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Great game - great price one of the best RTS games

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 7 / 11
Date: February 03, 2005
Author: Amazon User

Aweomse RTS game. If you like Age of Empires II - this game is taking it to the next level. It also won a lot of Game of the Year Awards last year. It's a must have

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.

Development of civilizations made fun

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 59 / 60
Date: February 07, 2005
Author: Amazon User

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.

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.

Fun.... For A Bit

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 15 / 22
Date: March 03, 2005
Author: Amazon User

I have to agree with most of the reviews in that this game is truly a masterpiece of real-time-strategy (RTS). I have played many of these types of games and I found that this game offers all of the features that I always thought would make the ultimate game in this genre. You start in the ancient age and work your way all the way up to modern times. That fact alone is amazing. It is very satisfying to watch your units upgrade through the ages, from cavalry to stealth bombers, from wooden war ships to aircraft carriers. Very cool!

What gets me is the replay value of the game. I started off with the Conquer the World Campaign, which places you on a large risk type map and allows you to move armies around and invade countries with the ultimate goal of capturing the entire world. I picked the Germans and thus started with my capital in Berlin, Germany. The first few missions were fun. I captured some territory from the locals by forming raiding parties and sweeping through and destroying everything. No building and gathering resources in these missions. I was still having fun when I declared war on Greece and began to fight my first real battles. The default objective is that if you are invading a territory held by another country you have 90 minutes to capture the enemy capital. If you are being invaded you need to hold out for 90 minutes. Sounds fun. The only problem is every battle is set up the same way. How long to the expect me to keep fighting 90 minute battles that are complete replays of the last one. You start with one city and some troops and citizens, you build up your economy, and eventually you have the resources and army to defeat your enemy. That's it! Over and over! I did it about 10 times before I had enough.

I must admit that I didn't try any of the other campaigns (I think there are 5 total such as Alexander The Great and The Cold War). I just couldn't force myself to put this game in, start gathering resources, and do the exact same thing I had done the time before. I'm sure I missed something by not playing these other campaigns, but I just couldn't force myself to play this over Call of Duty. And I am of the opinion that you should never have to force yourself to play a game to begin with.

While there is some satisfaction in building up a large army and destroying your enemy it quickly gets overshadowed by the repetition of the game. If you are thinking of buying this game in the hopes of conquering the world and are not the type of person who enjoys completing the same monotonous task over and over then I would look elsewhere. While I can see why so many people enjoy this game, I wanted to present some reasons for why you may not.

Not a patch on Civ3

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 5 / 8
Date: May 01, 2005
Author: Amazon User

I bought this game because of the good reviews it got but i have to say i was disappointed with the overall game. At first i liked the game. it was very different to other strategy games i've played and enjoyable to play at first. the major problem i found is that every single 90 minute battle you fight against another nation is pretty much the exact same. the game becomes very boring very quickly. i can't understand how people can give this game 5 stars. there is very little variety and you can't get any long term enjoyment out of the game.

worth the money

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 3 / 4
Date: May 04, 2005
Author: Amazon User

well worth the money. yea some of the battle get repeative but that is the same in every game out there. the graphics and game play make it well worth it. It's one of the games that actually stay on my pc desk and not on the rack.

Fun, but lacking some features.

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 3 / 4
Date: May 21, 2005
Author: Amazon User

This game is great, really. However, it always feels a little like a setpiece battle because everyone is researching the exact same technologies at the exact same time, just trying to get slightly ahead of the next guy. It would have been nice if there had been a technology tree instead of a technology calendar. Still, I love playing this game, especially on the easiest level, because you can win every time. Nukes are especially entertaining. The manual could use some work explaining things - I hate learning games from pop-up instructions in the game itself.

Still, overall, it's pretty entertaining. Just don't expect it to be too brainy.

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.

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.

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