I make GOTW today!
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Game of the Week: Rise of Nations Gold: Thrones and Patriots
Console: Windows XP Professional
Database (cheats): here
Graphics: 7.5/10 – The graphics are very shabby and unclear. You know what they are, but there are absolutely no details. Age of Empires III has much better graphics. But then again, we’re talking about a pretty old game, and it’s an RTS anyways.
Gameplay: 9.5/10 – I have to say, although it’s hard to improve since the bots are pretty hard (easy bots are like moderate bots in AOE III), it’s very addicting and unlike some RTS games, it doesn’t copy AOE and all the other early games. It has some very creative aspects. In addition, you can choose from 18 civilizations, and each civ has lots of special units and abilities.
Story: 7/10 – I really can’t say much about this. Conquer the World campains? I’d rather go quick battling.
Audio: 8/10 – From random children screaming to country music, RON has it all. Just in very annoying condition.
Overall: 8/10 – I have to say, it’s one of the best low quality RTS games I’ve ever played. You will hardly notice the lack of graphic and audio, because you’re so into it. But I don’t like the conquer the world campaigns at all. The Age of Empires and C&C campaigns are better.
It’s just your average RTS game. Left click and right click are all the same, improvements, ages, fighting, killing, and all that. But a reason why I like RON is because of it’s change in history. You start at the Ancient Age, which is ancient, and go to the Information Age, with includes Main Battle Tanks, Assault Infantry, and Rocket Artillery. If you want to play the campaign, you’ll get in some history. But other than that, it sucks.
Lemme explain a bit more about this campaign… if you’ve ever played Warlords: Call to Arms, then you know what I mean. There are arrows, and you can move into territories with arrows pointing to them. Then you have to complete the objectives to win the match and capture that territory. Then you keep on going until you conquer the world. There are actually 5 campaigns, from Alexander the Great to the Cold War.
So basically there are several things to know. You get food through farms, which never run out of food. You can only put 5 farms per city. You get wood through a forest. Depending on how big the forest is, you can task that many settlers onto the lumber camp. The forest never dies out. You get coin through caravans, which you build through a market. The caravan will go back and forth through your cities and make money along the way. You can also research in taxation to get a wealth income depending on how much territory you have.
Another hting you should know is the 4 catagories: Military, Civic, Commerce, and Science. Military helps you with population and unit upgrades, Civic increases your nation borders (the ammount of territory you have) and the amount of cities you’re allowed to build, Commerce lets you have more resource income and more caravans (it’s the most complicated one), and Science lets you build economic buildings and upgrades.
If I continue it’ll take a lot of space, so you’ll have to find out the rest of the mechanics yourself.
This game is one of many prizes given out during events, which is why I want you to help me with event ideas. Pleeasse?
-Cheers,
-Atomic Whiskey
–Head Admin
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Video Gamers HQ~
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
You mean the campaign is kinda like Risk, the board game. Also, you forgot to mention the other resources, like knowledge and oil. It’s not called coin in this game, it’s called wealth. After playing so much AOE III, I think that fighting for nothing but the satisfaction of winning is kinda boring after a while. The lack of a Home City makes the game not worth my while now.
Sure thing Don, sure thing.
I don’t want to be so detailed Don… although I admit bout the coin and wealth thing. I’ve played more AOE.