Playing A Game Rise of Nations: Extended Edition PC

A high school friend of mine was way into real-time strategy games, and Rise of Nations was one of the few I actually enjoyed myself (along with StarCraft).

Fast forward a decade-and-change, and the Extended Edition is a potent shot of nostalgia. There's still a lot of joy to be had in managing your nation's resource incomes, researching your way through the ages of humanity, and upgrading infrastructure into the modern era -- especially when this results in out-teching your opponent and slaughtering their hoplites with machine guns.

Of course, even if RoN was ahead of its time for 2003, strategy games have come a ways since then. This user interface is considerably more meticulous than a modern Civ, with most parts of the "tech tree" only accessible from part-specific buildings; and convenience functions like "find an idle worker" are hidden in obscure hot-keys.

Not to mention, the unit pathfinding is kind-of terrible, frequently taking an absurd route or getting stuck in the city. (It's easy to forget how bad RTS pathfinding used to be, back before super-parallelized CPUs and PhD-level AI theses.)

If you're up for a bunch of micro-management, including repeated attempts to move units to the right places, Rise of Nations might still be a solid diversion. As for me, though, I lost the patience for unit-level micro-management some years ago.

Progress: Finished a tutorial campaign mission.