For instance, since your national borders grow with the number of cities you control, you may wish to aggressively expand your empire by building lots of cities, but you'll be limited by the extent of your research in civics. In practice, national borders add depth to the game without being overwhelming. This intriguing concept of national borders works as you might have expected it to in an epic turn-based game, such as Civilization. This focus on cities also means that each one will become a distinct community, with its own farms, temples, universities, and so on-actual cities will populate your empire, unlike in other real-time strategy games, where most of your structures are at your main base, while your additional town halls exist in isolation near some resources. Since expanding your empire depends entirely on your cities, the game makes you think harder about how and where you should expand. You can build other buildings only within your borders, and you can build only a limited number of different improvements for each city (such as a maximum of five farms each). Each of your cities has a radius around it that constitutes your national border. Unlike in other turn-based games, in Rise of Nations, cities are a focal part of your strategy.
While these new features might seem foreign to real-time strategy players, fans of Brian Reynolds' turn-based strategy games should know them well. But beyond that, the game has a lot of depth, more so than other real-time strategy games, thanks to novel concepts such as national borders, city assimilation, and more. Rise of Nations might resemble Microsoft's Age of Empires games at a glance-like other, similar games, it has a host of different civilizations (18, to be exact), each with unique bonuses and four to five unique units.
Rise of Nations successfully incorporates many turn-based strategy conventions, like cities and national borders. By combining some of the concepts of Civilization with the general gameplay of Age of Empires, Reynolds and Big Huge Games have created a truly outstanding game. This superb strategy game combines the best elements of real-time strategy with the conventions of the turn-based blockbusters that Reynolds had worked on previously. But Reynolds went off and founded a new studio called Big Huge Games and began work on the historically themed Rise of Nations, a game that has finally arrived on store shelves. Designer Brian Reynolds had already made a name for himself with his work with Sid Meier on turn-based strategy classics such as Civilization II and Alpha Centauri.