Preview Impressions of Rise of Legends™

Rohag, 5 January 2006

Ah! Providence dropped a preview copy of Rise of Nations: Rise of Legends in the hands of this old Rise of Nations fan, and I have to say I'm impressed! Rise of Legends' graphics leap well beyond those of Rise of Nations, and Big Huge Games does this without shorting gameplay! They've skillfully evolved the basic engine to encompass a world of steampunk technology vs. Arabian Nights' magic vs. something more to be revealed shortly.

When Big Huge Games (BHG) announced Rise of Nations: Rise of Legends (RoL) as their next game, I was both mildly disappointed and hopeful. Historically inspired strategy games appeal most to me, not least because their contents are all mostly intuitive. "Tank," "Archer," and "University" don't require an explanation; "Third-level Leporid Mage Eructation Master" takes a while to imprint itself on my gaming imagination. And, as much as I cherish Tolkien's Middle Earth, orcs and elves already populate too many games.

Nevertheless, given BHG's overwhelming success with Rise of Nations (RoN), I was confident that, if anyone could develop a freshly compelling fantasy RTS, they could. Besides, the greater freedom of fantasy - of alternate realities in general - would allow BHG to flex their creative muscles and equip them to do an eventual RoN II (may it be!).

The Preview Beta of Rise of Legends represents an incomplete build subject to significant revision before the final version is ready. Nevertheless, the glimpses of the emerging game it affords have banished my doubts. With nary and orc in sight, RoL has the potential to recapture the majority of RoN fans and convert many others as well.

Graphics

If by graphics you mean the overall look of the game, the already released screenshots speak for themselves. The key advance is camera mobility. RoN's fixed perspective is gone; in RoL you can change all camera angles by mouse or keyboard . Playing around with the depress-center-mouse-button-and-drag method I was able to reach a nearly top-down view (80-85 degrees, perhaps) and a not-so-close ground-level view (about 20-30 degrees off horizontal).

The zoom is similar to RoN's. Alas, I was not able to zoom out as far as I wanted, but I've always been lobbying for a more remote perspective. That stratospheric view, however, would eliminate almost all the rich animations BHG has built into this game - and into RoN as well if people noticed. Zoom in and you can catch the new animations in all their glory; I found those of the cities and attached districts especially impressive!

Gameplay

"The gameplay's the thing." I don't know who first said that, but I agree. RoL's super graphics don't come at the expense of what really matters.

Unlike RoN, the world of RoL is more a world of discreet city states; cities are fixed on each map - you don't build them (not that I could see, anyway) and they don't produce civilians. You grow your initial city and others you may acquire by adding districts of various types, and a Great City can take up more than a full screen! This conurbanity - city and districts together (at least with the Alin and Vinci) - are selected as a single whole. Cities possess intrinsic, animated anti-ground and -air defenses with no garrisoning of units. Players can build various other structures and defenses outside of cities depending on the race.

Your starting city is not automatically your capital. In Quick Battle (BHG's term for a skirmish) the first of your cities to reach a certain size attains capital status when you build a (second?) Palace District there. Once established, I didn't see a way to transfer the capital to another city.

Now, here's where BHG has partially filled one of my high-priority want-list items from the pre-RoN days: the possibility of multiracial forces! Diplomacy among nations is still present, and you have three options to acquire the neutral cities and sites on the maps: capture, purchase (bribe), or trade: if you've established a caravan route with a neutral and trade long enough with it, that city will declare for your side, assume your color, and bring a small military contingent with it. Specifically, in a couple instances playing as the Vinci in Quick Battle, I acquired neutral Glass Spires. These Glass Spires seem to be inherently Alin, but suddenly I discovered myself the commander of several units of Desert Walkers and Heartseekers! I could also build Marid there. Sweet!

[Before uploading this article, BHG informed me that the races cannot access one another's tech trees nor build one another's units. I went back to the Preview Beta and confirmed that capturing another race's city will not grant access to their tech tree, but Vinci-captured Glass Spires did indeed allow the building of Alin units. I don't know whether or not this remains in the current iteration of RoL.

Also, recent information from BHG states the correct name for the Arabian Nights-inspired nation is "Alin" and not "Alim" as has appeared in earlier previews. This makes sense, as "-in" transliterates a common Arabic (masculine plural) ending, whereas "-im" is Hebrew. (Yes, I know the earliest sources of the "Arabian Nights" are Persian, but there's been plenty of mutual cultural influence in those parts...)]

Some asymmetry characterizes research and military development among the races, and this means they must develop their power in different ways. Officially, BHG has said the game features two resources: Timonium - a special mineral requiring the construction of mines and recruitment of miners for collection (Vinci mines and miners are upgradeable; Alin mines but not miners the same) , and Wealth - accumulated by the passage of caravans among friendly and neutral cities; the number of caravans being limited by the number and size of cities. Research Points are a kind of third, derivative resource used for various upgrades and tech advancements. They are earned for building research centers (no need to populate them with scholars; one center grants one research point) and for building or acquiring certain other things. Vinci research centers can be built anywhere inside your borders; the parallel Alin Magus Districts are intrinsic parts of their cities.

Each race has four basic research tracks (shades of RoN's library research), three of which are common and one unique associated with the national abilities: the Vinci's is Industrial Devastation (create a destruction zone on the map), and the Alin's is Army Summoning (summon a large but temporary army). In Quick Battle, I was eventually able to research every step of the four tracks, but the campaign scenario limited me to eight of the possible sixteen. Alongside the research channels, the Vinci have a Prototype Factory - research points can buy "trips" to the Factory for Vinci-unique advantages, and the Alin have an array of other research possibilities scattered across their infrastructure. It will take me a lot more time with the game to get a comfortable grasp of RoL's wide and varied developmental range.

If that weren't enough, during the course of a struggle a nation can gain one or more of four special "Dominances" (Political, Military, Industrial, Tactical) by being the first to fulfill sets of conditions, such as gaining control of neutral sites, having the most foot soldiers, etc. In my minimal experience with the Preview Beta, Dominances can change hands. They permit the invocation of powerful benefits: healing units, summoning allies, bribing enemy foot soldiers, and imposing mandatory cease-fires.

Building military forces differs from race to race. Except for the most basic, Vinci units need to be researched before they may be built at Barracks, Aerodromes, and Steam Fortresses. The availability of Alin units, on the other hand, is generally governed by your largest city size. Alin military production centers include Sand and Fire Circles, which produce ground and flying units respectively, and Glass Circles where you can obtain an impressive assortment of siege, foot, and flying units. Barracks and Sand Circles mostly parallel one another as do Aerodromes and Fire Circles, but the Steam Fortress and Glass Circle seem to diverge a bit more, yet both offering some siege-type units and each nation's Master Unit (Alin: Glass Dragon; Vinci: Land Leviathan).

As important and impressive as the special powers and lethal toys are in RoL, BHG seems to be upholding the nobility of the simple grunt for taking and holding ground in the form of the "Storm" feature. Frankly, it took me a while to figure this out: as you reduce an enemy city or capturable site, a little soldier silhouette and number appear to tell you how many foot troops are necessary to "storm" the city. If you have that many foot soldiers near enough, the silhouette begins to blink; you can then click on that soldier icon and the soldiers rush toward the city, which immediately drops to zero points and begins its assimilation period. This is an optional way of taking cities and sites, though, and it was also exciting to observe Master Units single-handedly reduce and capture cities. For example, it was truly cool employing the Land Leviathan's "Burrow" power to pass far and deep into enemy territory to emerge from below ground and seize a city!

Returning to the grunts, I was very impressed by the addition of special tactical stance options to the foot soldiers of the Vinci and Alin. Vinci Musketeers and Alin Desert Walkers are built as small companies of nine individual soldiers acting as a group, not so different from the foot trios of RoN but more adept at keeping in step. The stances available to the Musketeers and Sandmen differ: the Vinci troops can fight in close order and cause more damage to foes while moving slower or choose an open order allowing faster movement; Sandmen can choose a kind of berserker stance where they both move fast and cause more damage while taking more damage in return.

I can't say the factional asymmetry is as great as that of the classic StarCraft, but RoL's goes far beyond RoN's and is threaded through its predecessor's richer and more complex core system. I expect it will greatly please the community's strategic thinkers.

RoL's gameplay is also going to differ from RoN's in the greater emphasis it places on Heroes. Various Heroes and the national Master Units have their own set of icons on the left side of the screen; you can use these icons both to summon and assign combat and support units to them (I was unable to do the latter). Once summoned - at the cost of a sum of Timonium and Wealth - Heroes appear a couple minutes later on the map. In the one campaign scenario available in the Preview Beta, I summoned Lenora (Vinci) and she showed up accompanied by a retinue of military units suiting her aerial specialty. If they fall in battle, Heroes apparently respawn after a certain delay.

The RoL maps I saw featured no oceans or seas. Unbridgeable chasms and forbidding terrain features carve landscapes into strategic areas and choke points. In compensation for not having a navy to play with, I found the aerial portion of the game more involved than that of RoN's and absorbs some of its naval dimensions: it reminded me of a "sea of air" with a lot more going on than the brief passage of planes. Apparently all RoL's aerial units both fly and hover without fuel constraints. Indeed, the Vinci supply unit (think RoN's Supply Wagon) is a slow-moving air unit that doubles as a transport.

Interface & Controls

RoN's multiple interface panels were collapsible, so you could hide them out of the way if desired. I tended to use them at full extension, and they used up a good bit of screen real estate that way. Although the interface controls could change between this Preview Beta and the final product, RoLs' user interface (UI) requires less space and appears unitary, allowing you to do just about all you need from one display.

What I found especially useful was the addition to the UI of an easily reprogrammable button that allows you to access one of several favorite key combo commands with a single mouse click. For example, I frequently used shift-comma in RoN to select all military units. RoL allowed me to attach that keyboard combo to the one button on the UI (a number of other combos are available; you cycle through the options with the right mouse button). Subsequently, whenever I wanted to select all military units, all I needed to do was left-click once on that UI button.

On the other hand, I missed employing the Tab key to cycle through all available upgrades as in RoN. The functionally closest research-cycling shortcut I found was shift-L, but it didn't seem to catch all the possible uprades and research options, as well as requiring two hands. In a fantasy/alternate reality game featuring significantly different factions such as RoL, having a single key or interface button to cycle through all available upgrades and research would be very helpful, at least for those of us afflicted by creeping senility.

Modding

Many key game parameters are specified in easily-editable .xml files just as they were in RoN. The .bhs scripting files reprise with what seems at first glance little change. Based on the little I see in the preview, which doesn't contain an editor, RoL certainly won't be harder to modify than RoN.

A Very Early Preliminary Verdict

Here a glitch, there a glitch - nothing BHG can't fix between now and spring 2006. I didn't miss the civilians, missed the Tab key research cycler, and found RoL imposed on me all the kinds of strategic choices and more that RoN did. Unless the third unrevealed race* horribly unbalances the game, RoL is on track to become a first-rate title. No, I don't see RoL breaking the RTS mold in the same way as did RoN (unabashed personal bias here), but it does advance the Rise of Nations franchise in exciting directions that augur well for the future.

Forward, BHG!

[*BHG has revealed the third race as the "Cuotl," a Mayan-inspired alien culture.]

Discussions complementing this article are found at Rise of Legends Heaven and Rise of Legends Oracle.

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