Actually, his comment suggests that he could host in other games, which suggests that perhaps aoc and ee (I assume that's Age of Conquerors, and Empire Earth respectively) have a better way of dealing with this problem.
I have played a couple of the recentish RTS games:
- Warcraft III & Frozen Throne
- Ground Control II
- Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War
- Age of Mythology: The Titans
- Empire Earth II (just last night)
Rise of Nations is by far my favourite, I like:
- The 'macro' style of game, versus 'micro' of WC3 (less units, more important to tell each one what to do, especially heroes)
- The medium pace, as opposed to the faster pace and shorter games in WC3 and AoM.
- The deadlock breaking end-game technologies: ICBM, Jet & Advanced Fighter, World Government, Stealth Bombers, etc.
These are nice for beginner and intermediate players so the game does not stalemate.
- The intuitive and helpful interface made it a very easy game to learn. This is probably the best game interface I have seen in any RTS, ever. There is always room for improvement, but please start by planning to include the things which made RoN good.
I love the game, it's great single player, and it's great on a LAN, but something went wrong in the transition to Internet.
My understanding is that RoN and AoM were both financially successful games, released at a similar time, published through Microsoft, around the same time, and both have an expansion and a Gold edition.
But why are there at least 10 times more AoM players playing online?
Part of it is just the market, most people playing AoE francise online went to Age of Mythology, and RoN probably has more of the Civilisation players, who may never try it out online.
When I played AoM online the first time, I hit the quickmatch equivalent and was in a game with another newbie within 1 minute. This is vital. As au_tl mentioned, getting someone into a game within 5 minutes or you lose them. Streamline the search code, the interface, or give less choices for settings if necessary, because if you can get someone into a game with another person playing one of their first games, they will be impressed, and they will be back.
If someone hits quickmatch, waits 5 minutes, cancels, looks into the lobby and sees only a handful of different games with non-standard settings, they will probably give up, and you will only have a small group of loyal fans.
Look to AoM and Warcraft III for inspiration in multiplayer code and getting people online:
- Easy to find stats published online
- A 'Ladder' system, to get people excited about getting to the top of their favourite style of play (1v1, random-teams, arranged-teams, this thread suggests deathmatch is popular )
- Encourage Community with tournaments, things which will help clans, and improved friends interface.
- Network Code: Dropouts can't be prevented completely (sometimes people -actually- lose connection to the internet), but no RTS I can remember plays as unreliably over the Internet as RoN. Warcraft 3, Ground Control 2, Age of Mythology, even older games like Starcraft, Total Annihilation, and Age of Empires are more reliable.
Long delays and hangs in lobby; joining and starting games along with frequent Drop-outs, out of Sync problems, and general lag slowing the game down for all players means you have to be pretty keen on RoN to stay playing!
That should do to get you started :-)