Once you move from the first age to the second, you now have knowledge and metal to worry about in your economy. These options open your strategy significantly. Through research, resource gathering, upgrades, and economy management, you start to unlock new technology and buildings. You start off as a simple town with nothing more than a library, city center, a few farms and woodcutters, and other buildings based on your nation. The heart of RoN is in the economic speed and strategy of growing your nation.
Don’t like wonder victories? Disable them. It also has options to change things as you see fit. It all comes down to how you want to play. Rather spread your religious influence? Dominate your opponent by pushing your national borders against theirs through your cultural and religious zeal and win by dominating a majority of the map. Or, you can sit back, play defense, and win by building enough wonders to win through a wonder victory. For example, you can run the traditional victory condition of destroying your opponents. Win conditions and on-the-fly strategies. Here is what makes RoN so different from other RTS titles out there. It was overwhelming at the time, but 16 years in, and still playing, I have a decent handle on the game. RoN made me focus on my economy, my borders, bringing balanced forces to battle, subterfuge, counter intelligence, research, age advancement, and building management. I was used to, at the time, games like Warcraft that required little more than quick resource gathering and massive armies fighting.
My first experience with the title was confusion. During that time, RTS titles were seeing huge popularity, and Rise of Nations was just one of the titles that fell into the genre. RoN (as I will call it throughout the review) is a real-time strategy game that first released over 15 years ago. Does it still hold up today? Read on! A Slight Long Overview Otherwise, this is the same game that arrived from the heavens on May 20th, 2003. The major changes are the ability to run smoothly on new systems, updated multiplayer (through Steam), and a few graphical tweaks.
The game was originally created by Big Huge Games, with SkyBox Labs and Microsoft Studios now owning the rights. This is a modernized version of the original Rise of Nations and Rise of Nations: Thrones and Patriots together. Today, in Backlog, we are looking at Rise of Nations: Extended Edition for PC. After all, if we are going to try to cover the history of gaming, we might as well review every single title we can. Looks like it is time to start playing catch-up with some of the backlog titles we have laying around here at CultureDent.