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outstanding war game!

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 1 / 1
Date: October 09, 2005
Author: Amazon User

If you are a war game fan than this game is for you.The graphics are outstanding and the game play is great!

One of the most finely balanced games ever created

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 1 / 1
Date: August 07, 2007
Author: Amazon User

Rise of Nations is a truly astounding title. Even after a solid year of playing, I am still finding new strategies and new ways to play the game. Of the multitude of available nations, there simply is not one that stands head and shoulders above the others, it is more about the way you play the game and even the territory presented to you on a round by round basis.

The designers of Rise of Nations put an immense amount of time and thought into the game structure and it absolutely shows. The national border and city system is brilliant, allowing you to build only within your own territory (or allied territory) and some buildings only within new cities. The game strikes an astounding balance between economy and military while streamlining the experience at the same time.

Beyond that, the amount of time the game spans in one play session only increases the excitement of playing. From the dark ages to the information age, you will go from having men slinging rocks to nuclear bombs, artillery, stealth bombers and hi-tech fighter jets all in the course of an hour or so.

Without a doubt though, my favorite part about the game is how many strategies there are that can lead to victory. Take the Americans and the Russians, for example. With the americans, building a large military is important from the outset to fend off raids from other countries as well as produce more resources (all american troops produce wealth, timber and steel, three of the game's five resources--the other two being knowledge and oil). This is a nearly essential strategy if you want to win with them, I have found.

The russians, on the other hand, are afforded a completely different approach by the nature of their national bonuses. One aspect of the national border system is that enemy nations take damage when they send their units into your territory through means of attrition. As history buffs are probably already thinking, the russians have exceptional attrition damage and, through the construction of certain wonders (national benefits represented by iconic buildings that any nation can build, such as the hanging gardens--which increase knowledge production--or the Kremlin--which increases attrition), their nation is impregnable to any force not accompanied by an appropriate number of supply wagons, which keep your troops from suffering attrition.

As you can probably tell, Rise of Nations true secret secret to success lies in the incredible balance that it strikes between economy, unit production and specific national benefits. One of the great RTS games of all time, it is certainly a worthy purchase for any fan of the genre.

Solid strategy game that you can keep coming back to play

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 1 / 1
Date: August 09, 2007
Author: Amazon User

Rise of Nations is mix between city building and historical strategy. You can guide your nation through from ancient time to the present. It doesn't have the full complexity of a Civilization, but it what lacks in complexity, it compensates with the greater control/flexibility in city/civilization building. Unlike most of the Microsoft games of this type, it still was interesting to me after mastering it. If you like strategy and city building games, I highly recommend it.

A really excellent strategy game

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 1 / 1
Date: August 20, 2007
Author: Amazon User

I just love these kinds of games. What I particularly loved about this game is the history aspect, that you can choose an age and stick with that age the whole game and not having to advance to the modern world every time. It's just so much fun to see my soldiers use muskets, catapults or these planes they used a hundred years ago. What I also like alot about this game is the fact that gathering resources wasn't made into a chore, like if you chop down a forest you have to go and find another one. Not so here. When you find a forest it seems to be a forest that lasts forever (I guess the lumberers planted a new tree when they fell one, hehe). This make you focus on building your nation.

This game is very well made but there are some negative sides to it. When a higher age is played, like the industrial revolution or the modern era, the various units look a little too much alike when you don't count the special units. When you want to play Americans vs Russian in the modern era they don't look that much different. But the fun of the game is so high that normally you don't think about this.

I would recommend this game to all who like historic strategy games.

Rise of Nations Gold

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 5 / 34
Date: February 03, 2005
Author: Amazon User

OK! I am a strategy game fan. This game fell way below my expectations. The technologies you can research and create are nowhere near as good as Empire Earths's. The game is slow to load, and slow to unload compared to other PC games. I'm guessing that the organizations that picked this dog for PC game of the year were paid off. The one and only feature that this game has that I liked is that there are no priests, or wizards, to create disasters that wreak havoc on your forces. I got $2.00 when I sold this cow to a used game store and was glad to get rid of it.

Pretty, but once you beat it, why play it again?

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 1 / 4
Date: July 22, 2005
Author: Amazon User

I was hoping that this would be a game with a lot of replay-ability and what I got was a game that, once you learn it, just becomes tedious.

Once you figure out what you need to do to get your civilization going, it's a matter of building the same city the same way over and over.

And, it didn't take me long to find an approach to beating the computer that the AI couldn't cope with. I suppose this game would be a lot more fun to play against other humans, but you'd think that in this age of 2 gig and faster processors these game manufacturers would be able to build a game where the computer could really think out some challenging tactics. Not in this game.

So, for me it was fun getting up the learning curve, but now it's boring and once I win the current game I'm playing, on "tough" mode on a "big huge" map, I plan to sell it used.

Gets old

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 3 / 35
Date: June 06, 2006
Author: Amazon User

This game is awful .you might like it for the first sevral games but it gets old after awhile. Every game is about the same. After you get the later technologies you just build a thousand missle silos and nuke the enemies until they get a missle shield and nobody ever wins

Good enough

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 0 / 2
Date: November 07, 2007
Author: Amazon User

Buy this game if you love real-time-strategy, resource gathering and building games. It is one of the better ones available. If you do not like RTS then do not buy this game. Simple enough.

Rise of Nations Friend AND Foe

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 0 / 0
Date: August 22, 2005
Author: Amazon User

R of N is one of the most historically accurate strategy games focusing on more than a single culture. You can take one civilization and move it through all the different ages of the world, from ancient age to the high tech information age. Even better is the actual gameplay. As usual, though, it takes too long to load on some PCs.

Great buy!

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 0 / 0
Date: April 24, 2008
Author: Amazon User

The reviewer who called this game boring totally missed out by playing only 1 out 5 of the campaigns. The Conquer the World campaign is fun, but yes it is the typical run of the mill RTS. But, the other campaigns have very different scenarios! For example, the Cold War campaign (my favorite) brings alot of historical perspective as you choose between propping up puppet governments or supporting rebel uprising, seeking appeasement with the Russians or going for all out nuclear war.

This game is a great buy, especially at the current price. I played it nonstop for 2 months and I break it out for about a week or two every couple of months.

Big Note: Don't lose the product key!

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