Rise of Nations Preview

Page 5

Of course conquest isn't the only possible victory condition.  The wonder victory is also possible in RoN but wonders in general are handled in an entirely different way than AoK.  In RoN, there are 14 different wonders available to each player. When built, each wonder bestows an economic or military enhancement of some sort to the player that built the wonder.  To achieve victory via wonders, a player must construct 6 wonders and then hold on for a certain amount of time.  As wonders are built, the interface provides feedback to every player in the game by showing how many wonders each other player has built.

Lastly, the multiplayer features of RoN provide some unique twists as well.  One of the interesting features is that you can setup a game so that there are no attacks for a specified amount of time.  During this period, any units that wander into enemy territory take damage.  In fact, you can set up a game such that there is no fighting during the entire game.  The winner of a non-military game such as this, is usually determined by the player who reaches the Information Age first.  Another game type is a timed game where the winner is the player who controls the most territory.

To give some highlights of the games played at E3, the first game was between Draco and another show attendee named Marty.  Neither of them knew much about RoN but the game was exciting nonetheless.  Marty attacked pretty early before Draco's defenses were prepared and managed to inactivate one of Draco's cities and almost another before Draco's defending army kicked into gear and beat back the attack.  Draco was able to regain control of his decimated cities and get their economy back up and running.  After the attack, Marty did not follow up with further military advances but instead focused on attempting a wonder victory.  Draco was able to use the large defending force he had built to turn the tables and attack Marty's cities.  Marty had not built adequate defenses for his cities and lost one city to Draco before Draco went for the jugular and captured Marty's capital, ending the game.

Thunder took a different approach to his games.  Since he played the second day, he noticed that when a player reached the gunpowder age first, there was a significant advantage to be had while you had Arquebusiers and Bombards while the defender had no gunpowder units.   So Thunder concentrated all efforts on reaching the gunpowder age first and during the early ages, he built the units that would eventually upgrade to Arquebusiers so when he finally reached the gunpowder age, one simple upgrade turned his units into a strong offensive force which he used to quickly invade and defeat his opponents.  Let me just say that because a single foot unit appears as three on screen units in RoN, Thunder's armies looked extremely impressive and intimidating in the game.  Thunder was able to defeat his first two opponents quite quickly but Brian Reynolds (who incidentally was playing as "Hot Sauce Boy") was a different story.  Brian attacked Thunder early with Javelineers and managed to eliminate a couple caravans and a number of villagers before Thunder was able to fend off the attack with Hoplites.   There was also a big fight over a special resource that happened to be placed right on the border between Thunder and Brian.  In the end, Thunder was able to beat Brian to the gunpowder age and because of his superior economy, was able to stream a constant supply of troops into Brian's territory.  Brian's defenses held for a short time but eventually they succumbed to Thunder's attack.  Thunder was ultimately able to capture Brian's capital city while almost completely wiping Brian off the map by continually adding fresh troops to his advancing army.  To be fair, Thunder got a good deal of help from Kristine Ishii (aka "Nanogirl") who is one of BHG's best players and one of the few who can regularly beat Brian, but it was still an entertaining and competitive game.

Although at first glance, RoN looks similar to other rts games, it is actually, a very innovative and unique game with many features that cannot be found in any other rts game on the market.  RoN already looked very polished at E3, almost a year before its scheduled release date.  We had a great time playing RoN at E3 and I predict that many others will find RoN as much fun as we did.

There's one final thing I want to mention before I close.  Thunder, Draco, Farmgirl and myself got the chance to meet quite a few members of the Big Huge Games staff at E3 and they were all exceptionally nice people.  I had the chance to chat with Brian Reynolds for about 10 minutes and he was very down to earth and displayed a great excitement for his new game.  He couldn't have been a nicer guy and he even managed to take it pretty well when Thunder defeated him at his own game.  ;)  We also had the opportunity to talk with Paul Stephanouk, Tim Train and Kristine Ishii from Big Huge Games and Danan Davis from Microsoft, who were all great people committed to the success of RoN and it showed.  Rise of Nations is certainly a game all rts fans should be looking forward to in Spring 2003.