Rise of Nations continued

I hit enter to start a new paragraph, and since I was using Hello to upload the image, it went ahead and sent that as a blog entry. Oops.

So, as I was saying, I played the other night, but I had made the victory conditions much more difficult. You couldn't win by building Wonders (which I often do versus the computer AI), you couldn't win by capturing territory, and even the winning by capturing the capital was turned off. That meant the only way to win was to capture all cities.

During the game, you also advance through the ages, from Ancient to Classical and a bunch of others, then finally the Information Age. I'd sat down to play a "quick" game, meaning I didn't expect to play for more than an hour or so. If you look back at the image in the last post, though, you may be able to make out the individual time markers on the graph. The red line is my territory, the blue line is the computer AI's territory. The vertical bars are each a half hour. That's right, I finished the game, thinking, "Wow, that must have take an hour and a half!" Then the time appeared on the screen. Four hours, fifty-two minutes! It was 2:30am, and I had no idea.

Another clue to the length of the game is that the circles on each line in the graph indicate progress to a new age. Usually, these are spread out through the game. Players may not even have one for every age if the game ends before everyone's in the Information Age. On this graph, though, both players have all the circles, but they are way over on the left side of the graph. I doubt this is the kind of timeframe the game designers intended.

Talk about addictive. I have to be much more careful. That's an even worse time sink than, say, checking email. However, I think I'll go play a quick game right now....