squiffy eyes settings). The game has a build in fps counter so experiment with it.

Ages

There are 8 ages (7 upgrades) which are Ancient (aoe style), Classical (ror), Medieval (aoc castle age), Gunpowder (aoc imp age), Enlightenment (Cossacks / Napoleonic), Industrial (Ironclad / WWI), Modern (WWII) and Information (current). In order to age you research at the library where you have to meet a precondition of a fixed number of other upgrades. These upgrades are along 4 other "age" lines (tracks).

Military (red track)

Required for various unit-line upgrades in military buildings and importantly controls your population.

Civic (blue track)

Each level of civic advance allows you to build a city and also expands your national border.

Commerce (green track)

Commerce affects the maximum rate at which resources can be gathered. Once this rate is reached it is pointless assigning more villagers to production. Commerce also affects the number of caravans you can have trading between your cities.

Science (yellow track)

Required for researching various economical technologies. It also reduces the cost of other library research.

Economy

There is the standard economy of food wood and gold to start with. Farm to get food, build lumber caps to get wood and build trade caravans to get gold. Each trade route between your cities supports one caravan and each farm supports one farmer. When you place a lumber camp next to trees, the number of villagers that can be assigned is determined by the size of the woods. If you need any more woodcutters then you need to build a camp next to another wood. In the second age you get iron and knowledge as resources. Build scholars at university to gain knowledge (needed for library techs) and build mines to get iron. Mines behave just like lumber camps and you build them next to mountains and cliffs (no more sticky out bits of magic rock!). None of the resources dry up btw. When you get to industrial age you get oil as a resource, use a villager to build an oil well on a patch (sort of like a farm).

It's important to realise the way resources are gathered. When you put a villager to work, they don't gather the stuff and then drop it off. Instead they add to your gather rate. Next to your resource pool you will see what your current gather rate is. Resources will increment regularly (1 at a time) increasing your resource pool. If you re-task a villager then your rate will drop but you won't lose any gathered resources by not dropping them off because it doesn't work that way. Villagers appear to drop stuff off but that is just part of their graphical animation. The level of commerce advancement you have researched puts an absolute cap on the rate of each resource.

National Borders

Probably the biggest change for an RTS is the notion of territory and a clear definition of national borders. Each city and castle you build projects your border. The distance that border is projected is determined by military, religious and civic development. Some national traits and wonder construction also affect it. Borders are clearly marked with coloured lines on the main map and the mini-map is shaded in each civ's colour so it's all very clear.

National borders impose several key strategic elements to the game.

You can only build and repair buildings within your own land. So no more sneak builders and "forwards" and towering your enemies res.

Enemies in other people's lands are liable to receive attrition damage. Upgradable at towers, attrition causes all enemy units to sustain damage over time, so if a raiding force has to travel a long way they will all be on half damage by the time they get to your city. Attrition can be mitigated if you have a supply wagon near by, which makes them everybody's favourite target, but it is easy to defend them from raiding cav but you do have to keep them away from enemy guns.

Troops taking attrition damage glow red at the base

The proportion of the map that is within your borders determines some gold income (taxation).

A standard victory condition is the control of 70% of the map.

The Third Dimension

No, not the graphics engine, I mean planes. We are used to fighting on land and on sea. Now we have air battles. There are three basic types of aircraft, fighters, bombers and helicopters. What is interesting here is the way this new arm of the military interacts with the other two. There are natural units that are designed to counter units in other areas. E.g., helicopters are a really good counter to tanks (watch the noobs massed tanks just disappear) and of course you can build anti-aircraft and SAMs. There are also interactions on sea too with certain units being good counters. The navy also has a very potent air wing with the inclusion of aircraft carriers. These come with seven fighter-bombers on board and they are very nice indeed.

Not too important in a 2-player game but a key strategic part of the air war is the range of the planes. After being up for a while they run out of fuel and have to return to base, so the nearer the base (carrier) is then the more time they can spend in the air dumping on land forces and buildings. You can set missions up for aircraft so you can patrol areas and you can transfer planes between your air bases. You can scramble and recall your planes.

You can also build missile silos where you can launch V2 rockets and of course, nukes! (ICBMs if your lucky)

Multi-player

So, big question, what does it play like?

Bloody fantastic. It has all the depth of play that a big multi-player game of AoC had. You have plenty of population to fight major battles on 3 fronts while maintaining a navy and an economy. Lag does not seem to be a problem although I have had one 1v1, which lagged a little. I have also had the game suddenly drop dead with slowness a few times on a LAN, I am hopeful that this is a local problem on my LAN and the machines I run on. I know the BHG staff plays a massive number of games on a LAN. The game works really well for team play with players sending armies too and fro to aid their partners. Positioning of armies and barracks is important because you can only build in your own territory.

Rush settings

You can control when attacking is permitted, either by age or time. You can even set the game to non-violent so that you can play a pure economy victory game.

Resource settings

There is a lot of flexibility here on starting resources, there is even an infinite resource setting (not implemented in the beta). You can also start with a larger city, which comes with a more established economy (working villagers)

Cannon time

By hitting backspace during a multi-player game you get time to issue orders so you can really micro those intense key battles. You can control the number of times this is allowable in a game.

Technology advance

You can affect how easy it is to advance to ages. You can affect the cost and the time the research takes.

Game Types

You have the usual RM, DM and nomad etc. but there are also some new types that are well considered. Assassin assigns you an opponent to eliminate and you are not allowed to attack anyone else. Once you have eliminated that person you get their target next. Musical Chairs is a great FFA game where every few minutes, the lowest scoring player is eliminated from the game.

Strategies

Here are some of my observations on some common strategies.

Booming

The stakes are probably higher with this risky strat as a good boomer could sweep the map, however the risks are greater because if attacked well you will have no way back. I’m not sure how viable it is to boom with a little military because if your army gets swamped it’s almost as bad as having no army so you have to be very careful how you use a small army for defence.

Boat booming

Just as viable but with a twist. There are two types of fishables. Fish give you a bit of food and a bit of gold and whales give you a bit of food and a bit of iron (?). However one thing to bear in mind is that you can't just tune your land economy to mass wood like you could in AoC as there are limited places you can get wood from.

Rushing

The game can start fighting by 3 min however I have yet to be convinced that this is sensible due to the severe strain on your economy. It is more likely that a rush will consist of a bit of troop massing in the first age and then attacking in 2nd age more like 5 min in. I'm sure the ins and outs of rushes will be sorted soon enough.

Grushing

Grushing is really cool in RoN because rather than just galleys, you get the paper/scissors/stone counters so that its far more than just pumping boats, you have to manage the type of boats and how you deploy them. One thing to bear in mind is although you can win the sea you have keep an eye on it as it is very hard to destroy docks from boats.

Multi-Player Strategies.

AoC was just starting to develop multi-players strategies. Certain maps (like oasis) had some well-defined strategies where others (Arabia) were less developed. RoN will be an excellent opportunity to take multi-player strategy forward because of various factors like diverse terrain, large population, and different civs. One slightly disappointing thing is there doesn’t appear to be any civ team bonuses in the beta so fingers crossed the release will contain more.