Civilization can seem rather daunting. The entirety of human history (ish) played out turn by turn on large, multicultural maps with different paths to victory. From small beginnings, you explore and expand and flourish on the world stage, before Gandhi goes thermonuclear on you.
Age of Empires, similarly, allows you to grow into the powerhouse you want to be, but in a real-time strategy game that requires you to stay alert and manage all aspects of your empire, or at least the large army you're raising to crush the opposition.
I like the idea of both these games and can see good reasons to play various iterations of each, and others from the genre. But I never quite feel at home in any of them. The learning curves aren't steep, per se, but the time investment in understanding how to do well could be quite a bit.
If I could just find a game that offers both, like Rise of Nations...
Fun Times
I knew Rise of Nations to be a game like Civ and AoE, but genuinely thought it was more of the same. It's like I'd completely forgotten that this 1001 list is about titles that are worth playing, and therefore probably stand out in their respective genres.
Rise of Nations is Civ meets AoE. It is a real-time strategy game where you build not just a military force to aggressively negotiate with your neighbours, but a force that can sustain itself over forays into enemy territory without supply lines back to the safety of your home city. More likely, your home nation, a hopefully vast chunk of the map where individual cities are linked together, trading amongst each other to keep the wheels turning.
The only place to start with this is the tutorial.
I'm playing the Extended Edition with his graphical upgrade, which looks nice, but it's not the first thing I noticed. No, that would be that the first tutorial section appears to drop you into a world where you can just learn by doing.
That's bold, but at the same time, welcome. These types of games always felt like they'd begin with a tutorial of moving a unit along a path until they had to fight something. Here, Edinburgh sits there waiting for us to get going.
Ok. Uhm... Let's just click around some...
I've started with a library, and it'll allow me to research things like science and commerce. The more we learn, the more stuff we'll be able to build in Edinburgh and beyond. Eventually, we'll be able to turn that knowledge into a complete upgrade of our nation as it goes through various ages of civilisation.
Finding myself in Edinburgh, I get to work researching some science, but once that's finished, the tutorial voice-over mentions I should have gone with commerce if I recall. Well, I'll research that too. It's just a progress bar, at the minute. Is it consuming resources, all this research? I've no idea.
Most of the people I can see are already farming or cutting down trees. Wood and stone and the like are infinite resources, but how much you can produce will be capped according to how much or how little research you've done. Again, I've no idea quite how that works, but it only takes a pop up to say 'you can't do X until Y' before you find the 'Y' somewhere in the build menu and get to work.
One guy looks lost, so I click him around a few places before I notice he has an auto-scout option. I click it, and away he goes, exploring the map and removing the fog for me. Excellent.
People, too, apparently see if there is anything to do instead of waiting around for you to put them somewhere. The running theme returns, I don't know how it works, and I'm not sure I saw it first hand, but as the game went on, yes, I do recall seeing people roaming around and busying themselves without me telling them to do anything.
Is that helpful to me? Yeah, assuming they're doing what I need them to do. Maybe if I've a food shortage, they'll dive into the fields. I don't know, but I like the idea that I don't have to manage every single citizen.
At some point really early on, a 'Mid Game' text box appeared, asking me if I was a-ok or needed more information or time. As far as I was concerned, I'd barely got running at all, so yeah, keep me in here as I find out what's what, thanks.
I get started building a market, which will allow me to make merchants to collect precious resources, and caravans to connect my cities together. The more connected your nation is, the higher your production caps will go, if memory serves, and the caravans will diligently march across the map, making their own roads between two cities.
With my scout, if he even was a scout, exploring the map, I found my neighbours and thought it time to start expanding my territories. You can only build certain buildings close to your capital, but the more you're able to push into new territory, and the more resources you've gathered, I guess, you'll be able to build an entirely new city somewhere.
Spying some salt in the distance, I send a merchant out to do whatever he does with it and watched him set up a camp in the middle of nowhere. Seconds later he had given me a discount on troops trained at the barracks. That's good. How long does it last? Should I defend this salt pile? I should start a new city here...
And that's the origins of Nottingham. New city, new resource gathering opportunities, higher production caps, more things to learn and build. The Edinburgh library/tutorial instructions told me it was time to advance the age I was in, and I can see no reason to stick around in the stone age, or whatever age we're in. We're a civilisation, damn it. We're going places.
We're also getting attacked, so I should probably march everyone up to Nottingham to deal with that. Troops are trained in groups, so amassing a decent sized force doesn't take forever, and there are the usual types of soldiers. Get smart enough to build stables, and you can train cavalry units, build some siege tower something or others, and you can build catapults and so on.
You can sound the city bell to have your citizens run for cover while the military defends them, like other games of this genre, but it wasn't too long before my bowmen finished off this raiding party.
At some point, after building a Senate, I was able to choose how I'd go about governing my nation. Well, I would have chosen, were the tutorial to not heavily suggest I go down the route that would lead to me having a Despot.
If I were to march troops into enemy territory, they might get the job done, but would continually succumb to the battle of attrition, being so far from home. If they're within your territory, it's nothing to worry about. Venture outwards into the unknown, and you'll need units like the Despot to give your army a little boost and keep them in the fight.
If my opponent is to the North, I figure that building a fort, and accompanying city, right on the edge of my territory would be a good show of strength. I'll even plonk my entire army there, not that there's much of it right now. I think this game is heading that way, though. I'm not sure what diplomatic, peaceful coexistences we can forge in Rise of Nations, but we're not going to find out in this tutorial.
Having launched a surprise sneak attack well away from my fort, it's time to show my neighbours just who is the boss around here. A click and drag of the mouse seem to know exactly what I want, as I select my army and ignore all the citizens, sending them on a raid of their own north of Nottingham.
Cities aren't destroyed, but captured, becoming part of your territorial lands where you can repair them and set up new staging posts for future war efforts. In this case, I was feeling confident and just marched forth, attack whatever city I saw.
There wasn't much resistance. I was playing on the easy difficulty, in the first tutorial mission, but my forces were still blinding walking into the thick of it, tanking all the opposition.
Not even hidden cities springing up dangerously close to my fortified city of Salisbury could put a dent in my chances for success, as one by one they were left in ruins for me to rebuild if I ever got around to it. When the last city fell, the game was won.
Frustrations
What? 33 minutes of gaming and there are still five tutorial missions to go? Maybe I thought that mid-game message was something else entirely. Hmmm. I know I've got an awful lot to learn about Rise of Nations, but from what I've seen, that seemed to sum the gist of things up pretty well...
Final Word
I have, of course, barely scratched the surface of Rise of Nations. While there isn't a campaign as such, there is a game mode that challenges you to take over the world, country by country, starting as any one of a bucket load of historical empires, each with their own strengths and weaknesses.
The British, if I recall, have a strong naval presence, the Dutch are great merchants, the Russians are strong defensively, I think, as other nations fail to cope with the harsh winters or something. I really haven't got a clue, but I want to know more.
I know this game takes you from the dirt to the near future, at your own pace. If you're ready to advance your nation into the industrial age, you do that. Find some aluminium deposits somewhere? Advance another age or two and build some fighter jets to patrol the skies, as your tanks dominate the landscape below.
If your neighbours can't keep up, it shouldn't be too problematic to assimilate their cities into your nation. At the same time, if your neighbours have got hold of gun powder before you, do you really want to stick with swords? Get all the way to researching nuclear weapons, and you can utterly devastate your opponents, but they can return the favour, triggering a countdown clock to mutually assured destruction, and a game end where nobody wins.
Everything I've read and seen of Rise of Nations has gotten my attention, and while I got off to a slow and clumsy start, it wasn't long before I was just clumsy. It doesn't feel like a slog to develop your nation from its wee roots, and with units who will do your job for you, to some extent, you're free to focus on whatever you want to - until your neighbours come knocking.
I really want to dive back in and finish the tutorial, but it seems I might have to put aside another three hours for it, I don't know. Could I dive into a quick game? Yeah. Could I start that quick game in an advanced age to see all the more capable, developed units? Certainly. Would I want to? Well, yes, but only after I've managed to build up to that from nothing over the course of a game.
Have I found the kind of civ game I'm looking for? Potentially. I'll definitely need to play some more, but I like what I see so far.
Fun Facts
100 different units, from the Hoplite to the Stealth Bomber. Something for everyone, by the sounds of it...
Rise of Nations, developed by Big Huge Games, first released in 2003.
Version played: Rise of Nations Extended Edition, PC, 2014.