Rise of Nations

[leech]

Is this the coolest game to come out in a long time or what? Even the single-player kicks ass, because it's just like a board game. Multi-player rocks as well. Rather than just creating armies and killing your opponents, you have to worry about economy too! And rather than just the 3 or 4 resources that you have to gather, there is 6 (I think, that's off the top of my head) Food, Wood, Metal, Knowledge, Wealth, Oil.

Really a great game.

Leech

[Maggi]

a link would help to speed up response ...

[GNEP]

And it apparently works in surround... might have to be getting this one - real-time civilisation is what one reviewer called it

[leech]

http://www.microsoft.com/games/riseofnations/

Better?

Leech

[Zao]

Surround:

http://jan.elakpistol.com/~zao/ronsg01.jpg

http://jan.elakpistol.com/~zao/ronsg02.jpg

http://jan.elakpistol.com/~zao/ronsg03.jpg

[leech]

Very nice! Time to get two more monitors...

Leech

[Maggi]

Originally posted by leech
http://www.microsoft.com/games/riseofnations/

Better?

Leech

a lot better, thank you ...

looks indeed interestesting, but usually C&C ain#t my type of game.

the historical aspect is pretty tempting though.

[leech]

it's great, it puts in a lot of the cool elements of Civilization, and yet it's real time.

Leech

[Lim]

The RON graphic image is really disappointed. For comparison between AOM and C&C Generals, RON has to improve a lot.

[GNEP]

Well, it's not got fancy graphics, but it looks adequate to me. The fact that in 3 screens this means I won't be getting bogged down framerates is important in a game like this though.

To be quite honest, this type of game needs great gameplay - graphics come some way down the list. As an example, I have just spent a large part of the weekend playing networked Total Annihilation with a friend. The graphics aren't groundbreaking (heh, this is a DirectX 5 game!) but it has great gameplay (To the extent that sleep deprivation was the result!!! ). Actually, TA works in v high res or across 2 screens as well, which was a pleasant surprise.

I haven't managed to get a hold of a copy yet, but by all accounts RON hits the spot on the gameplay side. I don't honestly care too much about the graphics (within reason - I don't want to play a spreadsheet as I already do this at work all day...)

[Zao]

I tell you, if you play it, make sure you put the research cost/time to Very Slow and Very Costly.

That makes the games tempo much better. With default settings the ages just fly by, and some of the strategy gets lost.

Furthermore, the strategy element in this game is much better than earlier Ao* games, and I'll play this as much as I can on my upconing LAN.

I'll try to make some nice screenshots

[leech]

If anyone has any lockups, post it here. I'm quite curious as to what's causing it. We played a Lan game over at Byock's house, and it seemed that whenever I'd boot the game up, (mind you I wasn't even playing it, just at the Multi-player screen) it would raise the temperature of my CPU by 20 F I have an Asus P4PE 1005 bios (I updated it during the network party and still had the lock up, though not as often) A Parhelia 128mb ( Retail, latest drivers).

Scumhawk has a P4PE as well, along with The Parhelia and both of our systems would lock up randomly and heat up incredibly. He has a P4 2.4ghz and I have a 3.06ghz P4.

Byock's system wouldn't lock up, and he has an ATI Radeon 8500, and a AMD 2000xp (can't recall exactly his motherboard right now, but it's an Asus, KT400 chipset, I believe).

I never had it lock up single player, just in the multi-player, so I'm thinking it's in there somewhere, but kind of odd, that it locks up only on the machines with the Parhelia. (I did try the 1.3.1.2 driver, but had the same problem.)

Leech

[lecter]

No lock-up problems here, but the CPU usage was immense and it was unplayable when I had left YZ's Dock open in the background...I closed it and that was the end of the problem. Other than that, fantastic gameplay and very smooth@1024 w/FAA&aniso

[leech]

Just out of curiosity.... does FAA even do anything on this game? It's all 2D accelerated from what I can see. It runs at 40-45fps in 1280x1024x32 for me, so I'm happy. If I put it all the way up to 1600x1200x32 it works at 30-35, so I can't complain

Hopefully the patch fixed the lock-ups, we had tried patching it before, but it asked for us to sign into Gamespy which we didn't do, and so it didn't actually apply the patch... silly thing.

Leech

[lecter]

What patch are you refering to?