Rise of Nations is by very far my favorite real time strategy game. The main reason I like it so much is that I don't need to babysit the military units (or any unit, for that matter) - I just select them, bring them to where I need them, I can select a formation (brilliant thing) and they will fire on enemies when in range, pursue them when necessary, and depending on stance (another thing I can select), return to previous positions. Those of you who have played RoN know what I'm talking about when I say that there is very little need for babysitting.

This is also my curse: I got spoiled by RoN so much that now I cannot find a real time strategy game that I can tolerate. But maybe you can suggest something I haven't tried yet, and is as advanced as RoN?

bump for Finland!

I... honestly hated that game and found it to be the opposite of what you describe. O____o

Which reminds me... I have it on disc and should really give it to someone that would enjoy it.

Just play Red Alert 2, the best RTS game ever made

Rise of Nations was good actually, but it didn't really work as an RTS for me. It gave you a lot to think about but you never had enough time to think about it. It didn't know whether it wanted to be a turn-based or a real-time "strategy" game. It all ended up being too frantic for any thought to be really possible, and yet it was a thoughtful game at heart. Good game, though, I would play it again. Never really played Rise of Legends either, though I still have it on disc.

I can agree with your description of RoN. It didn't matter so much, I enjoyed it a lot, and I already explained why: because the units know how to behave themselves without me having to hand-hold them all the time. The people who developed RoN weren't lazy programmers.



(I tried Rise of Legends, and it totally didn't work for me for some weird reason. It made me sleepy.) I played Red Alert 2. I remember having some fun, but also a LOT more babysitting of units, compared to RoN. As I said, RoN has spoiled me and now I can't go back to games such as Red Alert, good as it may be. I cannot go back to hold the hand of the units.

@gscotti

It's definitely a game which deserves to see the light of day again. It was quite a bit more complex than, for example Age of Empires 2. The graphics were pretty basic though. I had a blast with it for a while back in the day but I'm struggling to remember how it worked exactly. You had to expand your territory in much the same way as you do in Civilization, I think. So you could expand your borders by means of conquest but also by means of culture etc, and you expanded your overall territory by taking control of zones. Am I right ? I'm not explaining it very well, but it was a bit like a "real time" Civilization I thin. i remember that the nukes in it were very impressive. The problem for me was that, in the end, everything was happening at such a tremendous pace that you had no time to think, and it was a pretty clever, complex game. There were lots of resources too. It was a very satisfying feeling to actually win a game, though. You needed to wipe the sweat off your brow afterwards though !

I presume you have tried Rise of Legends? (EDIT: Ok you already said you did.) Also, what you say about formations, different aggression levels of your units etc., aren't those available also in Age of Empires 2, Age of Mythology etc.? After all, I recall Rise of Nations was supposed to be some kind of beefed-up Age of Empires.

While I loved Age of Empires 1-2 and Age of Mythology, I disliked Rise of Nations (Gold). Mainly, those darn 90 minute time limits in combat ruin the whole game for me, and also, sometimes less is more. It appeared to me the RoN developers tried to overcome the AoE series etc. by just adding more of everything: more different kinds of units, more different kinds of research options, more different kinds of resources to gather, more more more... It all just made the game unnecessary convoluted IMHO.

Also when you say you dislike babysitting (of units), on the other hand I recall RoN having lots of babysitting of research, ie. there were so many different research options that you constantly needed to try to make sure you were researching something. Hence, I don't really recall RoN being easier on the babysitting/micromanagement apartment, even if units themselves might have been pretty proactive.

That said, I would have played it, if it wasn't for those fecking 90 minute time limits... Nothing feels worse than finally making some slow headway against the various enemy factions, and only losing because sorry, time's up.

I played Age of Empires 2 relatively recently,EDIT: no, I haven't! I was mistaken and confused Empire Earth with Age of Empires. I'll try AoE right away. That for me is not babysitting, but integral part of the strategy - in fact, for me taking care of the research is perhaps the most interesting aspect in which I want to immerse myself. RoN is no different than most other 4X games in this respect - I don't know ow many where you could just leave research to the AI. In fact, at the moment I can't think of any. I really like games with basic graphics. That means less cluttered view for my poor eyes, less demand on the GPU and CPU, and less places for crashy bugs. But that's just me.

It's weird to hear someone complaining about the pace of a RTS to me - when I'm the King of Take it Slow! I don't do action/shooter games AT ALL! And hate fast-paced RTS. That's why I LIKE RoN!!! Because there I can just position my army at a location, select a formation and stance, and concentrate my attention to other things. But note: I always played RoN at the slowest pace, and would pause it copiously! You did know you can pause it with "P", right?

I installed and played Age of Empres for a few hours. My verdict: a bit more hand-holding than with RoN, and far less fun. Here's why: for one thing, you can't drag your units into formation. This is something you can do with RoN by selecting your units and then, instead of just right-clicking where you want them to be, you can right-drag to select where the formation will point towards (and RoN will also nicely draw the formation it will create, so you will have an idea where the units will be when they arrive to destination). Then, the monks: when you point them to retrieve an artifact, when they arrive to the artifact they just stand there like idiots! I actually have to point them back to the monastery! How stupid is that? In RoN, when the merchant is sent to a special resource, it will take care of the whole logistics of it. Also, merchants will set up routes between markets automatically - you don't have to do anything, they'll just automatically start moving using the shortest paths.

But al that is small potatoes compared to the biggest drawback in AoE: rebuilding farms!? In Age of Empires farms have to be constantly rebuilt. How much fun is that? About as much fun as three consecutive kicks in the bollocks, I reckon. I don't see how RoN can be harder than AoE - AoE has all the things that make it easy for an AI to play, and hard for a human. RoN levels the field quite a bit.

In that case you might want to look at Age of Empires 3, farms don't need to be rebuilt, building a trade post can let you a) hire tribal troops if you build them in their settlement or b) supply constant resource, either wood, food or coin, and in later case you'd have to upgrade it to increase speed at which supplies arrive till trains. Though people tend to hate it for some reason. (People I've talked with, not everyone)

The first AoE? That's quite aged (but I still love it). I suggest you try the later AOE games (AoE2) and maybe Age of Mythology.

Note though, those Age of... games are more "pure" RTS and don't have that strategic map mode part that RoN has. I recall it being said that RoN is more like a mixture of the Age of Empires games and the Civilization series. So I guess AoE games are like that, minus the Civilization part. :) So, simpler games all in all. In my books that means more focused, which is a plus for me.

I finished AoE 1-2 + expansion packs in the highest difficulty, no problem. Several times, even. There were some quite hard missions, but overall nothing I couldn't handle.

Rise of Nations on the other hand... I can't win even my first battle (after tutorials) simply because I constantly run out of time (90 minutes) before I am able to conquer enemy capitals, which is the victory condition. Note though, since I am playing Rise of Nations Gold (including the expansion pack) and it just presents me several campaigns I am to choose from, I am unsure if I accidentally chose some harder campaign that I am supposed to play only later. I selected the first campaign on the list, I think it was about Alexander the Great IIRC, but I could remember wrong.

As far as I could tell, all battles in RoN have that same 90 minute time limit, and that is a definite no-no in my books. In the AoE games only some missions had a time limit.

As a matter of fact, the hardest missions in e.g. the first AoE were exactly those with a time limit, e.g. the one mission where you are supposed to destroy an enemy Wonder which is on another island, and you don't even have any farmers nor means to train them in the beginning (so you can't gather more resources nor build more buildings), so the first thing you must do is to smuggle your monk to another island and try to convert an enemy farmer to your side, and then smuggle it back to your island or try to create another base on that other island... God damn that was a hard mission, but I loved it after I was finally able to beat it. The feeling of being able to convert that farmer and then hurrying it towards your transport while enemy units were on his tail...

Overall, I felt RoN was all over the place and less focused than the AoE series.

No, it was AoE 2 (HD).

Well, I recall at least it had battle formations, and didn't it also allow you to put several farms in the build queue, lessening the problem of having to rebuild farms?

I was thinking you complained about the farms in the first AoE game, where I recall it really was that you had to rebuild a new farm every time an old one was depleted, without the possiblity to queue them.

Then again, I might be also mixing up some details with AoE, AoE2 and Age of Mythology...