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This game is great overall: excellent graphics, excellent sound, and it never gets boring because the experience always changes depending on the scenerio you choose. You can play as Napoleon or Alexander the Great, an American Revolutionary or a Russian Czar, or any number of world leaders past and present. You really have to plan ahead to devise strategies to defeat your enemies. You can change the outcome of historical battles -- I have made Napoleon conquer England, America take over South America, the Russians win the cold war, and the Bantu take over the world. The only downside is that it takes a lot of computer memory.
Rating: 
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I purchased the Mac version of Rise of Nations and have had an enjoyable time playing this game. This is the first Real Time Simulation I've purchased, so all comments should be taken in that context.
The learning tutorials are informative and the quick games (the only I've played so far) are entertaining (especially when one acheives nuclear weapon status...). There's a balancing act between building military items and civilian items that is not easy to achieve. The mechanism which drives "advances" is your library. Researching things like military, civic, commerce, or science enables your progress through "ages" (classical, medieval or industrial, for example). Each advance can affect many aspects of one's national health. Exploring for rare resources, building various structures (which enlarge your national borders) and building a military reserve also add to your nation's health.
As to nations, there are 18 groups or tribes or peoples from history and around the world. Each has special abilities and advantages.
In the quick game, you choose the nation you wish to play, choose the type of map you wish to play on (rain forest, great lakes, old world for example) and hit return. The computer generates a map and an opponent, and your little corner of the world appears on the map. Most of the map is dark, encouraging you to find out "what's out there" by using your scout to, er, scout. As you start in the stone age, it behooves you to build your nation quickly (by building barracks, markets [which allow you to build caravans and merchants], universites, farms, woodcutter's camps and mines). Everything produces various resources which you spend to build other things, generating more resources, building more things, back and forth, over and over. By itself, this can be an interesting struggle. However, the trick is to do all of this while competing against a "hostile" computer opponent. There are options to play against other real people, but I haven't gotten that far, yet. I'm still learning the "hot keys" and trying to develop some sort of strategy/plan of attack...this is where the Real Time Strategy enters into the mix. The computer is doing the same as you (building a nation) at the same time as you. I have a similar game (about 6 years old and OS 9) but it was turn based (I go, you go). So things heat up in Rise of Nations much more quickly than in my older game.
All in all, this is a fun game. The only thing I would say that is a negative is this:
MAC OS 10.4 and up users need to download a patch to allow you to actually play this game. The patch has worked for me just fine, so there's no probelm. Although, it took about 35 minutes (from putting the disc into my computer to actually playing) to get everything synched up. It wasn't a huge negative, I just wish I knew beforehand.
Rating: 
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Its fairly similar to other games of this genre. Lacks some of the humour and personality of similar games. Competent, reliably coded, and runs at a decent speed even on slower Macs. Multi-player games are fun.
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i love rts, this game is older but alot of fun on my ibook.
for those of you who had issues with the game crashing for no reason, i did as well. i downloaded the patch update (even though it deals with sound issues) and it fixed the start up problem.
Rating: 
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Really enjoy the game when it works, but it crashes so often that I can hardly play it. Using a PowerBook G4 with OS X.4.7.
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