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This game is awesome!!! Opinions on these games vary, but that is what reviewing is all about. I think one reason for this is the type of game an individual prefers. In an RTS, there is typically a couple of different basic strategies: 1) The Rush Players are aggressive in the early game and attack enemies as soon as possible. 2) Defensive (or Turtling) Players concentrate on building a large economy, strong cities, and huge armies before engaging in battle. I personally am more of a fan of the latter strategy, but Rise of Nations seems to have been designed more for the rush player in mind. The fact that you can't build walls is one example of that. Don't get me wrong; I enjoyed RoN, but felt that the game could have been more satisfying for the defensive-minded players without sacrificing the game's flow. One particular good feature are the dynamic boundaries. For those who have not yet played RoN, this means that everyone has territories with distinctive borders which can be expanded as you develop near them. You also have advantages when fighting inside your own borders. You can eventually push your borders against the enemy's borders and even collapse theirs against them. Now, the two things I consider the worst features of the game: 1) Automatic morphing of land units into sea transports. The fact that you don't need to bulid any shipping ports and transport ships to get land units over the oceans is a major boo-boo. When you instruct a land unit to move to a location divided by water, the unit will automatically turn into a boat, float across the sea, and revert to its original unit. This pretty much kills the sea-based warfare in my opinion. True, the units, when crossing, can't defend themselves and they're weak to attacks, but in a large game with many players, it is often way too easy to have them slip across the ocean undetected. 2) Nuclear Weapons This feature just sucks. When you've worked so long building up a great army and people start launching nukes, you can bet the game is over. As if it weren't bad enough that they are so destructive, the game designers must have felt they needed to incorporate their own political agenda into the game with the "Armageddon" rule. Too much nuking will suddenly end the entire game an nobody wins. This makes it a complete waste of time. One final complaint is that it is far too easy for some players to advance far beyond others in age so you end up with soldiers with muskets battling helicopters and battleships. The strange part about this is that many times the weaker force will triumph. There needs to be a method to better balance the transition of ages. I would suggest that perhaps with the first player crossing into a new age that everyone else goes too, but the players who are doing better are rewarded some type of bonus on a sliding scale, as a reward. Perhaps extra resources or units. Other than those last few gripes, I would have scored Rise of Nations a five.