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Looks like it is time to start playing catch-up with some of the backlog titles we have laying around here at Back to the Gaming. After all, if we are going to try to cover the history of gaming, we might as well review every single title we can. Today, in Backlog, we are looking at Rise of Nations: Extended Edition for PC. This is a modernized version of the original Rise of Nations and Rise of Nations: Thrones and Patriots together. The game was originally created by Big Huge Games, with SkyBox Labs and Microsoft Studios now owning the rights. The major changes are the ability to run smoothly on new systems, updated multiplayer (through Steam), and a few graphical tweaks. Otherwise, this is the same game that arrived from the heavens on May 20th, 2003. Does it still hold up today? Read on!

A Slight Long Overview

RoN (as I will call it throughout the review) is a real-time strategy game that first released over 15 years ago. During that time, RTS titles were seeing huge popularity, and Rise of Nations was just one of the titles that fell into the genre. My first experience with the title was confusion. I was used to, at the time, games like Warcraft that required little more than quick resource gathering and massive armies fighting. RoN made me focus on my economy, my borders, bringing balanced forces to battle, subterfuge, counter intelligence, research, age advancement, and building management. It was overwhelming at the time, but 16 years in, and still playing, I have a decent handle on the game.

Here is what makes RoN so different from other RTS titles out there. Win conditions and on-the-fly strategies. For example, you can run the traditional victory condition of destroying your opponents. That works fine. Or, you can sit back, play defense, and win by building enough wonders to win through a wonder victory. 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. It all comes down to how you want to play. It also has options to change things as you see fit. Don’t like wonder victories? Disable them.

The heart of RoN is in the economic speed and strategy of growing your nation. 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. Through research, resource gathering, upgrades, and economy management, you start to unlock new technology and buildings. These options open your strategy significantly. Once you move from the first age to the second, you now have knowledge and metal to worry about in your economy. You also have wonders that you can start to build, each with unique powers that can enhance your strategy for that battle.

At age one, your units are nothing more than slingers, spearmen, and archers. As you continue to advance through the ages, you unlock cavalry, snipers, spies, tanks, artillery, biplanes, bombers, stealth fighters, nuclear missiles, air craft carriers, and a wide range of other military units. Of note, the spies have the ability to “bribe” units. This is a special power held by spies and a few specific generals as you decide your nations governmental path, that allow you to turn enemy units into your own.

On top of worrying about your military, new buildings constantly unlock and upgrade through the ages (of which there are eight). Watchtowers in the early game, which can see spies, become anti-air turrets in more modern ages. As your nation becomes more scientifically advanced, buildings that enhance resource gathering, such as granaries and smelters, become available. These not only increase production in the city, but also allow you to research additional bonuses that can strengthen your buildings, ships, units, or grant other bonuses.

Age of Empires

Moving through the ages takes some time. You start with no research on your tech-tree, with most nations at least, and you will need to research military, civic, commerce, and science, to advance in your age. Most of the time only three of those need to be researched before you move up to the next age, but letting one fall behind can mean doom for your nation. For example, military research doesn’t just give you the ability to upgrade your units, it also increases your population cap. Science reduces the cost of other research as one benefit. Civic research allows the building of new cities and expands your borders. Commerce will raise the amount of income you can gather at any given time as one of its benefits.

As mentioned previously, “aging up” unlocks a host of new buildings and units, but it also gives you a distinct advantage over adversaries that are behind you in research. A small group of units that are fully upgraded in the industrial age, for example, can roll over a large army still in the enlightenment period. These are only one age apart, and the outcome is not always going to be what you expect as there are many other factors in play when it comes to combat.

Time for Fighting

I mentioned previously the different ways you can claim victory in the game, but ultimately, most of the time it will all come down to war. Taking your opponents capital city and holding it for the required amount of time is the most common path to victory. While I could get technical with how combat works in the game, stories paint a better picture. A few things to know, though, is that there are key things you will have to learn to truly succeed in the game.

Generals need to be in your army, especially against superior forces. They grant a number of boosts and their abilities, such as creating extra “fake” troops, allow your real troops to do the killing while getting attacked less frequently. Spies and scouts can turn the tide of battle depending on your strategy as their abilities come in to play in multiple situations. Most importantly is the ever present attrition damage as you wage war through enemy lines.

Attrition is a representation of the supplies an army needs. If you enter an opponents lands without supply wagons your troops are going to take significant damage. This damage can allow a small group in a fort to take out an entire army. Without supply wagons, your troops are going to die quickly unless you have a wonder to overcome the damage.

But, as I wrote, it is best to paint a few pictures of how combat in the game works. I play nearly nightly with a good friend and in those games we have seen it all. Early in our RoN careers, he attacked my land on camelback to find that he was facing off against tanks. This was because I was an age or two ahead and had upgraded my troops through research. That is the more mundane aspect of combat.

The better pictures to paint come from some pretty epic matches between the two of us. One in particular, which he reminded me of, had the two of us sending our troops to the death for what seemed like hours. There was a small land bridge separating the main access points to our nations and our two forward cities became unit producing power houses. No land was given by either side. We were flanked by water. Ships couldn’t turn the tide of battle either. As this slaughter continued, I started to bomb his economy with my aircraft. Bombers would target mines, woodcutter camps, farms, markets, anything that helped him gain resources. While this was going on, his focus stayed on the battle at hand.

He has always been better at the face to face fighting than me. What we learned from the game is just how devious I can be. While the war continued on the land bridge, I built a handful of commandos and helicopters and sent them around the edge of the map with a single marine. I had the Statue of Liberty, which meant I took no attrition in enemy lands. Just as he noticed that his economy was being decimated, he looked to his capital to see a handful of helicopters and commandos blowing up the city. At the time, I think, he felt safe since you need infantry to take a building. That is what the one marine was there for. Due to the fact that I had researched an end age ability which allowed me to take a city as soon as I touched it, he couldn’t do anything but watch as that one marine walked up and touched his capital, claiming victory for me.

That war would have gone differently if those options weren’t in play. Since he wanted to take me down in a traditional sense, his strong point, I would have lost. I may be a bit better at building an economy at times, but he is always better when it comes to battles. My strengths lie in micromanagement and sneaky devious plays. That skill won that game for me.

Another game was more of a dare, against another friend of ours. He was frustrated with the speed in which I could upgrade my military and take out his nation. I told him I would beat him without building one military unit. This means no barracks, no auto plant, no factory, no airport, and no ships. I would not build a unit that could attack. I also stated that I would beat him through a military victory. How is this possible in a real time strategy game? Russians and spies.

I chose to play as the Russians for the match as they get bonuses to building their spies. Doing this allowed me to build countless spies that would stand outside of each of his military buildings. They were simply lined up. As he built a unit, I bribed it and turned it back against the building that had just trained it. As “my” military grew, he pumped out more troops, which I also purchased. By the time he realized what was going on, he tried to build scouts/commandos to counter my spies, but “my” army was large enough to defeat them before they could harm many spies.

In time he attempted to go for a different type of victory, but I continued to harass his citizens, hurting his economy and stopping him from building key structures that would allow him to grow his nation. The whole time I was squeezing him with civic research, forts, and religion. He had no choice but to build more troops. The problem was that he was off his game at this point, unsure of how to combat this strategy. Looking back there were likely ways to get out of the trap I had set fairly easily, but he was too tilted to think that way. Instead, I slowly amassed an army that was able to take his capital and defeat him, all with troops he built for me.

Combat can be as simple as building a giant army and right clicking on a building. It can also be as complicated as building an entire army of spies to purchase the enemy units for yourself. Where the game shines is when multiple fronts are fighting at the same time and you are having to make split second decisions on where you need to reinforce lines, while also focusing on building your economy and continuing to push forward on research. And you also have to worry about nukes.

Late game, nukes become a headache. There are normal nukes and ICBMs, which are significantly stronger, and if you aren’t able to blow up the silos in which they are being built, you have no recourse until very late in the game. Fortunately, there are some backstops for the overuse of nukes. Once fired, the offending team can no longer use the market to buy or sell resources for a time. There is also an Armageddon clock that limits the number of nukes that can be fired before the game ends with no victors. We have used this against the tougher computer opponents to end a game with a “I didn’t lose and you didn’t win.”

Nations Rising

With a name like Rise of Nations the nations are obviously front and center. There are unique powers for each, most of which tie into the history of the nation in question. The Turks, for example, are great for attacking with huge unique artillery early in the game, while the Spanish are great at uncovering the entire map from the start of the game and exploring the map very quickly.

Greeks get bonuses to research and the speed in which they gather knowledge and Romans are great at building defenses and heavy troops, which let them quickly take cities early, then reinforce and hold them. Each nation has unique starting abilities, and each will lead you to play in a different way. The Lakota, for example, can’t build farms or anything to produce food. Instead, they gain food from citizens, scouts and cavalry. They also have no visible borders and can build anywhere on the map that isn’t occupied by another nation. This gives them a unique play style unlike any other nation in the game. Since the expansion is included in the Extended Edition, you’ll easily find a favorite nation, and mod support allows you to add even more.

Still a Looker

After all these years, RoN has continued to be a graphical beauty. This isn’t due to high poly counts, HDR support, or any crazy graphical enhancements, it all has to do with the style in which the game was built. Each unit is built in rudimentary, yet detailed, polygons. The buildings, though, are alive. You can zoom in on a factory and see pieces moving. In 4K, you can zoom in on a building and count the bricks. The game looks wonderful and has stood the test of time because it was built to convey information instead of checking “good graphics” boxes for people. Instead, the art, the style, and the feel all come together to keep the game looking beautiful, even 16 years after release.

Just Short of Perfect

It would be unfair to review RoN without mentioning a few issues with the game. First, pathfinding can be a mess. Build a barracks on one side of the mountain and your units will almost always come out, walk through enemy territory, eat all the attrition they can, and then quickly die to the enemy troops. This can be fixed by shift-clicking a path for them to follow, but it is a frustration that can’t be overlooked.

The computer is easily confused when attacked from the water. In naval battles they are beasts, but if you attack their ground units from the water, they will often put on their best Benny Hill routine and die rather quickly without ever attacking your ships. Artillery, by the way, can sink ships quickly, but the AI doesn’t know this at times and it can make battles far to easy.

Some of the more advanced techniques in the game are also not explained very well. It took us nearly 15 years to learn that once you take a city, you can buy structures built by the vanquished nation with your spies. These things may be explained in the single player campaign, but through all the years I have never felt the desire to play more than a few hours into the campaign. It is little more than a game of Risk with real time battles instead of dice rolls.

The Verdict

In the end, no real time strategy game has come close to pulling off what Rise of Nations has done. It is a game that, 16 years on, still throws unique wars at me. Most of my favorite gaming related stories come from different games of RoN because there is so much variety in how the game can be played. While the single player campaign is a miss for me, it may be something fun for those that want to dive in to a strategy style campaign that is light on story. Pathfinding can be frustrating, but is easily overcome through practice and know-how. The game stands the test of times and it is not unfair to say how much Big Huge Games is missed in the gaming community. While they are making mobile titles, the Rise of series stood the test of time and a proper sequel would have likely been a huge hit in a time when a strong RTS was needed.

The cherry on the cake as it were, is the endless customization you will find in the game. From scenarios for single player games, to options for multiplayer games, you will never starve for options. Want to see if you could handle the Napoleonic Wars, better than the namesake? You can. Want to create a game that only takes place in the industrial age, that is also a possibility. Want to start a game where you have nothing but a few citizens and wide open spaces? That is one of the most popular online modes, called nomad, available. There is little that you will want to see, minus Big Huge coming back and creating a sequel. And for the price of admission, you won’t find a better deal.

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Rise of Nations: Extended Edition 19.99 10 Score 10.0/10

















Pros Incredibly Deep

Devious Players Have a Home

Nation Powers

Still Looks Good

Great Multiplayer Cons Pathfinding

Rushes Crush AI Support GamingHistoria by Buying Through Our Link