SE - I also noticed that there was a kind of evolution of a civilization as the games goes on. The country starts off with horses but eventually they turn into tanks, much like Civilization 2.
Tim - Well, because it's a game about human history, we wanted to let the player go to the modern era where you get to play with all of the fun toys like missile launchers and flamethrowers and such. The buildings will automatically upgrade over time. And you can build bombers and also fighters to help defend them, and, of course, it wouldn't be a modern game, if we didn't have nuclear weapons which flatten everything in site.
SE - What are the main resources in the game?
Tim - There are six main resources in the game listed on the side of the screen. There's your standard food and wood, then there metal, there's also oil, wealth, and knowledge. Each of these is gathered in a very distinct way we've tried to avoid the Different-Kinds-of-Guys-Banging-on-Different-Piles-of-Stuff gameplay. So food comes from farms, woods comes from gathering at trees, metal around mines, oil from oil wells (that show up later in the game). Wealth can only be gained by creating caravan routes between your nations. There's no "mining" of gold. And then knowledge is gained by creating scholars at your university.
One of the things is that resources never deplete in Rise of Nations. So if you have a woodcutter chopping at trees, the trees will never disappear. You won't have to migrate your wood cutters to another forest or anything like that. What we're trying to do is reduce the micromanagement and make the player focus more on the strategic decisions and not so much on the Oh-Dang-Now-I-Have-To-Move-My-Woodcutter kind of problem.
SE - And what's the supply limit per nation?
Tim - Supply limit is two hundred.
SE - Is there a limit to the number of buildings that can be built around a city?
Tim - You can only build one building of each economic type per city except for barns. But there's no "physical" limit.
SE - What's the maximum amount of players that can play in a multiplayer game?
Tim - Eight players can play at one time.
SE - And will Rise of Nations have like a Battle.net type of service provided to it's players where Big Huge hosts a server that connects players to one another?
Tim - We're running our multiplayer through GameSpy so it's in game match making run through the GameSpy service.
SE - A lot of other RTS's now have incorporated the ability to save replays of games. Does Rise of Nations include this as well?
Tim - Yep. You can save replays in the game and you can save the game at any point.
And one thing that I wanted to mention is that our solo campaign game is very different from standard RTS's. Most RTS games rely on a linear, scripted, narrated campaign and so once you've played it through there's not a lot of reason to go back and play through it again. With Rise of Nations, this is actually where our turn-based roots with Civilization and Alpha Centauri come in. Basically, a turn based mode where you just start off with one army and one country and you pick where you want to attack based on what types of things you can gain from that province, whether it be a supply center or more resources, and then after you choose a province to attack, you go into the "real-time" mode where you fight a battle that has different victory conditions or might just be a straight up Conquer-the-Enemy-As-Quickly-As-Possible mission.
And over the course of the game, you try to take over the entire map. Certain territories are easier to take than others. You have to save up a lot of strength for attacking a capital. Attacking a capital will allow you to capture all major territories associated with that capital. And your goal by the time the end of history comes is to conquer the entire world.
SE - Tim, thank you so much for your time, we really appreciate it.
