The style in which this guide has been written is not overly brilliant or funny (except maybe for Brian Reynolds's foreword) but it's not boring or long-winded either. It's easy to read and informative. The layout is very pleasant: the main body of text is accompanied by loads of screenshots, game and concept art, and warnings, notes and tips relevant to the topic. In fact, almost every page has at least one such item and many pages even have several. This makes the guide very easy on the eye and pleasant to read or browse through. The only minor complaint I have is that the screenshots are slightly on the small side and sometimes it takes some effort to see exactly what you're looking at (the fact that they're all in black and white probably doesn't help either). As an added bonus for the die-hard fans, the guide comes with a sizeable full-colour poster of a RoN logo on the background a wheel with the names of some of the game's nations and a map of Europe (almost the same image is available as a desktop background on the Microsoft website as well).
There is a huge amount of invaluable information in this guide that you won't find anywhere else, certainly not in the manual or the in-game help. It's quite clear that some Big Huge Game developers were intimately involved in writing this guide and provided tons of undocumented information. For example, did you know you could view a city/building's firing range on the map by hovering over the 'range' icon in the city/building display? Or that you can force garrisoned units out of a building by torching it with a flamethrower? The guide also offers tons of statistics, such as the exact properties of units and benefits of advances (e.g. the guide tells you exactly how much faster Medicine makes your units heal (50%) and how much extra merchants gather with Taxation (120%)). In addition to that, many of the other stats, properties and features of units, buildings, advances, etc that can be found in the in-game help or elsewhere are all listed in convenient and readily accessible places, such as tables, lists and figures (or sometimes just plain text). Because they're often tucked away pretty well in the game, reading about them in this guide can be an eye opener.
Although it is by definition inevitable that online sources will eventually offer a lot of analyses, strategies and tactics that this guide simply cannot offer, it still provides plenty of insights that will help both new players and relative (the game's only been out for a short time) veterans to improve their game. Where information on the Internet is often hard to find, sometimes of questionable quality and rarely easy to get a good overview of, this guide will provide you with a high-quality, readily-accessible overview of some of very useful strategies and tactics. This guide serves as a solid foundation for creating your own playing strategy, on top of which you can add extra strategies and tactics that you find online or discover yourself. The author largely refrains from giving very specific and detailed build orders or attack strategies (a diverse game like RoN doesn't really lend itself very well for such things), but provides enough general insights and information to make every player capable of making the best choices for themselves, based on the conditions and events that they encounter during their games.
Of course, the guide isn't without error. There are a number of claims the guide makes that are simply not true, probably caused by the fact that the guide was written using information from betas rather than the final release version. The errors in Chapter 10 I already mentioned, but here are some other issues that are, to the best of my knowledge, incorrect: the guide claims the game can be played on a 800 x 600 resolution (lowest resolution is 1024 x 768), armies move as a single body at the speed of the slowest unit (in fact, every unit moves at its own pace), woodcutter camps can in some cases contain up to 14 workers (actually artificially capped at 10), only one mine per mountain can be built (should be one mine per mountain per nation) and the rear attack bonus is 100% while the flanking bonus is 50% (it's , incorrect: the guide claims the game can be played on a 800 x 600 resolution). These mistakes generally don't have a huge effect on gameplay (except maybe the flanking/rear bonus thing), but they are annoying and can lead to some confusion, especially for beginning players. To add insult to injury, in most cases it would have been nice if they were correct. But in the grand scheme of things, such mistakes are rare and don't take much away from the usefulness of the guide.
Though very thorough and detailed, there are some things in this guide that I feel could have been better. Some of the information that is written in plain text would have been nice to have in table form (as well). A general rule for strategy guides is the more tables, the better, and overall this guide does a very reasonable job in that respect, but it could have been even better. Also, I would have liked to have seen even more detailed in-game stats and formulas. Particularly the Appendices do a good job in this respect, but I wouldn't have minded to see for example the exact formulas for calculating the revenue of a trade route or the income from taxation as well (the factors that play a role are mentioned, but not exactly how they interact). Also, there's very little information on the costs of repairing buildings and I missed any kind of information on what affects the duration of various in-game clocks, such as for Nuclear Embargo or various victory options. I also would have liked to have known exactly how the starting situation of CtW battles is determined (what allies, units, buildings, etc, you and your opponent start with). More detailed information on how the AI works and how its specific weaknesses can be exploited could have been helpful for the singleplayer game, and I think it's a missed opportunity that the author failed to even mention the non-Quick Battle and non-CtW parts of the game: things like skill tests, scenarios, scenarios & script editors and the text files. One of the least important but most fun parts of any strategy guide is the section on cheats and/or Easter Eggs, which this specific guide also lacks.
For reasons that should be clear after reading the first few paragraphs of this article, I haven't read too many strategy guides recently and I can't remember the last time I read a Sybex guide, let alone one by Michael Rymaszewski. So it might be the case that Sybex and/or Michael Rymaszewski are an exception to my rule that present-day strategy guides are worthless and still publish excellent work, I honestly wouldn't know. But I do know that the guide for RoN is pretty good. Sure, it's quite clear that some of the information is no longer current and that better and deeper and better strategies will and are emerging on the forums and strategy sections of various fan-sites, but no guide is perfect (even my old SimCity guide contained some errors) and this guide has a lot of strong points that by far outweigh these minor issues. It contains a ton of invaluable information and provides a lot of useful strategies and tactics that will help improve anyone's game. For anyone who wants to excel at Rise of Nations, this guide is pretty much a must-have. I doubt it will (almost) instantly transform you into a RoN guru and take away all the challenge from the game like my old SimCity guide did for me with that game (with a vivid multiplayer community that's not likely to happen anyway), but it will certainly help you to take your game to the next level and make you a formidable opponent for the toughest AIs and most humans.
