Each nation could be played across any of the ages, even in times where they wouldn’t have existed with the game providing lore-friendly units that make sense to what a civilization would have if they had existed at the time.
Players are invited to take on one of eighteen civilizations across eight ages of history in Rise of Nations creating a massive multitude of options for situational and conditional games. It hosted city, population, and resource management of games like Civilization and combines it with turn-based strategy of games like Risk and real-time strategy of a Total War game. In 2003, Rise of Nations was a grand amalgam of many things that came before. To say Brian Reynolds took something away from his time at MicroProse, working on Civilization II and Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri would be a gross understatement epitomized by the existence of this game.
