Been playing some Rise of Nations Extended Edition on my laptop in hostels and such during rainy moments. I never played it before though it always sounded interesting to me, and bought it on a recent sale.
I like how familiar it feels as an Age of Empires-style RTS, yet is still different enough to really differentiate itself from the pack of other similarly styled games like Empire Earth etc.
In particular I like how the economy focusses on building different cities, and the setting up of trade routes between them. Each city can only have 5 farms, a single woodcutter building per forest, a single mine per mountain, and the size of these terrain features dictates how many people can work there. There are upgrade buildings that can increase the output of these resource buildings like a granary, woodsawing mill etc. which count only for the city they are in, and are limited to a single building per city, while they do house global tech upgrades. Resources don't run out which is good as well for long games, which got annoying in other games where I would clear-cut an entire forest and run out of resources eventually.
This means that in order to have the proper amount of resources, you need to expand and build more cities. The best way of getting gold is with trade caravans that move between the cities, and are usually limited to the amount of cities you have so you dont have an endless stream of caravans between two cities. It also means that each city needs to be built up, and some become 'specialised' in the sense that one city might not have a mountain nearby, and it becomes your primary income of wood. Another city on the coast will focus on getting fishing boats in the water, etc. This gives you some nice strategic points of attack that could cripple a certain area of someone's economy, instead of just a global overall dip in income.
Combat is pretty straightforward rock paper scissors stuff, but another big change is that you don't want to destroy all the enemy buildings that aren't military, because if you wreck the city centre you automatically capture it with infantry closeby, and that grants you ownership of all the economical buildings in the city limits. If you manage to hold on to the area, you can put in a ton of civvies and have a huge income boost. If you think you can't hold on to the area, you might raze the city instead without capturing it.
The only thing that I will have to get used to is the insane pace the game plays out at, you go through the ages it offers extremely fast. You can go from the Roman age to the industrial age in half an hour or so, if not faster.
Oh, and the campaigns are pretty interesting too. No narrative, but a big map of territories that need to be captures by fighting the RTS battles over them. Some give you tribute, others special resources, or even an extra army that can support an attack from nearby provinces.
During the missions you are even given certain choices that are scripted which are interesting. For example, while conquering a province there were three opponents, one of which were the Spartans. They offered me peace through a scripted moment after I wiped out everybody else, and I could accept it or decline it and wipe them off the map. I chose to accept the peace , and a few battles later the Persians I was fighting received reinforcements from the Spartans, who betrayed me and sought to partner up with a stronger force.
Highly enjoyable
