The Start

What's the deal

Many beginners are often overwhelmed by the complexity of RoN at first. The economic model is far more complex than traditional RTS games and the interaction of the upgrades on early development is hard to analyse.

This article is designed to talk you through the early part of the game, through archaic age and in to early classical and then to leave you with a general guide as to what you should be doing next.

What we need is a good build order

Or not, build orders were the way to get the most out of simpler RTS games. If all you had to do was but so many villagers on wood and so many doing this and so many doing that then it would be very easy to publish a build order. RoN isn't like that because most of the early development is about upgrades and situational variances. Citizen production in RoN is important but it is not anywhere near as critical as other games where uninterrupted production of them is key.

What we end up with in RoN is a build order that is not a build order. The first 30 seconds is a pure build order, but after that it gets a little fuzzy and the further into the game you get the fuzzier it gets. You can't use a build order that extends 3 minutes into the game let alone 16 minutes. So what is needed is a good eary start and then guiding principles coupled with a todo list.

A Good Early Start

The first two seconds

ltcvv. What's that then? Well, that is you fist 2 seconds of a typical game, that's you build order. What does it do? (l) go to the library, (t) research the first science upgrade (yellow), (c) go to the city, (v) produce a citizen, twice. A final word of warning though, don't be two quick, in a laggy game it's possible for an order not to take, or you may miss a key, just be precise about the key presses, it will only take you one more second and eliminates the possibility of a big error.

The scout

Select your scout. This can be done in one of two ways, either hit the scout hotkey (#) or drag select the whole screen. The latter works well because your scout is military so will be selected in preference to any civilians. You don't care where your scout is, he is there somewhere and you don't have to bother looking for him. Now that your scout is selected you need to order him to explore. You could just click the auto-scout button but you shouldn't for two reasons. First, you have nothing to do now until your science track is upgraded and second, the auto-scout feature is very poor. You need to plot a path for your scout to explore, to do this, hold the shift key down to queue up multiple move orders and then right click multiple times on the mini-map to set him going. Use the mini-map to issue the orders as this involves no screen scrolling, you don't have to move the mouse much and you can more easily see what you are doing as each click is visualised on the mini-map. The only down side to this is that you need to be a bit more precise for the first few clicks but you do have a few seconds here so concentrate on the first 4 clicks.

The first thing you need off of you scout is for him to find a good place to build a second city. This will be just beyond your current cities borders (they will grow a little)and towards the centre of the map. Click your scout to explore the front of your city (two clicks). Next, explore further around your city to get a good view of your immediate resources and collect any ruins. Use about 4-6 clicks, don't go mad, this isn't an ES game where an unexplored black bit can cost you the game, you just want the general topography of mountains and forests. Finally scout the rest of the map with bold orders, one click in each likely enemy camp location then a few more back and forth across the map. It's best to scout the enemy early for two reasons. First, you give yourself a chance of spotting a rush before it hits and secondly it's safer for your scout early on, by 10 minutes or so, the enemy camps can be deadly to a scout wandering through.

Second city

The game should be about 10 seconds old now and that science track upgrade is about to finish so select your library again when it has and upgrade your civic (blue) track. Now have a quick look at your resources, they can vary at this point for a number of reasons so you need to take stock, you will need two more villagers and some food and wood (60) to build a new city and also two more farms. You won't have enough for all of this but you will soon. Most likely you will be able to build 2 citizens and one farm so do that. Take another citizen from where you have the most resource and send him (or her) to the likely site of a second city. Chances are that your scout is only just starting in that area so you may not have found a good place, if you haven't then use this citizen to help look, if you have then send him there. Remember that your border will expand a little when your civic upgrade is finished. A good spot to look for is one with a good sized wood and preferably a mountain too. Always build your city as close to your border as possible.

Your current wood situation is important now as you need over (or nearly) 100, this will enable you build a second farm as well as have enough to build your city when your building citizen gets there. You usually can build your second farm.

Build the economy some more

We're about a minute in now and things get a bit hazy, your fist city is full of farms but may have more space on the wood camp, your second city is being built and your scout is wandering around, hopefully feeding you with extra goodies from the ruins he finds. This means that your economy will likely be 70 food and 60 wood production. There is little or no more room for economic expansion until you upgrade your commerce (green) track at the library so this is your next priority. You will probably have enough food but not enough wood, so build another citizen, while you are waiting for the wood to come in you might as well wait for food as well, you may even be able to build two and keep the wood and food level. Upgrade the commerce track as soon as you can.

Your second city should nearly be up now so you will have the ability to build extra farms and gather more wood. You will have the need for another 6 citizens that you can build from both cities to build a new lumber camp and 3 more farms. However first you need to get a market.

The market

The market is good, the market is your friend. At the market you can start getting gold and you can begin to access those blue dots in the mini-map. Build a market and immediately build a caravan and a merchant. The caravan will start trading between your cities to get gold and the merchant will boost your economy from rare resources. Rare resources are good because they give you 20 production (or two 10s) which is twice the speed of a citizen's economy. They can also give you other benefits. You will have been very unlucky if you haven't found a close safe rare resources and you will have probably found 2 or 3. When you select the market, the available resources will flash on the mini-map. Look for resources that gives you food, wood and gold. Others that give you metal and knowledge are useful as soon as you reach classical age but only give you 10 of what you want now.

The Todo List

Okay, we have gone completely fuzzy now, you're about 2-3 minutes into the game and any build order had completely finished. So much now depends on what you want to do that it's best to have a check list of things you should be looking to do.

Archaic age

All these things should be done early but you may want to do them in archaic age.

Classical age

All the above things that you haven't yet done should be done ASAP.

Other Useful Stuff

Game options

I have assumed standard options are in use here, in particular the standard hot keys but also some behaviour like preference to selecting military.

Some other options can also help your game-play, have a good look around the options screens to see if there is anything that might suit you.

Some options I would recommend are:

Some guiding principles

Here are a few reasons and the concepts behind the above suggestions