Having a strong economy is important in that it will enable the creation a strong military, but it is the military that wins 90% of games. In Age of Empires, your economy exists to support your military. One is the scope – RoN deals with all four thousand years of human civilization inside of an hour where AoE just does one – but the other is the approach each game takes to your economy. I recall the biggest concession Rise of Nations got from the gaming media at the time of release was that it was innovating somewhat by mixing some elements of Civilization into Age of Empire’s basic structure, but that they were otherwise pretty much the same.Īnd perhaps they are the same in terms of that basic structure, but as I see it there are two fundamental differences between Age of Empires and Rise of Nations that turn them into very different games. The two games are superficially very similar – start with a town center, send out villagers to gather resources, use resources to research technologies and progress through technological eras/ages, and then use that tech edge to build a huge, technologically advanced army and crush your enemies. Since it was conceived and developed at a time when Age of Empires 2 was doing very, very well for itself in the PC gaming charts, it’d be understandable if you mistook it for an AoE knockoff. Certainly more care has been taken over making sure buttons and icons scale up correctly than certain other Extended Editions I could mention, and so while it’s nothing particularly flashy this version of Rise of Nations both looks and feels like a modern game. I haven’t encountered a single bug or crash, and while in-game improvements are limited to support of modern resolutions and Steamworks multiplayer (note that I haven’t tried the latter) I think RoN is a game whose visuals have aged better than most and which really benefits from this HD rerelease. I’m not the best person to judge since I’ve played the non-extended version of RoN for maybe a couple of hours, but it seems pretty damn solid.
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