With the upcoming Rise of Nations, it looks like developer Big Huge Games will live up to its name. Based on a recent beta we got to play, Rise of Nations looks like it will be an RTS on steroids. For one thing, this whirlwind tour of history will be brimming with eight historical ages, eighteen nations, over two-hundred unit types, six major resource types, and a towering tech tree. But more than the raw numbers of features, it's the gameplay innovations that should make Rise of Nations fresh and interesting.

In many ways, Rise of Nations immediately calls to mind RTS games like the Age of Empires series, Cossacks, and Empire Earth. In Rise of Nations you'll rapidly advance through abstracted historical ages by sending citizens off to do work, researching upgrades, and cranking out diverse military units for conquest. Much of the basic gameplay should feel immediately familiar to any RTS veteran.

While Rise of Nations shares a lot with other historical RTS games, it offers some unusual features that should set it apart. The guiding hand behind Rise of Nations is Brian Reynolds, lead designer of the classic turn-based strategy games Civilization 2 and Alpha Centauri. With Rise of Nations, Reynolds and his team are injecting some unusual elements of grand strategy into the traditional RTS formula. As a general concept, this merger isn't new: games like Shogun: Total War and Kohan: Immortal Sovereigns have already blended traditional RTS action with larger strategy in entertaining ways.

Nonetheless, Rise of Nations will offer its own unique take on this fusion of strategy subgenres, most notably through the focus on cities and national borders. Cities in Rise of Nations won't just be any old conglomeration of individual buildings, as in most RTS games. Rather, they'll be unique, integrated objects in their own right that appear visually as a collection of little buildings.

Each city will provide you with a base income of certain resources, allow you to erect civilian buildings (like mines and libraries) nearby, and let you create citizens to gather additional resources. Each city you possess will extend your national boundaries, shown by colored lines on the map. You'll only be able to setup buildings within your own borders, and your units will suffer attrition damage as they spend time within enemy borders. So, if you want to gain more wealth, enjoy civilization and unit upgrades, or simply win through having the most territory, you'll need to keep expanding your borders by building new cities, upgrading them, and establishing trade routes between them. This puts an unusual focus, by RTS standards, on construction as something more than just a means to a military end.

Of course, you'll also be able to expand your empire by sacking and assimilating enemy cities, which will then grant you the use of any non-military buildings next to them. At the same time, capturing an enemy city will also grant you access to new local resources, like timber from nearby forests or stone from surrounding mountains. In other words, strategy in Rise of Nations should remind you of real-world conquests, where states build up armies and send them across borders en masse in order to secure vital resources for expansion. You'll still be able to perform the sort of hit-and-run skirmishes you find in games like Age of Empires II. But, they'll be more costly to undertake as your units suffer attrition in enemy territory and roam ever further from friendly barracks that could provide reinforcements.

An early city.
Another interesting twist in Rise of Nations is the way resources are handled. At least initially, each farm can only be worked by a single citizen, but the number of citizens that can work at a woodcutter's camp, for example, will depend on the size of the forest it's adjacent to. This sort of resource center remains strategically important throughout a match because it can never be depleted, only worked more and more efficiently. Unfortunately, as you haul in an increasing amount of resources, you'll quickly run up against a commerce cap that restricts your ability to process newly gathered materials. If you don't want your grain to just sit there and rot, you'll have to perform some research at a special library in order to raise the commerce cap. Interestingly enough, research will require its own special resource: knowledge accumulated by scholars at a university.