Rise & Fall

[Mythos_Ruler]

I got Rise & Fall running on Windows 7. I took some screens of their ships and water. I was playing as the Egyptians. Despite the overall feel of the game being garbage, a few parts stand out favorably.

First the bad:

-- Base building and Buildings: Dumbed down considerably compared to Age of Empires. The building textures are excellent but the building designs and models themselves are not aesthetically pleasing one bit, nor are they realistic. There are no houses; you build a granary and this brings the pop limit up to 50% of max pop. You keep upgrading this one granary to bring the pop limit closer to max pop. There are no farms. It was very difficult to create a "city" because nothing really fit together or looked authentic.

-- Economy: Dumbed down considerably. No trading. No bartering resources. No hunting. No herding. Only two gather-able resources: Wood, Gold. One "dropsite": The "Settlement" which can be upgraded for dubious benefit. Gain another resource, Glory, by building statues. That's it.

-- Ships are hard to use. The ramming function is frustrating to use. I'm not entirely impressed with the idea of having units running around on deck. It feels micro heavy, but it's an interesting experiment.

-- Things are very unhistorical. The Persian heroes are Nebuchadnezzar and Sargon, for crying out loud. Ships look ridiculous, as you will see.

-- No random maps. Map selection is very limited.

-- I am confused regularly by the GUI at the bottom. It's not designed well and conveys information poorly, if at all.

-- Game is laggy and glitchy even on my quad core rig.

-- HORRIBLE MAP EDITOR. I AM CAPITALIZING THIS BECAUSE THE MAP EDITOR ACTUALLY ANGERS ME. Atlas is already much much better and 10x more usable than the RAF editor. My god.

-- The Campaigns are poorly designed and buggy.

The Good:

Most of the big good things have to do with heroes...

-- The Heroes level up with input from the player, kind of like researching Ages. Each level gives you access to Advisers in the Advisers screen, which are basically techs that you research with your "glory" resource. This is basically the tech tree of the game.

-- Hero Mode: You can eventually take control of your hero, RPG style, and slash through hordes of enemy soldiers. This is kind of satisfying. There are even commands you can make while in this mode to coordinate the actions of your soldiers with your hero. You can run onto ships, up ladders, etc. I just wish this was a little more developed. You'd need to design the game from the ground up for this kind of feature, so it's not something we could just retrofit into 0 A.D.

-- The "Hero Medallion" as I call it in the upper left corner of the screen. We something like this for our heroes.

-- The water is just gorgeous, as you will see.

-- Like how a tree flashes white momentarily when you task a slave to go chop it. We need that in 0 A.D., that visual feedback.

-- They have multiple real tree species like how we're doing it. Not sure why they added this bit of detail when everything else seems so devoid of detail.

-- I like how units can run around on walls, BUT it seems like to do this they had to do a lot of weird things with walls, not least of which they made them absolutely MASSIVE when compared to other buildings. Don't like this.

-- They build siege engines like they construct a building. They don't build siege engines in a "Siege Workshop" or Fortress like 0 A.D. does. I'd like to do this in 0 A.D. for siege towers.

-- Soliders spontaneously form battalions/formations.

-- Last but not least, the music in the game is very very good, and pretty much Hollywood-level quality. This makes sense since the composers actually work in Hollywood. The best music I have heard in a AAA RTS game, bar none. Admittedly the bar is set kind of low. I do want to praise Omri though--some of his stuff seriously approaches AAA quality work akin to Rise&Fall. This will be a high point for 0 A.D. as it is for Rise & Fall.

Things I would like to have seen:

-- Customizable heroes, like in Battle for Middle Earth 2. Example:

-- A more authentic unit rosters. Spartans are cool and all, but no Pezhetairoi or realistic Hypaspists? Once again, Hypaspists are generic swordsmen, le sigh. There is 300 years worth of Hellenic and Hellenistic soldier-types to choose from and they pick the most generic line-up imaginable. Same for Egyptians, Persians, and Romans.

-- More special things beyond big ships and hero mode. Should have made the control points more interesting.

-- True battalions like in Total War or Battle for Middle Earth 2.

So, here are my screenshots of the Egyptian boats:

I screenshotted this one right as it was destroyed. The dudes fly up in the air (kind of comical) and the ship breaks apart.

I do like the look of the first level of the "Settlement" dropsite. This is the "tent" on the right side here. It could be a good basis for the Huns' Civic Centre in 0 A.D. Part 2.

You'll also notice that they used selection circles that are exactly like our current ones. The one pixel selection. This makes the game look unpolished, IMHO. A lot about this game is unpolished, which is sad.

[L'ethu]

I have visit the Praetorians website and i find the game was quite historical inaccurate, if you guys want to play a true historical strategy games then you guys should download Europa Barbarorum and of course you will need Rome: Total War v 1.6 and Barbarian Invasion v 1.6.

Edited October 3, 2011 by L'ethu

[L'ethu]

If anyone could ever Impose Historical Accuracy Act to PC games especially RTS AND Strategy games, i will definitely support this act because these game publisher have defiled history and they need attitude adjustment.

[AuroN2]

You should take note that Rise and fall was a Rushed game, They were forced to Release it quickly before they could fully finish the games mechanics.

And on the idea of Ancient wars sparta, play The golden horde, it's a more complete version of AW S (or The fate of hellas)

[Enrique]

-Flora looks kind of simple

-Playercolor in some buildings deserves jail. Way to mess up how nice textures look in some of them.

Things I liked:

-Terrain texture blending looks good, despite the low texture variety on the screens.

-Units drowning on water?

-Splash effects of oars on water?

-Fire arrows look nice ^^

[Pedro Falcão]

That granary reminds me of AoE... I'm not sure if i really liked its color scheme, or if i like because of the good memories of AoE. The pavilions looks well textured and the light effects on water is very beautiful, but the fog of war is ugly and the blending of the water with the sand of the beach is too abrupt on some pics, as if the sand 1 inch away from the water was totally dry.

EDIT: About the heroes, i think i don't really care for hero customization besides the banner. And i don't care at all when in a campaign, i want to revive the paces of that hero, not create my own.

Edited November 20, 2012 by Pedro Falcão