Earlier this month, I had the opportunity and pleasure to sit down with Brian Reynolds, President of Big Huge Games, to talk about his company's upcoming real-time strategy game, Rise of Nations, in his summer home situated in the beautiful 1000 Islands region of southeastern Ontario. This is the second part of the preview based on that conversation. This portion highlights a discussion on trading, city improvements, national bondaries, units/warfare, game settings, micromanagement and even two "what's in" exclusives. You'll hear all about RoN from the main man himself.
MORE THAN ONE REASON TO TRADE
At the outset of Rise of Nations, your resource gathering is limited to three types: food, cultivated on farms; wood, obtained by chopping trees; and gold, revenue generated by trade between cities. At this point, it may be prudent to mention another 'resource', albeit a limited and potentially far out spaced one: there are ruins placed throughout the game that are the “goodie hut” equivalent to Civilization and Civilization II. You never know what you are going to find. As you advance in time, there are more resource types you can discover, exploit and use to trade goods with others.
As promised back in Part 1, we return now to the place of gold in the game. Again, it is not mined from the ground but rather generated by intercity trade. To obtain it, you must build Caravans which once constructed will automatically scour to pathfind to another city. In making roads for fellow units to use along the way, it decreases a micromanagement pinch by not having to not only specify the route from city 'A' to city 'B' manually, but also saves a Citizen unit from the monotony that the task would otherwise be charged to. In this context, the road represents a linked trade route which spawns a continuous cash 'err gold flow, the value of which is presented to the player upon its initial setup (you can turn this option off via messaging settings).
"[I]t's not that all micromanagement is bad", Reynolds adds describing his philosophy on the subject. "There is good micromangement and [there is] bad micromanagement. There is good micromanagement when at a particular time in a game you have the time to spend and you can actually make a difference in making your economy better by placing things a certain way to a certain extent. Yet, it wouldn't give me any benefit really to place exactly which pixel [a] road is going to go through. So, [this] is kind of drawing the line between repeating activities that you would always do the same way anyway; that's bad micromanagement, and we try to automate that. And likewise, bad micromanagement is every time I build a peasant I have to go specifically assign him to something”.
Unlike CivII, however, the Caravan does not simply vanish from the game map when it initializes its route. Instead, it continues to follow the path it initially constructed back and forth between the now economically linked municipalities permitting a more reassuring sense that all is well. As your city grows, the more profitable the trade route will become so don't skimp on the farms and terrain improvements. Similarly, city improvements too will drive up the value of your merchandise. Only one trade route can exist between two cities, so be certain to research to the best of your ability that which will reap the most monetary rewards. Accordingly, you will need to either found or acquire a number of cities greater than two to further increase the coin in your coffers, for example by studying Empire in the Classical Age. However, a city can institute more than one trade route so, for instance, two trade routes are capable of existing simultaneously within an civilization comprised of three cities.
If you find yourself with too many idle Citizen units, you cannot put them on road construction duty: only Caravans are trained to do this. If you do find yourself in this circumstance, either find them something to do, use them to explore (with military escort) or as a last resort disband them. Reynolds admits that in the earliest builds of RoN a 'build road' command was included in the citizen's list of duties, but was soon dropped. As he put it in a fashion only a true strategy gamer would find humourous, it was quite simply, quote, “a drag”. He adds that he and the rest of the Big Huge team found it interesting how as one migrates from a turn-based to a real-time environment, there are enumerating tasks that gamers simply don't want to spend their time doing given the intrinsic time pressure.
Rise Up: Reynolds On RoN 
