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What happened? Rise of Nations was great, but now...meh

Lyric Suite

Converting to Islam
Joined
Mar 23, 2006
Messages
56,160
What difficulty setting are you using? I remember you couldn't just steam roll over the AI at the highest levels, and you had to learn all sorts of paper/rock/scissor tactics to win. I loved the game at the time and thought it was much better than Age of Empires. Admittedly though, that was a long time ago. Also, perhaps they changed something with the "speshul" edition? Wouldn't be surprised if they found a way to dumb the game down. The graphics "enhancements" were shit to begin with.
 

Johannes

Arcane
Joined
Nov 20, 2010
Messages
10,487
Location
casting coach
To be fair, comments like this:



Are, in my experience, pretty representative of what the game is like at the amateur level. Hell, that sentence pretty much sums up every LAN party I went to fifteen years ago. There's a lot more to the game than that, sure, but not everyone's necessarily gonna experience that
All the different elements are pretty plain to see, though. It's very obvious different units have different utility in different situations, even if having more of those units is just as important as their type. What type of resources you gather, then, makes also a big difference as you have to predict what units / buildings / upgrades you'll want in the future. And microing your units has a very clear effect on their effectiveness, you can see that archers can miss, mangonels even more so, using monks etc.

All of the different elements of the game already matter when you're a newbie, and can be easily improved. "Building workers and killing enemy workers", of course, is obviously what the game's about, but hardly tells the full story. The biggest problem most newbies have is exactly their lack of understanding of what's going on in a game, not their lack of APM or anything like that.
 

Hitoshura

Educated
Joined
Nov 9, 2013
Messages
54
:necro:

I did play this quite a bit over the past 2 months and it's a great game.

I think that RTS suffer the same curse as 2D fighters game: the newb strats are easy to implement without an in depth knowledge and to transition into a better player is a long road which involves actually unlearning the obvious newb strategy. For RTS, this strategy is described in previous posts: secure early resources and spam your opponents with military. For fighters, just button mash to victory. I suspect that these genres are not very popular today as a side effect of this: why bother really learning the game, which likely involves being destroyed online over and over, or simply play the latest AAA with awesome buttons?

My experience with RTS is the following:
  • Dune II
  • Warcraft I and II
  • Starcraft
  • Age of Empires I
and I see that RoN is an improvement in the genre as it put more focus on the macro decisions and makes the micro decisions that have less impact more automated. Additionally, not having to hunt down every single building to claim a win against the AI is also very welcome, you simply have to capture their capital and wait a bit and it's over! Scouting the map is also interesting with the freebies laying around.

Comparing Starcraft 2 and RoN on YouTube between between far more competent players than I am, it's night and day: SC2 is all about the pre scripted build order and a massive armies with tons of micro: you lose the big battle, you just lost the game. RoN is constant adaptation as the maps are procedurally generated and constant economic harassment is a key to victory, wining a big battle doesn't guarantee a victory. Adding the idea you can garrison troops, you end up with different fight tactics: small skirmishes to secure/deny resources, guerrilla style fights when you are outnumbered but can hide in your buildings and wait for reinforcements. I can also do the micro intensive big battles right although granted these feel more fluid in SC2.
 

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