As a great fan of Civilization, I agree. But I have to admit I didn't really realize this before you mentioned it! Good catch.
Yes, it has formations, but you can't drag-to-formation the units, you can only right-click to the place where you want your units to be. In RoN, you can both select the formation AND then drag the units to align the formation a certain way. For example, if you have a simple row, you can point that row towards a certain area. Very useful to take out incoming enemy units with your ranged units.

I didn't know you could queue farms - but still, unnecessary game dynamic.

Well, at least in one of those three games you could, I thought it would have been already AoE 2... :)

Look, you won't find a bigger detractor of fast-paced games than me, trust me. I hate anything that tries to make me go fast-quic-do-tis-right-now. Shooters, action, that's not for me. But so how do I play RoN and have no problem: I set the speed to the lowest setting, and pause the game often. That's it. A 90 minute game may last a whole day, or several sittings, but RoN makes it super-easy to give commands while paused. It's one of the best, if not the best, RTS games for in-pause control. I suspect the problem may be that classic RTS gamesrs LIKE the fast pacing (usually) and cannot fathom playing RoN the way I play it- with a slow, single-minded and deliberate strategic planning. I come from Civilization, as you implicitly and very correctly noted, so that's how I roll.

Kohan totally sounds like something I'd enjoy - thanks for the tip!
If I do end up liking it, you have a beer on me next time you come to Helsinki.

Happy to help. I'm also playing the first of the Hegemony games and they might be worth a look. The strategic macro is more around logistics and getting your armies where they need to be on time and supplied. Micro is still present if you want to limit losses, because manpower attrition is a pain - but the formations work nicely, despite being very constrained by terrain. Anyway, might be a stepping stone of sorts towards even different types of RTS.

I think similarly. I hate RTS games that force me to play "speedily", ie. I am unable to slow the gamespeed down if things get too hectic. That's one of the things I liked about RoN, you really could slow it down to your liking and that was often needed as things sometimes got VERY hectic when two or three of your cities were attacked simultaneously. To me RTS games are not about how fast you are with your mouse and keyboard, and fortunately RoN was not about that.

But still, that 90 minute time limit just killed it for me. I dislike such time limits in general because I can't really tell beforehand if I still have enough time to reach my objectives or not, until I run out of time. Then I have to revert to some very old save game, or usually even restart the whole mission from a scratch because obviously I was just too slow and inefficient throughout the whole mission.

I just couldn't apparently play RoN efficiently enough to conquer the enemy capitals before that timer ran out, no matter how hard I tried. It made it even worse that I felt that I was starting to hold my own and pushing the enemies back town by town... but just not fast enough. I would have won if there wasn't that darn time limit.

Another thing that I didn't kinda like about RoN (compared to AoE games) was that you don't really destroy enemy cities, you have to conquer them. That always means yet another place on the map that you have to try to defend from the enemy. I guess I just like the traditional "cleanse the map of enemy presence" more.

Also as far as I could tell, RoN didn't let you create new cities where you wanted, but those places for cities were preset (you just conquer them). Some of the more memorable AoE missions were those where I tried to find a safe place for my town, even leaving my original city because I just couldn't get the defenses up fast enough before the enemy rushed in. So I just create a new city on a more safe place while enemy is busy destroying my old city.

I guess I am the other way around. My first RTS was Dune 2, then Warcraft, Warcraft 2, Starcraft, C&C games, AoE series etc. etc... That's the direction from where I am coming.

I've tried the couple first Civ games but I always became quite overwhelmed, as in "Ok there's the map ahead of me. What the heck am I supposed to do?". It just seems those traditional RTS games were better leading you to the game step by step, introducing you to new units and tactics with subsequent missions, Civ games (as well as Master of Orion, Master of Magic, UFO Enemy Unknown etc.) were more like throwing me to the deep end of the pool and telling me to swim, without teaching me how.

Just a quick reply (I promised my son we'll watch Mr. Peabody tonight): you seem to remember wrongly - in RoN you built your cities wherever the heck you wanted. You just had to build the town hall within the borders of your empire. And once you built that townhall, the borders expanded around it.

I've always wanted to try Rise of Nations. Is it similar to Empire Earth or Age of Empires?

The wishlist for it has over 4,700 votes. GOG really needs to sign up with Microsoft!

The difference being that Empire Earth is actually fun. :P

So where did RoN go wrong? Did it not have the futuristic aspect like Empire Earth?

I just thought it was boring but I should stress I am in the extreme minority here.

I wouldn't say boring. But if you played Empire Earth this was nothing new. I preffer the Rise of Legends with its Steampunky and magical setting.

Steampunk games are pretty cool, but they're relatively rare. The only steampunk game I know of on GOG is "Sir, You are being Hunted."

To the op. Why don't you try Cossacks? You don't have to babysit units much if you set up the right unit behaviour (stances) and you have unit formations.

Oh man! Good game. HAAAAAAAAAARD GAME! :P