Experts love the challenge of rushing their opponents, but newbies usually cannot handle such aggressive tactics. Rise of Nations tries to temper the rush by adding in design ideas that slow down play. For example, you cannot build your own towers in an enemy base. Your civilisation must expand to take advantage of the special rare resources spread across the map.

Each country may have valuable minerals or other resources. You can also buy resource cards which may give you a temporary advantage during a battle.

Invading enemy territory is serious business and your army will slowly suffer from attrition while in enemy territory. You can avoid this if you bring along supplies.

Each of the 18 civilisations has its own economic and technological characteristics. Militarily, each civilisation also gets quite a number of unique units.

Most real-time strategy games have a story-driven campaign mode that unfolds as you complete missions. Rise of Nations goes in a different direction and uses a Risk-like board game to give the game a strategic ebb and flow. From humble beginnings as one of 18 possible civilisations, you use the campaign mode to plan and execute a campaign to take over the world. Standing in the way of world domination are the other 17 nations trying to do the same thing.

Players looking to seriously improve their skills will find Rise of Nations very helpful. The interface is fantastic. One brilliant improvement is how the usual click-drag selection works. Normally, it selects all objects in your box, meaning with military units and villagers running around, villagers are often inadvertently selected. Rarely do you want to send off your poor peasants to war. Click-drag in Rise of Nations only selects military units.

The game raises the real-time strategy performance bar and puts some of the best ideas from the genre together in one delightful package.