Vendor's Description
Rise of Nations: Thrones & Patriots, the expansion pack to the best-selling Rise of Nations, adding new features. Get six new nations, four unique single-player campaigns, more than 20 original units, new wonders, and new government types.

Rise of Nations is an historical real-time strategy game from Big Huge Games' Brian Reynolds, designer of the PC game classic Civilization II. The game brings to life 6,000 years of history, from the ancient age to the information age - not just in warfare but in city building, trade and diplomacy.

Features

• Highly diverse new nations
  • You can lead any of six new nations ó Iroquois, Lakota, American, Dutch, Persian, and Indian ó in various modes of game play.
• Rich new campaigns and scenarios
  • New campaigns, including Alexander the Great, Napoleon, the New World, and the Cold War, will keep you busy as you navigate historic conflicts.
• Choose a government type
  • Whether it's socialism or capitalism, despotism or democratic republic, you'll unlock different powers that create new tactics and strategic possibilities.
• New units
  • More than 20 new units are available for you to command, including massive Persian War Elephants, armed Dutch merchants, unique ships, and supply wagons.

Price
Rise of Nations: Thrones & Patriots runs for $19.99, and requires that you already own the original Rise of Nations.

Setup
Rise of Nations: Thrones & Patriots (T&P) installed very easily. After running the installation wizard, I started up a game immediately. Like the original Rise of Nations, T&P comes with a "learning" scenario that teaches you some of the different aspects of the game before you jump into serious battles. I was up and playing my first real game in no time.

Game Play
Like Rise of Nations, T&P sports some very nice graphics and sounds, and very addictive game play. In short, it is like a cross between Risk, Civilization, and Age of Empires. The standard game starts off with a map of the world, with territories charted out (just like in the board game Risk). You choose your starting nation, and then began your campaign to conquer the world. However, instead of the dice controlling the outcome of battling neigboring nations, each time you challenge a nation, the screen changes to a close-up of the land you are battling for (or defending), and you begin what feels like is an entirely different game. Your focus is no longer on the big world map, but on building cities, managing resources, building up armies, advancing technologies, and finally engaging the enemy in battle. Here, the game has more of a Age of Empires and Civilization feel as you create farms to gain food, build mines next to hills and mountains, create trade routes, and gather wood. In many ways, RoN removes some of the mundane tasks of the other mentioned games making it a lot more fun. For instance, instead of having to replant farms as required in Age of Empires, once a farm is planted in T&P, you never have to worry about replanting it (unless, of course, it's destroyed by your enemy). Likewise, instead of having to build roads in a turn-by-turn fashion in Civilization, in T&P your cities automatically build roads as you build new buildings, cities, and trade routes. T&P is a combination of real-time and turn-based. It's turn-based the way that the game of Risk is turn-based in that each "turn" you decide which battle you are going to engage in (or no battle at all). Once in battle, however, the action is all real-time (similar to Age of Empires) and can be quite intense as well as fun.

As you would expect, different buildings require different resources to construct, and can then produce other resources once built. Granaries help food output, mills help wood output, universities help technology growth, and so on. As you advance in technology, you advance in the skills and abilities of your artillary and soldiers. You start off with rocks and spears, advance to guns and horses, and eventually reach a period where you have tanks, fighters, submarines, and missiles. You can create spies to sabotage enemies buildings, generals to organize and improve the defenses of your armies, and so much more. Another way to describe this game is Civilization on steroids. It's a total blast, both in terms of balancing resources, managing your cities, and strategizing your battle plans. The best part, of course, is the implementation of your battle plans. Eventually, you conquer the enemies capital city, and that ends the game... well, sort of. Then you're reminded that it was only a game within a game, and you are brought, once again, to the world map.

Back on the world map, successful campaigns win you the territory as well as other goodies. Each territory has a set of icons indicating what kind of goodies you get if you conquer the territory. Sometimes you get an extra army, sometimes a special abilities card (that can be activated in subsequent battles), rare resources, a wonder of the world, or, if the territory carried a flag, then you've just eliminated an entire civilization from the game. The object of the world conquer game is to dominate the world, so going after the nations with flags is a good thing.

With each nation battle launching a new game, you can imagine that the world conquer can take quite awhile to complete. I played several world conquer matches, and they all lasted for days. Strategy techniques aside, another technique you really need to get a handle on is managing your time (otherwise, you'll be up late, night after night, losing lots of sleep). Tell yourself when to stop, and actually stop when you reach that point (easier said than down).

The aesthetics of the game were very pleasing, adding quite a bit to the game play. The graphics of the buildings, citizens, armies, and scenery were very well done, and the sound effects and music were awesome. One thing I noticed in T&P, however, is that there were some interface problems that I don't remember in the original Rise of Nations. Games seem to take forever when loading, and often after clicking buttons to perform actions (such as Start game), the screen doesn't do anything to let you know that it received your click. It's basically frozen until it's ready, no working cursor, no "please wait". Navigating the world view I found a bit unnerving as well, because when you hold the world view rectangle close to an edge, the whole map shakes. Occasionally, there were interface quirks where buttons that should be enabled were disabled, and you had to "jimmy" your way around to get them working again. I just didn't remember having this many problems with the original.

T&P includes new nations, government types, and units, but I honestly didn't notice the difference between playing Rise of Nations versus T&P. There were already so many (too many to remember), so what's a few more? Difficult to really keep track of them all. However, I did notice, and enjoy, the new campaigns. The campaigns include Alexander the Great, Napoleon, the New World, and the Cold War. The campaigns make the game a lot more interesting, as maps and strategies are designed to give you different kinds of challenges throughout. For instance, in the Cold War, you must do things like sabotage missile silos, work with your allies, strengthen NATO countries, and prevent the war from going to DEFCON 1. Even on Easy, the battles can be quite intense. These campaigns will provide you hours of good challenging entertainment.

There is still one negative that persists through all of Microsoft's RPG games, including the original Rise of Empires as well as the Age of Empires series. Specifically, it is the way the AI advances in difficulty. As a player, I want to see the computer get smarter, but what really happens is that the computer just gets faster. In other words, while you have to manually click each of your cities to manage them, and manually tell each building, citizen and army what to do, the computer, with it's CPU power, can manage everything so quickly that it appears to do it simultaneously. What that means is that while you are proud of finally getting your first army formed, you discover that the computer has an army 10 times that size already advancing on you. It would be nice to one day see a game like this have the AI restricted to human limitations in its ability to manage resources, but get fiercely more intelligent in the way that it strategizes and implements its battle plans.

Summary
Rise of Nations takes one step beyond the strategy games of the past, and brings us a new and refreshing strategy game of city management, civilization management, and world conquer. If you enjoy the board game Risk, you'll love the world conquer aspect of this game. If you enjoy Civilization, then get ready to pump up the adrenaline as Rise of Nations takes your civilizatoin to real-time rather than turn-based. For those Age of Empire addicts out there, this game provides similar addictive game play, but without many of the tedious resource management tasks. Regardless of whether you've played these other games or not, Rise of Nations will captivate your imagination and intellect for hours at a time, immersing you in an exciting and fun world of real-time challenge. The Thrones and Patriots expansion does provide some new unit, governments and nations, but they didn't really make the game seem any different. It was nice to see some new campaigns, but the expansion still imposes the speed-instead-of-intelligence AI as difficulty settings go up. I think that Rise of Nations fans will enjoy the expansion, but there may not be enough newness to excite everyone.

Pros

• Addictive game play
• Excellent integration of Risk style game with real-time strategy challenges
• Great sound effects and graphics
• Fun new campaigns

Cons

• AI relies too much on resource gathering rather than strategy
• Challenge ratio between easy and hard not well balanced
• Interface quirks
• Slow level loading

Overall Rating:

3 1/2 out of 5 Mice