Rise of Nations (RoN) has been out for some time now, and most of us have had a chance to get acquainted with the game. However, the manual RoN ships with has by many been described as a pamphlet, due to its brevity and lack of content. The in-game help is very useful, but still far from comprehensive and not always equally accessible. Also, after a few games, a lot of people probably reckon they've gotten an initial feel for the game and will want to take things to the next level. This is where the Rise of Nations: Sybex Official Strategies and Secrets guide comes in: offering in-depth stats, detailed analysis and advice, new strategies and advanced tactics -- or so claims the back-cover -- this guide should complement the manual and help players improve their game. Is this true, is this guide worth your while? Read on and judge for yourself.
The first strategy guide I ever read was for SimCity. That was many, many years ago, before the Internet (read: the World Wide Web) was even born and when a game that supported 256 colours and required more than 500K RAM was considered high-tech. I absolutely loved that game, but wasn't particularly good at it. That is, until I read that strategy guide. It was a whopping 600-page volume that contained everything one could possibly want to know about the game. In-depth stats, detailed maps, advanced strategies -- all clearly the result of many combined years of playing experience by the authors. After reading that guide, it wasn't long until I had fully mastered the game myself, and could turn the most polluted and dilapidated slums with huge debts into profitable and luxurious resorts or wealthy and buzzing metropoles. In fact, I soon became so skilled at the game that it lost much of its appeal: it simply couldn't challenge me anymore. And all of that thanks to that one strategy guide. Though to a lesser extent, I've had similar experiences with other strategy guides from the early nineties, such as for the Wing Commander series.
Today, most strategy guides are but a mere shadow of these old guides from the early nineties. The last strategy guide I read (which I shall not name to protect the innocent) was basically a rehash of the (in itself already mediocre) game manual and contained more historic and background info than actually useful new game info and strategies. Quite frankly, it wasn't worth the paper it was printed on. This has been my experience with more game guides that were released in the past few years. Nowadays game designers often assist in writing the strategy guide for their games, which in theory should be a good thing but in practice rarely works out that way. More often than not, the strategy guide has to be finished before the game itself, so that both can be released simultaneously for better profit (contrary to the old days, when strategy guides usually came out months, or even years after the games themselves, after the authors had completely mastered every aspect of the game). As a consequence, the information contained in today's strategy guides is usually based on betas and at least some of it is obsolete by the time game and guide hit the shelves. Another consequence is that authors of strategy guides hardly have enough time to play the game (as most game developers work with tight schedules and games are usually only fully playable and stable pretty late in the development process), so the strategies provided in the guide are sometimes based on only a few dozen hours of gaming. Hard-core fans usually start to come up with better strategies only one or two weeks after the game's release, which often makes the guides all but useless. So when I heard about the Strategies and Secrets guide for RoN, I was initially a little sceptical about it, but willing to give it a try.
Let's first look at the contents of the guide: exactly what kind of information will you find in it? The guide can basically be divided in four sections: everything from the acknowledgements and the foreword to the first two chapters of the guide can be considered the introduction. Chapters 3 to 7 deal with various elements of the game, such as resource gathering, knowledge, wonders and military. One could argue that since the game itself doesn't come with a real manual, this part could be considered sort of a replacement manual (or at least a bulky supplement). The third part, chapters 8 through 12, deals with strategies: strategies for your economy and military, strategies for the Conquer the World campaign and strategies for multiplayer. Simply put, this part is the actual strategy guide (though it should be noted that the first few chapters offer plenty of strategy notes and analyses as well). The Appendices form the fourth and final part of this guide and offer statistics galore.
Seemingly unimportant and easy to overlook, but the guide kicks off with an extremely detailed table of contents. Unfortunately there's no index in this guide, but the detailed table of contents to some extent compensates for this: once you've read the guide and know roughly where to find everything, the contents helps you locate specific information quickly. A smaller table of contents and a proper index would have been preferable, but this works as well. The contents is followed by an excellent foreword by Brian Reynolds himself: he explains the reasoning behind giving up his comfortable life at Firaxis and founding his own company just to create yet another real-time strategy (RTS) game. He also elaborates on some of the design decisions that made RoN the game it is. After a standard introduction, the guide moves on to the first chapter: 'Rules of the Game'. This is a general introduction chapter for people who are new to the game. It explains the key concepts of an RTS game like RoN -- paying special attention to the significance of time -- and briefly outlines what sets RoN apart from other RTS games. It also gives some advice in how you can use the game preferences to quickly get up to speed (autocitizen, hotkeys, etc) so you can play at a competitive pace. It even offers a few pointers on installing the game and making it run smoothly (which we all know can be a pain). Finally, it gives a brief run-down of the Tutorials and gives some tactical hints that can help new players master these scenarios. Chapter 2 ('Playing the Game You Want to Play') explains the various options of the Quick Battles start-up screen. It lists all 18 starting nations with their unique characteristics and offers some comments about which strategies and maps make each of these nations shine. It also discusses all the different map styles (from African Watering Hole to Warring States) and the significance of map size. Finally, it discusses the various team settings, game types and other parameters (such as starting resources and victory types). Though mostly aimed at new players, more experienced players may find some of the comments in this chapter worthwhile as well.
