Remember our earlier dialogue about softening up an enemy city's political center? It's back! This will help you not just sending ground troops into a city and occupying it, it will help you truly capture it and more than just its inhabitants' physical bodies. You have to take the time to assimilate the populace into your culture and during this meticulously arduous time, you cannot use any of the improvements you have left standing. A virtual timer counts down in 'real-life time' how much longer is left before this task is complete. So, while you do immediately gain territory, it is strictly under your occupation at first. If you are counting on these improvements to help you in your warring efforts, think ahead and bring appropriate troop numbers so that you can hold your new land long enough to bring it into your fold. Should it ever fall back to its previous owners or anyone else, at least they too will have to go through this integration process themselves.
CONTROLS, CHEATS AND OTHER GAME SETTINGS
What role your mouse plays in your Rise of Nations games depends on the extent of your passion or lack thereof for hotkeys. Want to keep the AI at bay for a while? You can turn it off with a few clicks where you in turn control all of the civilizations in a game, perfect for re-creating the epic battles of human history or some of your own. If military strategy is what you crave, hex-based games finally have some competition in reaching to fulfill this desire. Known as “Sandbox” mode, this option started off as a simple yet temporary debugging protocol for programmers and testers of the game. The idea was to slow it down to better comb through the minutia of settings during the game's development but soon evolved into a permanent fixture of RoN's make-up.
Speaking of temporary structures becoming permanent fixtures, Reynolds confirmed that there would be cheat menu for those who wish to advance more speedily than even the slowest game speeds would allow.
“I am way into cheating. I think that people like to cheat”, he jokes.
At the time of my previewing the game, and even as of the time of this writing, there is no definitive interface yet in place to see what this will look like in the end, but the base coding is already in place. In the build I saw, a two-step keystroke command brings up a command prompt by which to input requests, such as 'add 3 muskets' where, in this example, is great for a quick runthrough of in-game combat elements. If you choose to listen to the interview from which this article is based (and I do sincerely hope that you will if not right now then at some point in the near future), you can hear Brian verbally reiterating commands he has given through this prompt in order to bring up the components he needs to show me something else in gameplay.
One final tidbit for you today: I asked Reynolds if there will be scenario editor included in Rise of Nations from the get-go. The answer was an affirmative and, indeed, a “fully functional” scenario editor. I got the immediate impression that this item was and presumably still is in its early stages of creation, so elaboration on what exactly “fully functional” entails will have to wait for a future previewer to inspect.
Rise Up: Reynolds On RoN 
