bloodfyr's Full Review: Rise of Nations: Thrones and Patriots for Windows
(NOTE: As I received both the main game and the expansion at the same time, this review handles them as a single entity)
I've been a fan of Real Time Strategy games since I could first click a mouse, but the latest offerings by all the 'big names' in the genre really leave me wanting more. Warcraft and Starcraft require too much micromanagement, Command and Conquer has descended into quick skirmishes, and the Age games have never really been what I wanted either. So naturally, it was with a slight amount of skepticism that I took on Rise of Nations, and it's expansion, Thrones and Patriots.
Dismayed at first to see that it followed the -craft control scheme, where you right-click to give orders and have to click on a building to produce units, I pushed past that and found what is probably one of the richest and most rewarding RTS I've ever touched.
While the game, at it's core, follows the traditional RTS formula of "build up your base/slay your foes", there's a lot more to it. Instead of simply building and securing your base, you're building an entire nation and guiding them through the Ages, from the Ancient Age to the Information Age. Through research conducted at your Library, you progress through the Ages, making different units and tactics available to you. In the beginning, you will be facing off against your foes with slings and arrows, and then later you'll be crushing them under the treads of your tanks. There's Seven altogether (Ancient, Classical, Medieval, Gunpowder, Enlightment, Industrial, Modern, and Information), and each one forces you to alter your battle strategy just a tiny bit.
Combat is definately the first thing you notice to separate this game from the 'pack'. It is a refreshing change in regards to 'tank-rushing' strategies that seem so prevalent in games today. A rush of tanks will fail in this game, no matter how large. Balancing your forces between ranged attackers and melee units is key to victory.
Expansion is accomplished through building cities that expand your national borders. When you attack a city, instead of reducing it to rubble, you're forced to bring it's health to zero and capture it with an infantry division. Because it takes time to 'assimilate' the city into your nation, it's vulnerable to recapture, and you have to spend a few frantic minutes (depending on the size of the city) defending it from your enemies. This changes the pace yet again, forcing you to take a more realistic approach to war. The winner is not the man who blitzes straight through enemy territory, but the one who stops to cultivate and use what he captures.
Despite being called real-time strategy games, for most in the genre, I feel that they fail to deliver the 'strategy' component. While a rush of twenty tanks will blow over anything in your way in Red Alert 2, as I mentioned before, a well-prepared enemy will turn your forces to scrap metal here. Balancing your forces is the only way to win. Use of the terrain, special General units (which grant your armies special powers and stats), and advance planning is key to defeating even the computer on some of it's higher difficulties. If you do not plan ahead, if you do not think to counter every possible enemy advance, the enemy will trounce you (yes, even the computer).
Control groups have been in RTS games since seemingly the genre's origins. Rise of Nations, however, adds something minor to the feature that really adds much strategic depth. It may not seem like much, but the ability to assign a unit to multiple groups (assigning group of units to a number, and then reselecting them later by pusing that number) is a blessing. In a large, pitched battle, control of all of your troops are key. Rush in, and you will die. In most RTS games, this was your only option, though, because units could not belong to more than one control group. If you had a multi-element army (infantry, tanks, artillery), you had to separate them into different groups and order the attack separately, hoping they all arrived at around the same time, before the enemy's soldiers obliterated the tanks, or the infantry was run over. In Rise of Nations, assign the entire army to one key, and then each element to it's own. Move the army as one cohesive unit, in formation to the battle, and then when the battle begins, and events start to unfold, manually order each particular element around as a real General would. This slight tweak to the formula makes battles in this game that much more enjoyable.
Instead of just two or three sides, Big Huge Games, the developer, added a whopping 20+ countries to choose from, each with their own unique units and powers. Some of them are modern powerhouses, like the Americans (who are on the Expansion Pack), but most of them are ancient civilizations, like the Romans or the Egyptians. Each has a handful of unique units, and a collection of bonuses that both fit the country historically. For example, attrition damage is damage your armies recieve when in enemy territory without supply wagons (it simulates running a military campaign without proper supply lines, another thing the game makes you think about and adds more realism to it). The Russian's have a bonus that gives one-hundred percent more attrition damage to enemy units because, historically, no invasion of Russia has ever succeded. Nations succeed economically, politically, or militarily, and it's up to you to find the right country for your fighting style.
Rise of Nations advertises something called 'smart citizenry'. The reason I don't like Starcraft and other Blizzard games are because of the required micromanagement. Like in those games, Rise of Nations uses a basic unit to construct all of your structures. Your citizens, the building unit, will stand idle for a preset time, before they go find work for themselves. If they've stood around for about twenty seconds, and there is an idle resource collection station, or a building under construction, they will go to work. It's not perfect, like if you need a citizen for something, queue him up, look away for a few seconds, and when you come back he'll have disappeared, but it's better than having nothing but idle workers filling up your population limit.
When it comes to multiplayer, were it not for the fact that you can customize just about every detail of your match, it would be a generic RTS multiplayer battle. Two or more players come in, pick their country of choice, and go duke it out. Instead, you can customize your entire experience to your liking. I said the key to the game was advancing your culture through the Ages, but if you want to start the progress at an Age other than the Ancient, all you do is select it. If you want to stop advancement before the Information Age, or disallow war before a particular Age comes about, merely set the options. If you want to cut down on the civilization building, and jump straight into the action, just set the proper options.
The single player mode, called Conquer the World, is handled in a very different way than the multiplayer, and this is where my inner General really giggles with glee. The single player game for the Main Release is played on a Risk-like board, and it's turnbased. You pick your country of choice and simply try to conquer the world, however it plays a little differently than Risk. The world is divided up into territories, each with bonus materials or special structures which are visible on the world map. These structures go a long way to deciding your strategy. Grab a territory with a supply depot, and you're granted an extra army. During a normal skirmish, there are rare resources scattered around the map that grant bonuses. If you capture a territory with a rare resource, it's bonus applies to all battles you fight afterwards.
Wherein Risk, the number of armies you invade with largely determines your strategies, an army marker on the board is merely that...a marker. Whenever you invade a territory occupied by an enemy force, a normal skirmish battle occurs, and you have ninety minutes to seize the enemy capital. Your starting forces are determined by the strength factor of the target land, and any special cards you put into play before the battle.
The biggest problem with this, however...is in the later stages of a campaign, the other nations of the world (all of which are represented on the map) have gobbled up all the unclaimed territories, and every battle turns into a long, drawn-out skirmish battle. Big Huge Games saw this as a problem, and for the release of Thrones and Patriots, they included four mini-campaigns that let you relive some of the greatest moments in military history, such as Alexander the Great's campaign, all the way up to the Cold War. (Strangely, there's no World War scenarios though).
Before you pass these mini-campaigns as merely a "lite" version of the main Conquer the World campaign, it's clear that the developers put a lot of effort into making them as fun, and challenging (but not nearly as frustrating) as the main campaign. Each has unique rules that suit the situation, such as during the American Revolution campaign, the Native forces cannot built any gunpowder-related units until late in the game.
The one that really showed how much effort Big Huge Games put into this work (a rarity in today's world. I'm looking at you EA) is the Cold War scenario, where you can play as either NATO forces, or Soviet/Warsaw Pact forces, and you have to dominate the other side politically, economically, and militarily...without battling them. To do so would send the DEFCON (Defense Condition) meter, on a specially designed interface just for this mode, up a notch, and bring the world that much closer to nuclear armageddon.
With so many good things going for this game, sadly it has it's fair share of problems, although minor. The game, at least in skirmish mode, follows pure RTS conventions. Although there are a few extra steps involved in the process, your objective is still simple: build a base and crush your foes. Firstly, for a game that features interaction between nations, the diplomacy side of the game is severely lacking. Your options are simple: peace or alliance. You give the other side what they demand, and now everything's settled. Nothing deeper than that.
In skirmish games, there is no sense of time. The game consists of nothing but seeing who can get to the Information Age the fastest and crush their enemies. Over the eons of human existence, attitudes between countries have changed, and changed again. Where America and Britain were once bitter enemies, one would take a bullet for the other today. But despite the 'centuries' of span that your gameplay represents, generally, if you go to war against a country in the Ancient Age, chances are, you'll be destroying them with tank divisions in the Information Age.
There's no covert operation abilities in the game at all. Sure, you have the power to build spies but you have to be at war with your target before you can use any of their special abilities. America spied on the Soviet Union and vice-versa all throughout the Cold War, yet there was no formal declaration of war.
If you know my reviewing style, you know that I never count a game's graphics against or for it, unless they're so bad that they make my eyes bleed. Graphics do not make the game, in my opinion. The visuals in this game aren't bad, but they're not great. The colors are very dull. There's nothing to grab the player's attention. They're passable. They don't detract from the gameplay experience, but neither do they add to it.
The good far outweigh the bad in these two games, and if you look past the sloppy presentation in some places you'll find a true real-time strategy gem who's CD is sure to stay in your drive (or it's image mounted if you've been naughty) for a long time. It's not perfect, but it's very close to perfection and the best thing to come to the genre in a long time.
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