The Claw...

Just an idea that came to me the other day. I'd be surprised if it hadn't been done before.

I'll admit that I'm a big fan of Real Time Strategy (RTS) games like Age of Empires and Warcraft. Something about controlling a tiny empire and watching it grow and flourish on the computer screen appeals to me. What's even more fun is playing it with a friend, something that most products go out of their way to make possible. I have two computers linked together on my home network and would enjoy playing Age of Mythology in tandem with my son on the other computer. Sadly, the other computer is a bit slower and sometimes the audio card decides to freeze up the system entirely and I have to wait for it to re-establish itself. Fortunately this doesn't happen too often and when it does, Age of Mythology is content to wait as long as I want to wait for the other computer.

Recently we've begun playing Rise of Nations, which has much to offer it, particularly the fact that it can easily run on the older computer and we can have the same fun we had with Age of Mythology. Rise of Nations has a broader span than most other RTS games in that it starts in the Ancient age and takes you all the way to the present day (and a bit beyond). Not content to have the simple "food, wood and gold" model of resource collection, Rise of Nations also makes you gather oil, knowledge and wealth. At first I thought that keeping track of all of these resources would be a bit daunting, but I fell into the swing of things pretty quickly. Having a technological advantage over your opponent is pretty satisfying, particularly when you can send bombers over a city that has yet to discover the internal combustion engine. Oh, and there are nukes as well.

I have one complaint with Rise of Nations and it's a big one. While Age of Mythology lets the user decide how long to wait for an unresponsive computer, Rise of Nations gets very impatient. Ironically, the time limit that the game sets for the slower computer to reestablish itself is a fraction of a second shorter than the time our laggy computer needs to get back in sync. I've tried to find a fix for this online and have had no luck thus far. It would be nice to find a way to adjust the settings to give ourselves a little more time for the computer to catch up. Ultimately, I should try and figure out why that old computer is acting up like it is, but I haven't had much luck troubleshooting that either. Any suggestions?