Rise and Rule of Ancient Empires, designed and developed by Impressions, a division of Sierra, is a classic explore, expand, and exterminate strategy game based on cultures that existed from 5000BC to 500AD. You may play as ruler of the Greeks, Indians, Egyptians, Mesopotamians, Celts, or Chinese, each having slight differences relating to gameplay. Play against your friends (or enemies) on modem or network; if none of them are up for it, up to three computer players await your challenge. You may explore on a pre-made world map or a random small, medium, or large map. Each civilization begins with a settler unit and knowledge of only the immediately surrounding area.
Cities are founded with a settler unit in mountain, desert, forest, plain, or rough terrain. Another terrain type, water, also exists but this is not a recommended spot to begin a city! Watch out, because when cities are automatically named, they sometimes duplicate already existing city names - I had three during one game before I caught the error, so you may want to just name your own. Buildings present at the onset of city creation are a city hall and an academy. Eventually a market, workshop, barracks, library, temple, blacksmith, city walls, and wonders will help make your cities powerful.
Three buildings, the academy, warehouse, and city hall, allow you to manage your city, in addition to providing specific information. Construction of the academy leads to the creation of philosophers. They provide the ability to build roads, cultivate land, and establish diplomatic relations. Philosophers spread knowledge between your own cities or may sway opponent cities to reveal their own precious knowledge. New cities are greatly aided by philosophers as the city's knowledge levels can advance quickly. The academy also provides the ability to manage, via slider bar, the priority of each area of knowledge including general, sage, engineering, medical, and martial.
The warehouse, quite obviously, will store food and resources, which can then be exported or used to support temporary shortages. Merchants can be instructed not to take exports or imports from cities. They will also increase the affinity or respect for the player trading with it.
Despite what they say, you can beat city hall. In fact, your submissive city hall will provide you with valuable information about the city's affinity toward you, as well as about your opponents (if other players have made contact with the city). This is important, because if affinity and morale are low enough, cities can go "renegade," rejecting you as their leader, affiliating themselves with no one. If fortune smiles not upon you, they may even choose to be annexed by another empire! In order to avoid this, you can determine why your people are upset with you by examining icons representing , for example, "not enough food eaten."
Buildings can be "upgraded" two times up to a level 3 building, with each upgrade representing additional power and capabilities for the city. Upgrades are accomplished by researching various areas of knowledge: general, sage, engineering, medical, and martial and, finally, the physical construction of the building. While each city is responsible for its own acquisition of knowledge, philosophers can be used to spread knowledge throughout the empire as they travel from city to city. This type of research is more realistic than other games where research efforts are directed into a single discovery and then, once discovered, the entire civilization instantly reaps the benefits.
Buildings and knowledge are required to acquire the ability to produce various troops. Units are generally of four different types: infantry, cavalry, missile (bows, catapults), and galley. There are also a few special units, including elephants, desert raiders, and mounted bowmen. Each unit is rated by morale, health, and quality. Morale is affected by fortunes in battle, the empire's condition, recent battle losses, and the unit's health. Health is affected mainly by food supply and battle losses. Quality is affected by a city's level of advancement and battle experience. Additionally, when units and cities are exposed to each other, they affect each others' health and morale.
It's hard to determine what, if any, advantages, disadvantages, or special abilities various units have. There are no hard numbers on attack strength, defense strength, fortification effects, terrain effects, and how exactly health, morale, and unit quality affect the final battle results. You have to play the game numerous times before you get a mental picture of some sort of comparison chart. Because of this, it is difficult to figure out the best battleplan and production plan for your empire. I'm sure all of this will be conveniently supplied in a strategy guide - for a price.
Movement is accomplished by using explore, go to, auto-send, patrol, and the one-space-at-a-time method. Terrain affects movement and desert, water, and mountain terrain have different danger values, meaning your units are more at risk from starvation or random calamities. There are quite a variety of calamities a unit may suffer: lightning, tornado, grassfire, starvation, wolf attack, sandstorm, mud slide, tidal wave, stormy seas, exposure, sea monster, heavy seas, and other unfortunate acts of God.
Auto-explore is a helpful feature that will wipe away the blackness that surrounds you. As you are exploring, however, there is no notification when an enemy unit is cited. Making matters worse, units do not stop when enemy units are spotted and will absent-mindedly stroll by. Auto-send is a way of ordering a city to send all new units to a specified area. This is quite helpful for games that have established front lines or enemy cities that are far away.
Wargamers will hate the oversimplification of combat (accurately described as "highly abstract" in the manual), and the lack of information such as attack and defense values, no zones of control, no fog of war, and the fact you don't know how much defense is boosted when a unit is fortified. Instead, the manual makes vague generalizations like "limited," "advantage," "greater chance," and "increases." You can see units in explored territory no matter where your spotting units are. Combat isn't very satisfying; it's short and to the point , occurring during a puff of smoke and a single sword clash sound. Combatants are either both eliminated, both preserved (in whole or part), or only one will remain. If you want to know how much damage your units are taking, you'll have to wait for all the turn's combat to finish , then go back and click on each unit.
Gameplay can be slow at times; you have to check cities continually to insure optimal allocation of resources, as do any human opponents you play against. Games can last many hours and probably will last more than a single sitting (unless your butt has more stamina than mine). Computer players take their turns quickly at the beginning, but take considerable time later in the game, when many units and cities populate the board. Getting your butt kicked or kicking butt? Want to change the AI levels? Sorry, no can do; it's all the same, one AI fits all. There is no auto-build; instead there's an autopilot, which seems to go too far by allowing the computer to take total control, doing your turn for you. This can help new players see the way a game can develop, but other than that it seems pretty useless, because who wants to let the computer control his empire? Every so often, there are reports on civilizations in "your" known world: known number of cities, known number of armies, known population, etc.
One of the reasons people may purchase this game is for its modem and network capability. Keep in mind that as of this writing, modem/network play is available only for Win95 users. A patch to allow Win 3.1 users to play by modem and network has been announced and should be ready when you read this. Let's start with the initial connection. Buried in the readme file is a warning to set the error correction OFF in the modem control panel. Once this is discovered - probably the hard way - you have to remember to return it back to its original setting after playing. It's hard to tell if you are in waiting for call mode, because there is no on-screen message confirming this. Additionally, it's not clear when you and your opponent are ready to move on to the game - unless readme file is carefully read. Once you are in the game and want to send messages to your opponent, you have to backspace over your previous message in the chat box to enter something new. This chat box is too small to send a detailed message so you'll find yourself sending it in several parts. If you are typing a message and an animation appears, your message is destroyed, sometimes causing a strange, disorienting palette change for the turn. When a message has been sent to you, you will hear a trumpet sound and the "face icon" of the sending person becomes outlined. You may, however, experience moments when you hear the trumpet but no see no outline, forcing you to click on face icons to see who sent it to you. When you need to save a multiplayer game, you are warned (in the readme file) not to have explore and auto-pilot on. You are also told to avoid saving the game during your opponent's turn because this could lock up computer. I also experienced problems in loading an auto-saved multiplayer game: the game could not locate the proper files. These are all issues and procedures modem players should not have to deal with.
Videos depicting your discoveries and city enlargements are well done but, as in most games, you'll skip these after seeing them a few times. Music is very good, and I've seldom been tempted to turn it off; it provides a suitable, non-annoying background. If you wish, however, you can play your own CDs while gaming. The game's 256 color SVGA graphics are well done. The city graphics, depicting buildings that reflect cultural differences in architectural engineering, are very attractive and detailed. Terrain upon which the city has been built is reflected in the background from majestic mountains to barren deserts. Icons representing cities and units are also good, and they, too, look culturally different from other players.
Rise and Rule has some interesting slants to the standard explore, expand, and exterminate strategy game. Its use of terrain and city populace affinity, cultural research and unit differences, and the fact that cities must be in a particular terrain to produce certain special units all add something special to the game. There is a general overall feeling, however, that something is missing. The more I thought of what was necessary to spice it up, the more it would have to involve copying other games - namely, Civilization II. The modem play, an appreciated addition, is somewhat interesting, marred by some not-so-intuitive procedures and inconveniences. A patch that addresses these issues may provide extra life to these Ancient Empires but for now, Sierra's 30 day return guarantee may be the safety net you need to try this one out.
