I was a fan of the original Rise of Nations game, and it actually taught me the names and known properties of various civilizations before I took up proper history class. While I did play it at my Dad's house when I was younger I didn't really favor the new fantasy setting that the Rise of Nations series took. Though I guess that's my personal taste. ... I was hoping Rise of Nations would return to a historic setting, but any chance of that has been invalidated after hearing what happened to 38 Studios (the parent company of Big Huge Games, developers behind Rise of Nations).
You're looking at Rise of Legends (ROL), the 2006 game, in terms of Rise of Nations (RON), a 2003 game. That's just a title, because the company created both. Microsoft and Big Huge Games wanted people to know that this new real-time strategy (RTS) was created by the same people. However, ROL is not only much newer, but it is much more of a perfect game than RON. ROL is not meant to be a replacement. It represents a turn Big Huge Games made. So, when you talk about this newer RTS taking a turn but not "favor[ing] the new fantasy setting," I can agree, even though I never played RON, that people will have missed the game that they once knew. I can appreciate that.
I would say that ROL has more in common with a 2005 game: Age of Empires III (AOE3), also published by Microsoft. You can tell, playing AOE3, that everything about it shares a remarkable resemblance to ROL, except that AOE3 is, like the reviewer I'm quoting says about RON, is not a fantasy setting, but a historic one, albeit that AOE3 is more of a mishmash of history, which is a major theme for AOE3 and how it gets its name.
The game engine operates the same. The ideas of territorial development are the same, although carried out differently according to the theme of each. The way the visual elements are drawn in three dimensions is the same. Both map systems have circular maps, rather than conventional rectangles.
The main difference between ROL and AOE3 is their themes--one is a fantasy setting and the other is a mishmash of different actual periods from history. And actually, you could look at the mishmash of different historic periods as a fantasy idea within itself. AOE3's periods exist simultaneously. For instance, the archers of medieval times and musketeers of the Enlightenment exist at the same time in AOE3, depending upon how a player upgrades his country.
Actually, ROL has an upgrade system also, which is also dependent on the player's country, with a level system, but in ROL, there are only three levels, whereas AOE has five-to-eight levels. In both games, the units themselves are upgradeable, and the level upgrade that can be made depends on the level of the player's country. These games are remarkably similar to the point where they operate--and look--alike, other than the fact that the units are painted differently by their artists. Although I'm not sure what relationship the respective companies had to each other, I know that they did have a relationship. Big Huge Games worked on some of the AOE3 studio's stuff, and Big Huge was even credited as the studio that created AOE3's second expansion pack, AOE3: Asian Dynasties (2007).
But, let us talk about the good things of ROL. It is a perfect game. It is a chess game with a multitude of elements. It has excellent artificial intelligence for the computer players, and several different kinds of computer players that all act differently from each other. This comes off extremely well in ROL. It is great that one can design a game for eight players while deciding how many of them will be computer players and what the teams will look like. You can play four human players against four computer players. Or you can have four teams of two players on each, with each team having one human and one computer player. Or, you can have an every-man-for-himself game with an assortment of computer and human players that you can design with an easy-to-use interface system that provides a near-infinite amount of set-ups. Like AOE3, ROL has a "peace timer" also, which gives players from five to thirty minutes of peace to create his base and his military units, depending on what set-up users desire. ROL is every bit as good as AOE3, but it fixes the minor issues that the review magazines of 2005 talked about, since it came out within months of AOE3. The one thing ROL has that AOE3 does not is attrition warfare, and this is one of the great ideas put into it that other RTSs do not have--except for RON, so I read. ROL has a system of leaders that AOE3 does not have, and each general can be upgraded uniquely, not only from the generals of other races, but from each other.
For those of you who have not played ROL, the game has three races of people. The Vinci race is based on the sketches of Leonardo da Vinci and represent a steam engine, clockwork theme. The Alin (pronounced ah-LEEN) is based on the imagery of the two film versions of "The Thief of Bagdad," mainly the 1940 film. As I read, for most of the production of ROL, the game only had two races, but a third was added late. The style of the Cuotl (pronounced coo-AH-tul) appears based on Egyptian hieroglyphs. All three races have their own mythologies and their mythologies are unique from each other. This gives a lot of fresh playability to ROL.
