Caltrops - Gamerasutra - Re: someone explain Rise of Nations to me

Forum Overview :: Gamerasutra

by Bitter 06/25/2003, 12:43am PDT

Chairman Mao wrote:

FABIO wrote:

Is there a "sit yo ass down" button? I try to stand back and let siege engine pulverize his fort while screened with my units, but they keep breaking away to the fort or get baited to it by enemy units.

That drives me absolutely fucking nuts. I know you can fortify but its hard enough to get them in the places you want while under fire to do even that. I've had two large armies picked to shreds this way now, being lured off by one dipshit scout or something and then dying of attrition or being picked apart slowly by raiding parties. as I frantically am doing something else. I think the moral here though is that I'm far too much the micromanager for this game.

Uhm, I've just been changing their stance from aggressive to defensive (guy with two knives to guy with shield) and that seems to work pretty good. I pretty much do the 'couple o' them, a few of them others, how about a spoonful of that' unit selection, and so far it's worked pretty good. I whack 'h' a fair amount when they get rambunctious. You can additionally set barracks/stables/siege shops to produce units that default to defensive, which is pretty useful.

By the way, I think you can turn off that 'auto transport' thing where guys turning into little boats automatically.

I pretty much dig the game so far. It got rid of a lot of the stupid from AoE II or whatever it was: resources don't expire and peasants try and behave in a reasonably smart fashion.

What the game really needs is to let you, across ALL your military facilities, pick a mix of forces (and perhaps priorites of unit construction within this mix), and then just keep grinding out units as resources arrive. Like I could set a slider so that 50% of all resources coming in are directed to building shit, and infantry and horsies and cannons and shit just keep pooting out of my factories at speed, with a chance to say 'if I'm running low on stuff, horsies are tops, please' (though why this should ever happen with AI controlling build rate is a question). Especially in the end game, it gets damn tedious to click like a chimp across several barracks, etc., to get your army constantly built back up. Which makes me wonder, do you think this feature's missing because it takes the 'fun' out of the game, or because the developers never play the damn thing? Like didn't some game recently turn down their AI on units recently so that the player wouldn't become superfluous. HINT: if you have to do that, yer game is probably like dum.

Bitter.

Bitter.