Rise of Nations Preview

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Cities are by far the most important structure in the game.  They are roughly equivalent to a town center in AoK but differ slightly in a number of ways.  First of all, you gain access to additional cities through research.  In AoK, once you reach the castle age, you can build as many town centers as you want, assuming you have the resources to do so.   Such is not the case in RoN.  There are four main lines of research in RoN which I will discuss in more detail later, but for now, let's focus on the civic research.   There are eight levels of civic research and each level researched grants the player the ability to build one additional city.  The interface will show you how many cities you have built as well as your current city limit.  The most cities that a player can build themselves via civic upgrades is eight.  There are exceptions however.  One special resource allows a player to build an additional city and of course, if a player captures enemy cities, they can control more than eight, but eight is the base limit on cities per player.  This system of requiring research for each city helps gameplay in a number of ways.  First, it effectively puts a limit on the number of cities a player can create, so players cannot build cities all over the map. It also causes the player's cities and national borders to expand gradually over the entire course of the game.  Each city is given the name of a real life city belonging to the civilization you are playing.  Your original city is designated as your capital city, which will become important later.  All of these features cause the player to feel like they are building a real nation of connected cities, rather than just a collection of buildings.

There is no total fixed population limit in Rise of Nations but as you might expect, each player starts with a low pop limit which expands as new cities are built.  There is no equivalent to AoK's houses in RoN.  Instead you can grow your civ's pop limit by building new cities and granaries.  Each new city and granary adds 20 to your current pop limit.  While technically there is no pop limit, since a player is limited to 8 cities and each city is limited to 1 granary each, the effective limit is 320, although it can grow even higher through capturing enemy cities and other special situations.   One nice feature of RoN is when you hit your pop limit and try to build additional units, a large message appears in the middle of the screen so you can't possibly miss it.

In addition to expanding your nation's borders and raising your pop limit, cities are also your economic centers so let's take a closer look at how resources and the overall economy works in RoN.  There are six resources in RoN: Gold, Food, Wood, Knowledge, Metal and Oil, however oil is not available until the Industrial Age.  Resources are collected in a very different fashion from AoK and it is this aspect of RoN where a heavy influence from the Civilization line of games can be found.  The most obvious aspect of resource collection in RoN is that resources do not deplete.  Farms never run out of food, forests are never cut down, mines are never used up.  So what prevents a player from building 200 villagers and creating an unstoppable economy?  RoN controls player resource gathering in different ways.  First, villagers start out costing a very low amount of food but each additional villager costs one additional food.  So as your villager population grows, so does the villager cost.  Each resource collection building you create has a limited number of villagers that can work at that structure.   The villager limit is based on the amount of resources within the immediate vicinity of the structure.  For example, if you build a lumber camp near a single tree, only one villager will be able to work there, but if you build the lumber camp near a forest, you can assign a large number of villagers to the camp.

In RoN, because resources are never used up, villagers don't make trips back and forth between the resource and the collection structure.  Therefore resources are not collected in chunks like AoK but instead, there is a constant stream of resources flowing into your nation.  The speed that the accumulation occurs is controlled by a number of factors, the main one being the number of villagers assigned to collecting the resource, but it also controlled by economic research at the library.  If you have not researched enough economic upgrades, your collection speed can be limited by the lack of economic research and progress of your civilization.

You collect Food, Wood, Metal and Oil from resources on the map, however Knowledge and Gold are collected slightly differently.  Knowledge is collected from universities. Each university can create scholars who then provide knowledge.  The more scholars you have, the more knowledge you gain.  Gold is collected by trading between cities.   Once you build a market, a trader and a caravan, this process happens automatically.  The more traders and caravans you build, the more gold you can collect.  Of course, you can also buy and sell resources for gold at the market.

Each city also has city limits and RoN restricts the player from building too many of the same building type in a single city.  For example, each city is limited to 5 farms for food collection.  Each city is limited to a single university and each university is limited to 7 scholars for knowledge collection.  You can also build resource collection enhancement buildings such as a Granary for better food gathering, a lumber mill for better wood gathering or a smelter for better metal mining.  Each city is limited to one of each type of enhancement building and that building only affects the resource collection of that particular city.  For example, if you build a metal mine in one city and a smelter in another city, the smelter will not improve the metal collection since it is in a different city than the mine.  Technology upgrades, however, are shared among all cities.

One last important aspect of the economy is the special resources which are scattered randomly across the map.  There are a wide variety of special resources, each of which grants a different bonus to the player that controls it.  To control a special resource, you must build a merchant at your market and move the merchant to the resource.   The merchant will build a small hut on top of the resource and as long as the hut is standing, you gain the benefits of the special resource.