Caltrops - Reviews - The resource streamlining aspects in RoN was bad?

Forum Overview :: Reviews

by FABIO 06/14/2005, 9:55pm PDT

Really? I loved it for getting rid of all the crap that made the Age of Empires/Empire Earth game 80% about managing ten thousand workers on three dozen different resource patches around the map. RoN concentrated everything in your one or two main cities while still making it a good idea to expand. Brilliant!

The resources popping up only when you reached the right age to harvest them was bad? Really? Pretty much everyone seems to agree that was the ONE thing Civ3 did right.

Knowledge points were bad? Their existance made expanding mandatory, since you could only have one university per city.

Not having to constantly replant farms is bad?

I absolutely loved how RoN streamlined all the tedious resource management crap that plagues this sub genre. Idle workers that automatically go to work on their previous job once they've finished the current? Yes please.

The only thing that kept me from loving RoN totally was that it still held on to the braindead, impossible to control combat of the Empires games. It was all about who had more units. Telling siege weapons to fire on buildings was about as deep as the tactics got. Sure there were a couple units with special abilities, but beyond telling your general to "entrench" to get an armor bonus, how often did you see anyone actually using them online? Every online game I ever played was just siege engine pushes followed by city bombing followed by nuke fights.