- Lead 1 of 24 diverse nations in this epic, historical, real-time strategy game
- Engage in 5 single player campaigns and over 130 scenarios
- Brings to life 6,000 years of history from the ancient age to the information age
- 6 new nations, 4 unique single-player campaigns, 20+ original units, and more
- Challenge up to 8 players on the Internet or via local area network
Product Description
Rise of Nations: Gold Edition gives you the greatest strategic game experience as you you lead your armies on land or sea. This version gives you both the award-winning original title and the critically acclaimed expansion pack, Rise of Nations: Thrones and Patriots…. More >>
In many ways, Rise of the Nations is more like an upgraded version of the Age of Empires series. In the Gold edition, you will also get the expansion game that came after the original so that is a good deal. This is a fun game to play. The format isn’t anything new or special. Its your typical gathering the resources, building up your armies, developing your tech level and go out and conquered your foes. It been done many time before. But what make this game go up to the next level is that there are a lot of options to be play. Different nations, different tactics, different priorities to developed and nice graphics that actually helped the player. Its also fun as you conquered from Risk-like board, going from nation to nation as your initial commands of hoplites changed into Tiger tanks and usages of nuclear weapons and development of national shield system.
Overall, a pretty fun game, interesting and above all, entertaining to boot. By the way, I owned a Pentium III 800 and its plays well on my system.
Rating: 4 / 5
In the past, I’ve played a lot of games like Starcraft and Command and Conquer: Generals, so when I had some extra Christmas money, I decided to look for a good RTS game. Before I bought Rise of Nations, I downloaded trials of Civ IV, Empire Earth (I and II), Rise of Nations, and Age of Empires III. In this game, there are twice as many ages as in Age of Empires, so you get to play the progression from slingshots to rocket launchers. There are also 14 different nations. Each nation has it’s own strengths and a few unique troop types, but the technology tree is basically the same so that you don’t have to learn a whole new tree if you want to try out other nations.
I haven’t done much with the campaigns, so I can’t say anything about them. I’ve basically done skirmishes and played multiplayer. When playing this mode, there are a lot of options to customize the game. You can go with the defaults or you can choose different sets of victory criteria, 5 skill levels for the AI, AI personality (aggressive, defensive, etc) or even limit the game to a range of ages rather than play all the way through. One of the only shortcomings is that I wish there were more maps. I haven’t looked into whether there is a way to install or download more.
When playing, there is a lot going on, but the interface keeps things from looking cluttered and confusing. I figured out how to play just based on my experience with other RTS games and am just now going back and looking up some of the hotkeys to speed up my game. There are a lot of upgrades to keep up with between age upgrades, troop upgrades, and resource upgrades, but pressing tab automatically scrolls you through all currently available upgrades, so you don’t have to spend half your time remembering where your library/granary/lumber mill is.
I know this game is a little bit older, but I think it is better than any of the others I demoed. The only exception may be Civ IV, which I bypassed once I realized it was turn-based. If you’re a fan of turn-based games, you might like it better, they just aren’t my cup of tea. If you’re looking for a good history themed RTS, Rise of Nations is one of the better ones out there.
Rating: 4 / 5
This game is along the lines of Age of Empires. Go out and get resources, build up your city and army, then go stomp on the enemy. The gold edition combines the original game with the Thrones and Patriots expansion. While I enjoyed the game, I did find certain strategies that always worked against the computer controlled enemy. While it is fun for a while to beat up on the enemy, it became a little tedious after a while. Still, I think this game is worthy of purchase.
Rating: 4 / 5
When RON came out, it was definitely the best game of its kind: the graphics and game engine were far superior to anything that had been made before. However, there are now several better games on the market.
Summary:
Great fun to master, but once you’re good – it’s very tedious.
Also, there are a few critical flaws in the AI, making the game seem rather stupid at times.
Overall, it’s great for a short-lived, thrill of a gaming experience, but once you’ve conquered the world, you’ve conquered it – there’s nothing else to do, unless you want to conquer it again…
Rating: 3 / 5
I have a laptop, so most of the games coming out nowadays are too hardcore for me to run. This, however, works fine and is a pretty good game. It does chew through quite a bit of memory when there’s a lot of units on the map though, which causes it to slow down a good deal.
Rating: 4 / 5