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Excellent Strategy Game

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 3 / 4
Date: October 26, 2005
Author: Amazon User

The game is similar to Age of Empire and Empire Earth, but you will find 24 unique civilizations and many different buildings for each group. I am putting 4 stars, because the game have poor zoom system, but the AI is very configurable (Defensive or Aggresive Civilization) and you will play a Entire World champaign, from Prehistoric Age until last one.

Go Through The Ages In Under An Hour

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 4 / 7
Date: May 24, 2005
Author: Amazon User

RON is a real-time strategy game. Play one of 24 nations from the age of the chariot
To the age of the jet. Research different technology.Fight on land sea and air.
If you liked Age Of Empires you will love Rise Of Nations.
WARNNING: It will suck the hours away from your life.

Fun

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 2 / 2
Date: May 03, 2007
Author: Amazon User

This strategy game combines real time and move-based game.
Map (risiko-based) has nations and armies. When you play your move you enter into 'real time game' that can be in different modes - different goals (e.g. conquer enemy towns, ambush, kill certain # of enemies, defend yourself). Computer can also attack you if he wants the teritory you own. When you get new teritory, you get cards (you can purchase them also) and they can give you extra bonus during the game. For bonus, you can also build wonders within your teritory (when you aquire the card for building the wonder).
It doesn't require high-end machine to play (it will work very good on Pentium III).
It's not very durable - if you play the same campaign 5-10 times (even with different nations) it will become 'seen already'... But it's very fun while it lasts, and I recommend it.

Tedious and a step backwards

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 3 / 5
Date: June 29, 2005
Author: Amazon User

Rise of Nations is a tedious game. It plays like Age of Empires (AoE1) with regards to the structures, units created, and map scale. The game units are small which causes an eye strain. Infantry units are produced 3 at a time while cavalry units 1 at a time. Do they have any attack bonuses or strengths against different types, supposedly, but it really isn't noticeable, the player spends most of the time trying to gather ridiculous amount of resources to build the army and tech tree.

The tech tree is confusing and do not seen any real bonuses to the troops by having a high tech level, aside from being able to produce more advanced units. One has to build multiple structures and multiple cities to gather resources at a fast enough pace to keep up with the computer instead of concentrating in building an army and trying to decide how to out fight the computer. The player has to build universities to get science points for research, then there is the food, gold, metal, and wood harvesting. Oh wait, if you are mechanized, now try to find the oil. But wait, each harvesting area and city can only have a fixed number of workers gathering the resources (only 5 farms per city, etc). Now you have to build another city and build the same structures in it, each city needs a granary to get the food collection bonus for those workers, same goes for the smelter, etc. It is a waste of time bouncing back between the cities and resource gathering in an RTS.

If I wanted to play a city builder game, a turn based game like Civilization 2 would be the choice.

The game gives you a "historical leader" in the campaigns, but there is no real noticeable difference in the battles by having a general. The Generals do not fight, even the mighty Alexander just stands there immobile on a horse unit and does fight to defend himself. The game AI is also poor, when you select an Army to attack a certain unit, the soldiers will move off to fight, while the Generals and supply units remain behind instead of moving in support of the army. As a result of this glitch, the units become out of supply (suffer from attrition) and lose any command bonuses from their General.

Rise of Nations is a regression in the RTS genre to AoE1 with illogical tech trees and too much time being spent on sending merchants, and trying to gather the multiple resources in building cities. Empire Earth also suffers from having to gather multiple resources instead of focusing on strategy in defeating the opponent.

The campaign game, I played the Alexander one, is also quirky. You move your armies and fight one battle per turn, but there are no historical scenarios like in the campaigns in AoE2.

Overall, the game was not enjoyable and a waste of my time. AoE2 is much more enjoyable. Recommend Civilization 2 for turn based city empire building, AoE2, Starcraft, Warcraft 3, or Warhammer Dawn of War for an RTS game instead.

sweet game

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 4 / 9
Date: March 01, 2005
Author: Amazon User

I think this game is way awsome! I love rushing my age and dominating the other teams with my army of warriors. I also love the upgrades for your units and buildings. One more thing I love about this game is that you can build monuments that upgrade your army and sometime supplie you with recorcous. I highly recomend this game for all ages. Also check out the expansion for this game.

Rise of Nations

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 4 / 9
Date: July 08, 2006
Author: Amazon User

This is plainly a great game.Period. It has great replayability
and doesn't chew a hole in my hardrive. My favorite part is ....... Well anyway lets just say this is my favorite PC game. Ever .

Rise of Nations "Gold"

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 2 / 3
Date: December 29, 2007
Author: Amazon User

This item was advertised as Rise of Nations Gold, but it really wasn't! This CD contained Rise of Nations and Rise of Nations Thrones and Patriots. You would think this was the same as "Gold", but it is a different version and not compatible to play multiplayer "Gold".

doesn't live up to age of empires, unfortunately.

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 3 / 7
Date: December 03, 2006
Author: Amazon User

first off, the "thrones and patriots" expansion pack has noticeably better graphics.

anyway, i had enough of this game even before finishing scenarios... it just doesn't live up to age of empires. here's why. first of all, things simply move too fast. you research ages at lightning-fast speed, to where you don't even know what you're doing. you're clicking on build military units not even knowing what exactly they are, just so you can put up a fair fight. basically you're doing a bunch of things really fast that you don't appreciate because the game moves too fast. in age of empires 2, probably the best RTS game ever, you had to take your time and make sure not to run out of resources. here, it's all about EXPANSION. you have to keep expanding and expanding and expanding at lightning pace.. instead of having one city and working on it, you're supposed to create as many cities as possible!!! the idea is almost laughable. it takes so much trouble to build one city with the appropriate buildings etc., and here you're supposed to build multiple cities as fast as possible. hmm... not exactly like history, at all. not that realism is always a good thing in gaming, but it would be nice to have a sense of time and feel like your discoveries and accomplishments actually mean something, instead of just clicking "research civics," "research military" over and over.

that said, there are amazing things about rise of nations. the combat is a dream because you create and control military units as a unit... in other words you don't control just one soldier, you click and it selects all 3 archers you just created. the one thing i LOVE about rise of nations is that you can drag a box around ONLY military characters without selecting your citizens, too. obviously you don't want to send them into battle. this will surely become the standard control for RTS games from here on out.

citizens are easy to manage because they go to work at an appropriate place as soon as they're created. farms aren't a hassle like in AOE, because they're an unlimited food supply and don't go bad. with so many great things going for RON, it's a shame they didn't SIMPLIFY IT to be easier and more addictive like AOE. you have all these issues with tributes and truces and blah blah blah. oh yeah, and figure them all out while your battles are raging instead of getting to pause first. i really WANT to like this game, a lot... but it makes my head spin playing it.

Everyone else here is missing one large point when they talk about Rise of Nations

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 1 / 1
Date: August 01, 2005
Author: Amazon User

everyone else who has writtena review has not mentioned the online play. I admit without the online play this would be a 3 to 4 star game but the online play is what make this game worthwhile. so gather up your friends and fight them to the death. also the replay ability is amazing. change the settings any way you like. if you dont want to have to get oil then make the stopping point the age before that. This game is for anyone who likes any real-time strategy games and for those who are curious. I would try the demo (...) first but if you like age of empires, starcraft, warcraft 3, and any other really good rts (real-time stratefy) this is for u.

The best pc game I've played

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 1 / 1
Date: September 04, 2005
Author: Amazon User

This game is fantastic I really like all the different ages. It makes it so much more fun then just being in one particuler period of time. The Ages are Ancient(10,000BC-200BC)Classical(200BC-500AD) Medieval(500-1200)Gunpowder(1200-1650)Enlightenment(1650-1875)Industrial(1875-1930)Modern(1930-1980) and Information(1980-present).
You can also fight with an extremely wide varitey of units, anywhere from phlanxs, archers, cavalry, javalineers, and catapults to infantry machine guns, bazookas, tanks, battleships,stealth bombers(one of my favorite), fighters and even (drumroll please)nukes and much more!!
The game is a little complicated but not to complicated. Instead of just one source of money you have 6; food, wood, metal,wealth, knowledge, and sometimes oil. To get all of these things you'll need to build citizens and put them to work at farms mines etc. All of these used for different types of things. For example knowledge is used for age advancement and wood is used for buldings and units.
The absolute best thing about the game is the different campaigns:

Alexander the Great- 8/10 Try and take over the known world of the classical age including the Romans, Egyptions, Persians, and Indians. Also do the thing I most like about campaign the real historical battles.

Napolian- 7/10 Try and take over Europe in the Enlightenment Age with Napolian and become emporor of a continent. Again do historical battles.

The New World- 7/10 Try and take over North and South America in the gunpowder/enlightenment age as a Europian nation; English, Spanish etc. an Indian nation Iriquis, Aztecs, etc. or the Americans.

The Cold War- 9/10 The best campaign. Be the Americans or Soviets in the modern/information age. Control The Nado and Warsaw Pacts. Purchase Nukes. Win an economic or war victory(although if the americans and soviets go to war there will be nuclear annilation)also conquer as much of world as you can.

The Entire World- 5/10 Fun at first but gets boring. Be any nation and try and conquer the world. Starts Ancient age ends Information age. The really bad thing about this campaign is the lack of varity of battles you'll find yourself doing the same thing over and over.

Overall a great game also for a great price 25$.

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