First Steps
When you start off, you'll generally have a Small City, some Farms, and a Woodcutter's
Camp with some citizens already at work harvesting resources for you. However, this
tiny income won't be enough if you want your nation to rise to supremacy. Follow
these steps, making your own choices where indicated, and you'll be conquering other
nations in no time!
- Select your Libary (the hotkey "L" also selects the Library for you) and research
the bottom yellow technology. Yellow technologies are Science technologies, which
do a few very important things: make all the rest of your technologies cheaper and
research faster, increase the bonus you get for exploring ruins, and allow your
scout to see farther.
- Speaking of scouts, select your starting scout and click the Auto-Explore button
to have him automatically begin exploring the map for you (you can also choose to
plot out a route for him to follow on the minimap by shift-right-clicking various
points on the map).
Scouting is very important in the early portion of the game since you will find
Ruins which give you bonus resources that will really help jumpstart your economy!
- Select your Library again and research the blue technology. Blue technologies are
Civic technologies and each one allows you to build another City (as well as increasing
your national borders).
- While this researches, select your City and right-click the Woodcutter's Camp to
place a rally point on it. Now create some citizens at this City. Notice they automatically
go directly to the Woodcutter's Camp and get right to work.
- Select a Citizen and build a new Farm. Citizens working at Farms provide an increase
to the rate which you gather Food. Repeat with a second Citizen. Note: You cannot
build more than five Farms at any given City.
- Continue creating new Citizens until each of your five Farms has a worker and your
Woodcutter's Camp is full of workers.
- The first Civic should be finished researching by now, so take a Citizen and use
him to build a second City. Deciding where to place your cities is very important.
First off, you will notice you can't place buildings outside your national borders.
So, the furthest away you can create a City is right at the edge of your border,
and it's usually a great idea to build it there, as it will push your territory
out much further!
Try to find a spot for your second City that has a lot of forest nearby. If you
can find a spot that's also near a mountain, that's even better. It's also strategically
important to place cities towards the center of the map, since controlling territory
allows you to access more resources and prevents opponents from harvesting those
resources!
- Select your Library once more (that "L" key comes in handy, doesn't it?) and research
a green tech. Green techs are Commerce, which increase your Commerce Limit and allow
you to build Markets. Increasing Commerce is an important part of growing your nation's
economy, since the Commerce Limit is the maximum rate at which you can gather any
given resource (except Knowledge).
Commerce techs also increase the number of Caravans (and therefore trade routes)
you're able to have at any given time. Twelve farmers normally gather Food at a
rate of +120 Food every 30 seconds, but if the Commerce Limit is +100, you will
be limited to +100 Food every 30 seconds.
- Construct additional Farms or Woodcutter's Camps and fill them with newly-created
Citizens until you have +100 in both Food and Timber.
From this point, you have a few choices:
- Early Attack
- Short-term economic growth in order to make a huge early army
- Long-term economic growth
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Early Attack
This involves crushing your opponent and hopefully taking one or more cities from
him. While your economy won't be as good as in B or C, your opponent's economy will
be even worse shape after you capture cities from him with your military might!
- First off, you'll want to make sure your Scout is headed towards where you think
your opponent might be-usually this is across the map from you, but you'll never
really know the exact location. You want to find your opponent and better yet his
weakest spot-his second or third City once he places it. Once you find a good spot
to attack, you can divert your scout to looking for Ruins.
- While your Scout is exploring, research the first Military (red) tech at the Library.
- Build your first Barracks.
- Create five Hoplites and two Slingers. Send these towards the enemy City and continue
creating additional units as you get the resources - set the rally point of your
Barracks near the City so your units immediately move to the battlefield.
- Attack an enemy City with the Hoplites, keeping the Slingers nearby but out of range
of the City. The City will fire at your Hoplites if your opponent garrisons his
Citizens, but your Hoplites don't take very much damage from this and you will eventually
take his City. Your Slingers are there to attack any Bowmen that your opponent tries
to use to attack your Hoplites.
Beyond this point, you have the following options:
- Continue reinforcing the front lines with more troops; bring 1-2 Citizens to repair
the captured City and work at Farms or Woodcutter's Camps at that City.
- Advance to Classical Age, upgrade your military units and continue reinforcing the
front lines.
- Advance to Classical Age and concentrate on economy (while keeping the captured
city as long as possible) in an attempt to gain a crushing economic advantage.
- If you've captured the City but don't think you can hold it, start Razing the buildings
in it one by one to plunder the resources. You can only Raze one building at a time,
so start with buildings that your opponent will miss the most, such as a University
or Library.
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Short-term Economy (huge early army)
Use this strategy to form a large army in Classical or Medieval Age.
- Build a Market and create a Caravan once it's finished.
- When you have enough Food, advance to Classical Age at the Library.
- Construct a University at each City once you reach Classical. Spend whatever Wealth
you currently have on Scholars-it'll really help your Knowledge income.
- Research Commerce Level 2 at the Library and begin building more Woodcutter's Camps
and Farms to increase your gather rates towards your new +150 Commerce Limit. Since
Farm prices get a bit expensive at this point, you may want to stop once you have
Food and Timber both coming in around +130.
- Begin mining Metal by building a Mine at one or two nearby mountains.
- Research Military Level 1 and Military Level 2 as soon as you can afford it. Research
Science Level 2 at this point, too, if you have enough Wealth and Knowledge. Remember
that if you queue up Science researches before other researches, you'll be saving
money.
- Build two Barracks and a Stable.
- Upgrade to the Classical Age versions of the troop types you want to produce and
begin spending all of your resources creating military units. Remember that different
troop types cost different types of resources, so if you have a lot of one type
of resource look at the costs of the units to figure out where you should spend
the excess.
- When your army production slows slightly, construct a Siege Factory and create three
siege units. Unless you're the French, you'll have to wait until you reach Medieval
Age for a Supply Wagon, but don't forget to create one as soon as possible! Supply
wagons counteract the attrition your troops may suffer inside enemy borders, so
they are critical to most attacks past the Medieval Age.
- At this point, you have another choice. You can immediately attack or you can advance
to Medieval Age and upgrade the entire army that you've created. The advantages
to immediately attacking is that you give your opponent a little less time to prepare
defenses, and the advantage to Medieval Age is the availability of Supply Wagons
and the fact that your army is significantly stronger when upgraded.
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Long-term Economy (winning the endgame)
Use this strategy to have a powerful economy, able to construct powerful Gunpowder
Age armies.
- Construct a Market and create a Caravan once it's finished.
- When you have enough Food, advance to Classical Age at the Library. If you're feeling
extra daring, you could research an extra Science tech first to lower research costs
further and increase your Ruins bonuses.
- Construct a University at each City once you reach Classical. Spend whatever Wealth
you currently have on Scholars, it'll really help your Knowledge income.
- Research Science Level 2 if you haven't already, then research Commerce Level 2
at the Library and begin building more Woodcutter's Camps and Farms to increase
your gather rates towards your new +150 Commerce Limit.
- Research Civic Level 2 and construct your third City. You should definitely start
up two new Caravan routes at this point too to get Wealth coming in. You could also
consider building a Temple and researching Taxation.
- Construct another University at this new city.
- Construct one or two Mines and begin mining Metal. Note that since your strategy
is light on the military, you're actually able to sell some of this Metal off if
you want to get more Wealth. Even with three trade routes established this early,
your wealth income may not be enough for you.
- At this point, your economy should be moving along at a quick rate. Remember to
keep building new Scholars as the key to this strategy is to gain a huge Knowledge
advantage over your opponent.
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Resource basics
Rise of Nations has six resource types and each is important in a different way.
While Rise of Nations' interface makes harvesting each of these resources easy,
you'll still have plenty of strategic decisions to make. Here, we review each resource
to point out why you want it.
Food
The biggest reason food is important is Citizens. Nearly every other resource is
gained by assigning Citizens to work at a variety of jobs, so the more food you
have, the more citizens you make, the more resources you get! Food is also required,
in great quantity, for most early Age advances and all Civic research.
Timber
Timber is required for most buildings, for Commerce research, important University
upgrades like Literacy, and for constructing Farms. It's hard to convey how many
important and useful things you'll need Timber to do, but rest assured you'll want
to keep Timber coming in at the maximum Commerce Limit as often as you can throughout
the early-mid parts of the game.
Wealth
Wealth is extremely important for improving your Knowledge income by creating new
Scholars to fill your Universities. It is also used for Science research and for
certain military units. Wealth is also a little more flexible than the other resources,
since it can be used to buy goods at the Market, and you can sell other resources
to get Wealth as needed.
Knowledge
Simply put, the faster you can attain Knowledge, the faster your nation will advance.
Only Library techs require Knowledge, but Knowledge comes in slowly and the technologies
require a lot of it. Unlike other resources, you can't buy Knowledge at the Market
and you won't find any in the Ruins, so building Scholars early and often is essential
for technological advance.
Metal
Metal is primarily used for heavy military units, the ones you'll want to have lots
of. Consequently unless you have powerful allies willing to do all your fighting
for you, you'll probably want to ensure your territory contains multiple mountains
so that you can mine enough Metal for the military you need.
Oil
Oil becomes available in the Industrial Age and is a critical resource required
by nearly all of the powerful late-game units, including Nuclear Missiles and Air
units.
Beginnings of a Powerful Nation
by Brian Reynolds
Big Huge Games
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