Rise of Nations campaign

I finished a campaign on “tough” as the Koreans. I liked it early on, but I have two gripes about the ending. First of all, the build-up of stratgeic resources makes the late-game conquest battles too “rich”- its like starting a skirmish with tons of resources. I dont see much that can be done about that given that the resources are one of the main carry-overs from battle to battle, and they do help speed things up, but it would have been more fun to end with an epic battle instead of a few cake-walks.
The other gripe is the lack of a victory animation or hall of fame; just one static screen of stats and that’s all folks. Quite a contrast with the slick intro movie.

Well, I remember seeing that some sick number of gamers never finish any of the games they buy, so it’s probably a smart business move to put all the expensive cutscenes up front.

That would be me.

I don’t finish most of the games I buy. I loved IWD2, for instance, but I didn’t finish. Grew bored of it.

Though, conversly, I finished Dungeon Siege and have even played it part of the way again… And I abhor the design of a fair part of the game.

This is the first game I can remember since PS:T that I didn’t immediately turn off the music. It’s really nice.

How many kinds of different battles are there in CTW? I’ve only see 4, and that’s stretching it. There’s the fairly cool defend your base for 15 minutes from barbarians(absurdly easy if you are the Maya, BTW). There’s the no-support-troops attack, in which is kinda cool until you take one city and it turns into a regular game, and then there are the 90 minute regular-style games, both offensive and defensive. I saw the first two real early, but since then I’ve just seen conquests. Kinda wears on me. The biggest thing stopping my aggression was that I didn’t want to play another 90 minute slugfest(and the high city strength that so nicely prevents early rushes also prevents any truly devastating military defeats). RON without a real tech tree and without wonders isn’t that much fun.

Oh, and Christ I hate hard counters in RTS games. If developers want to have hard counters, they need to make the unit AI understand what it’s good at, otherwise it’s just more micromanagement.

Ben, you can avoid the slugfests by making sure you have more armies/reinforcements coming into the territory than your opponent. With a good enough advantage, and as long as the territory isn’t too built up, you can easily rush his main city and end the scenario quickly. For me, the early turns of a campaign go by pretty quickly this way.

The slugfests should only occur when you’re evenly matched or when you’re attacking a built-up territory, in which case, you gotta duke it out if you want the territory. Thems the rules.

Also, I can’t tell whether you know this from your last comment, but there are no hard counters* in RoN. With a few exceptions involving air power, almost any unit can be attacked by any other unit.

 -Tom
  • Assuming we agree on what hard counters are: one-sided matches according to a paper/rock/scissors scheme.

Are you sure? I think the “good against” descriptions for unit types means they get multipliers.

The “reduce territory strength” card is handy for assaulting enemy capitals, too.

The counters seem about as important as AoE. I suppose you could get harder with immunity but from my somewhat limited RoN combat experience there’s a definitely an X beats Y type system. Use pikeman against cav, horse against archers, archers against infantry.

My understanding of the subject is limited though. If I misused “hard”, uh, keep in mind that I rarely know what I’m talking about. In that case, my comment is general rather than specific, cause it annoyed the hell out of me in AoE2. As a rule: when units are not given specific instructions from me, in combat they should place a high priority on targetting that which they have an advantage against.

from my somewhat limited RoN combat experience there’s a definitely an X beats Y type system

Correct. Maybe it’s my misunderstanding of the term, but I had thought those were ‘hard’ counters only if Y couldn’t, in return, be useful against X. When you simply get bonuses, I think you’re talking about ‘soft’ counters. But I could be wrong as well.

I think we had this confusion in a previous thread, but suffice to say RoN definitely has a ‘this beats that’ system, which is spelled out when you select the unit and read the detailed help text (which you should be sure to have enabled while you’re learning the game).

 -Tom

Me too. I dig the music.

I’ve noticed that they have. Funny you should mention it. I was just testing this last night. My AT infantry (heavy inf) was going after the opponents Calvary.

Anyone else been testing this?

Also, to avoid another thread - Anyone else disappointed with the amount of damage that Battleships do with their shore bomabardment? I was while I was fending off an attack (during industrial age) I brought in some ships for support. An enemy machine gun was ripping my infantry up pretty good so I targeted two BBs on it. It took about 8 shots from each of the BBs plus being strafed by some biplanes before it was knocked out.

Huh? Roughly 16 salvos from Battleships? WTF? I started testing the shore bombardment against various targets - supply trucks, armored cars, infantry, etc, plus using the bombard ground attack as well. It looked to me that these BBs weren’t doing shit. I would think if some 12" or 14" shells (you know, circa 1906) were landing near soft targets it would make a fucking mess of things. At least do the 35 points (or whatever) of damage that BBs are slated as doing. Didn’t look to me like they were doing even close to the rated 35 pts. Anyone have an explaination or has noticed the same thing?

If it’s for game balance I can dig it but I was a little disappointed. I was looking forard to tearing some shit up. Also, it would would have been nice to see some impact explosions so you know when the rounds are landing on shore (small gripe - no big deal).

I’m playing the CTW campaign now and really enjoying it. I haven’t had this much fun with an RTS since the original Warcraft and C&C.

Agreed on both the fun thing and the disappointment with battleships.

You’re complaining about the lack of realism in a game that models wars between the Bantu and the Mayans using nukes on each other?

Bingo. Rise of Nations does a great job of balancing the naval game with everything else. Can you imagine how much signifigance the naval game would have if the guy controlling the seas could just scrape everything off the coast with impunity?

Having said that, Advanced Battleships are pretty damn annoying!

 -Tom

You’re complaining about the lack of realism in a game that models wars between the Bantu and the Mayans using nukes on each other?[/quote]

Heh, heh. Of course, that can be said about nearly any game we play. :)

Bingo. Rise of Nations does a great job of balancing the naval game with everything else. Can you imagine how much signifigance the naval game would have if the guy controlling the seas could just scrape everything off the coast with impunity?

Having said that, Advanced Battleships are pretty damn annoying!

 -Tom[/quote]

While I agree overall, I still think the amount of damage they deal is damn near insignificant or pathetically low. After all, in the on screen text description they are advertised as a “shore bomabardment” unit as well. Would you agree that they should at least do their rated damage to infantry and vehicles? To me it looks as though they do not. I could be wrong, it was late and I had a pretty good buzz (math skills were possibly impaired). I’m almost done with the work I wanted to get done today and I’ll take another look later.

For the cost of the damn things (and in relation to how quickly they’re whacked by a sub) they should be good at something else besides popping destroyers, unless shore bombardment meant reducing only structures and not units.

It’s really not a complaint, more of an observation. I like to understand all the aspects of a game so I known how best to use my assets. I just want to know how they work.

BTW - I’ve never had Adv BB - why are they so annoying?

For the cost of the damn things (and in relation to how quickly they’re whacked by a sub) they should be good at something else besides popping destroyers, unless shore bombardment meant reducing only structures and not units.

If you look at them in the context of how everything in the game fits into place, battleships are clearly meant to destroy other ships. They get whacked by subs because subs are obviously their counters, just like destroyers are counters to subs.

This is all very standard RTS stuff.

As for their shore bombardment capability, I haven’t run any tests, but I’ve certainly lost games to battleship bombardments. They may not do as much damage as you’d like, but they don’t seem weak to me. In fact, in a game where I don’t expect to contest naval supremacy, I try to build my cities well in from the shore.

BTW - I’ve never had Adv BB - why are they so annoying?

They attack using long range missiles. Lots of fun. Unless you’re on the business end of the missiles.

 -Tom