Famed science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke once noted that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. And in Rise of Nations: Rise of Legends, the next big real-time-strategy game from Microsoft and developer Big Huge Games, that's certainly going to be the case. Ever since Rise of Legends was announced last year, we've known that it would feature an epic struggle between at least two nations, one based on technology and the other based on magic. However, Big Huge has kept the game's third and final nation under wraps--at least, until now. We were able to visit Big Huge Games' Maryland office this week to learn about the third race, as well as play the game and get our best look yet at what's quite possibly going to be one of the best strategy games of the year.

　　If you're familiar with the original Rise of Nations, then Rise of Legends may surprise you a bit. This game isn't a sequel or an expansion pack to GameSpot's 2003 PC Game of the Year. Instead, it's a brand-new game that goes in a completely different direction than the original. Whereas Rise of Nations featured more than a dozen historical nations--such as the United States, England, Germany, and Japan--Rise of Legends features a mere three fantasy races. And this isn't your typical, fantasy-based game. Having felt like gamers had seen far too much of elves, dwarves, orcs, and their assorted ilk in dozens of other games, Big Huge Games created an original fantasy universe with three unique nations, two of which--Alin and Vinci--have been publicly known for months. Alin is a magical nation heavily inspired by the mythology surrounding the Arabian Nights universe, so you'll play with genies, dragons, half-man, half-scorpion units, and more. Alin cities are dreamy, elegant structures, full of tall, slender towers topped by golden domes. (And, yes, it was previously "Alim," but Microsoft and Big Huge Games changed the name due to a translation issue.) Meanwhile, Vinci could be considered Alin's opposite. This technology-based nation is inspired by the drawings of Leonardo da Vinci, and they rely more on steam-powered war machines, corkscrew-bladed flying units, and giant, clockwork men.

　　Meet the Cuotl, the newly revealed third nation in Rise of Legends.

　　With magic and technology battling in the form of Alin and Vinci, it's appropriate that the recently revealed nation, Cuotl, is home to an alien race with technology so advanced that it looks like magic. In a surprise plot development, Big Huge Games revealed that the game takes place on a world where a Cuotl spaceship crashed to the surface ages ago. Only a handful of Cuotl survived the crash, and they set themselves up as gods, subjugating small tribes on a remote continent. Pieces of the starship landed all over the surface of the world, which inadvertently ignited the war between magic and technology that has lasted generations. In Rise of Legends' three-campaign story arc, you'll take control of the hero Giacomo as you see the conflict through to its bitter end.

　　Cuotl's design is heavily influenced by Mayan architecture, which is fitting since they also inhabit a lush, jungle continent. From the perspective of the other nations, Cuotl possess amazing abilities. Cuotl buildings "materialize" out of thin air, and they're protected by energy shields. Meanwhile, Cuotl weaponry is energy based, and they possess some spectacular special weapons, such as the star bolt--a devastating beam fired from an orbital platform. With all of these advantages, you'd think that Cuotl would be unstoppable, but that's not the case in Rise of Legends. First of all, while the individual surviving Cuotl have godlike powers, there are only a handful of them. So they must rely upon subjugated races--such as humans--to fill out their armies, and that puts them on relatively even terms with Alin and Vinci. And while Cuotl units can be very powerful, they're also very expensive to build compared to Alin and Vinci units, so the balance between the nations hinges upon having a few high-quality units versus having a higher quantity of weaker units. Playing as Cuotl will be something of a challenge, as well, since they differ from Alin and Vinci in many subtle ways. For example, many Cuotl powers use up resources that would otherwise be used for construction, so you must balance your building needs with combat, or else a Cuotl unit may run out of power in the middle of a big battle. "I would consider them the most advanced race for the most advanced player," explained producer Tim Train.

　　We had the chance to play as all three nations in several games, and it's apparent to us that Rise of Legends is an intricately balanced game. It's also an incredibly fast-paced one, especially for a real-time-strategy game. Train explained that one of the problems of most real-time-strategy games is that there's nothing interesting going on in the first 5 or 10 minutes of play. You're usually gathering resources to construct buildings and then gathering more resources to construct units. It's such a dull, repetitive task that there's very little thinking required. "What is the first point where the first meaningful decision is made?" he asked. In Rise of Legends, he explained, you'll make your first key decisions within 45 seconds.

　　Your first task in a game of Rise of Legends will be to begin expanding your city by selecting one of four different types of districts to attach to it. Your district choice will have an immediate impact on what you can do--for example, a military district will raise your population cap so you can start churning out units, and a merchant district will let you create a caravan to generate gold and begin "converting" neutral cities to your cause (in the case of Alin and Vinci). While those districts are under construction, you can assign a few miners to your nearest timonium mine, construct barracks (which are independent of cities), and begin seeking out and taking over neutral cities and outposts, either through force or through bribery. All of this action is within the first few minutes of a game. Within 10 minutes, we had taken over a sizable portion of the map and fought numerous border skirmishes with hostile neighbors. At this point, it's a race to seize cities and territories in order to support larger armies, research new unit technologies, and bring powerful superunits to the fray--such as heroes, dragons, and siege weapons. The pace is so fast that we played a few games that were over within 20 minutes.

　　Cuotl have technology so advanced, it's almost magical. They also have a cool, Mayan theme.

　　It's hard to describe just how well thought out the gameplay is. Everything is tied together and balanced so as to not upset the game. In one match, for instance, we took control of several barbarian tribes in the middle of the map. By doing so, we not only extended our nation's borders but also gained the ability to generate an unlimited horde of barbarian units, which were useful in swamping the enemy with numbers. The problem we encountered, though, was that having a ton of barbarians ate up most of our unit cap, which prevented us from building more powerful superunits. This, in turn, forced us to build military districts at our capital to raise the cap, but when we ran out of space, we had to expand to other cities. These outlying cities are naturally weaker, and before we realized it, we were hard pressed on two different fronts, with armies racing to lift the siege from one city after another. The advantage of having unlimited barbarians quickly became a liability because we hadn't planned carefully enough. And that, in a nutshell, is why this seems like such a promising strategy game. The decisions that you make have the potential of paying off spectacularly or haunting you further down the road.

Best Multiplayer Interface Ever?

　　Forget about knights and archers; just get a giant, fire-breathing salamander.

　　To that extent, Jeff and the team rewrote the entire networking layer used in Rise of Legends to make it much more stable, as well as far more dependable. Now, the entire game uses a single network port so as to make it a lot easier to negotiate through firewalls, which was a big issue with Rise of Nations. But making the multiplayer more dependable was just one of the team's goals. Big Huge Games went about creating an impressive new user interface to make looking for multiplayer games incredibly simple. In fact, it's safe to say that no other game on the market features such a unique interface. The irony is that Big Huge Games found inspiration for its innovative design in something that most of us look at and use every day: Microsoft's Windows OS.

　　It seems fitting that Big Huge Games has such a close relationship with Microsoft, since the new multiplayer interface in Rise of Legends is based primarily on the user login screen found in Windows XP, with its emphasis on icons and a simple layout. When you play a multiplayer game in Rise of Legends, you'll be identified through your user account, so you "log in" to multiplayer in the same way you would select a user account in Windows. Once logged in, you're presented with a very clean display that presents you with three icons--one to launch directly into an online game against an available opponent, one to play a game with a friend, and one to create a custom, online game.

　　There's going to be a lot of automation built into the multiplayer game, since Big Huge Games thinks that traditional multiplayer interfaces tend to confuse new players with too many options. So, if you click on the automatch option, you'll be asked if you want to play in a one-versus-one, two-versus-two, or three-versus-three match. Once you've made your choice, the game will automatically find an available game that fits your criteria, and then you're all set to start playing. Maps will be selected based on a master list kept on Big Huge Games' server, and it will be updated constantly based on feedback and community trends. If this process seems suspiciously like matchmaking in some Xbox Live games, that's no accident, since the idea is to get you into the game with just a few clicks. That's not to say that power users won't be able to customize their own games, though, because that's what the custom game option is for. But since the average user won't use those, Big Huge Games wants to make the experience as smooth and seamless as possible.

　　Rise of Legends will keep persistent track of your record, and you gain experience for winning matches and lose experience for, well, losing matches. Gain enough experience, and you'll level up, which will unlock more icons that you can choose to set as your user portrait. Also, your ranking will help you find more competitive games, which is done by using the matchmaking algorithms developed for Xbox Live (once again, it's nice to have a close relationship with Microsoft). The multiplayer interface will have other cool features, such as a community browser with a friends list, a robust search system to help you find your friends, and a built-in instant messaging system, which also lets you launch directly into a game from a chat window. Even the chat system is well thought out. Instead of featuring one huge, confusing chat room with a dozen different conversations going on at once, it will feature individual rooms dedicated to technical support, clan recruitment, general chat, and strategies and tactics. You can even create your own custom chat room, and it will appear on the list.

　　It looks great and it plays great, but you must wait. Rise of Legends will ship this spring.

　　The multiplayer sessions that we were able to play were tougher than the single-player game, and that resulted in some wild matches. Don't get us wrong, the artificial intelligence looks to be pretty darn tough (it whipped us at the default skill level), but nothing can replace the treachery and cunning of a fellow human being. Designer Brian Reynolds didn't help things any by giving each side pointers, so every time we researched a major new technology or recruited a powerful new unit, the other side quickly developed a counter. Multiplayer can be a seesaw, tug-of-war battle for momentum, and you can go from the cusp of victory to defeat in a matter of minutes if you're not careful. Momentum will swing with national powers, such as the Cuotl star bolt power we mentioned earlier, as well as with "dominance" powers, which can be used by the player who has the most developed advantage in a specific field of research, like military or economic advancement. The military dominance power, for instance, lets you instantly force some of your enemies' troops to betray them and start serving you, instantly turning an even fight into an advantage in your favor.

　　Visually, the game looks just as good as the screenshots indicate, and it's an impressive achievement. Train also said that they're keen on keeping the game's performance scalable, as strategy gamers tend to have older machines compared to action gamers. The game looks so good that Big Huge Games began receiving licensing requests when it showed it off at last year's E3. Sensing an opportunity, Big Huge spent time working on its development tools, and it now plans on licensing the Big Huge Engine to other developers. For regular gamers, the good news is that Big Huge plans on shipping the game with a very robust scenario editor. In fact, it's the same editor that the designers used to create the maps, and it's powerful enough that players can create whole missions, complete with scripted sequences, custom sounds, and more.

　　At this point, Rise of Legends reminds us of so many classic strategy games. It has the fast pace and strategic depth of Rise of Nations, but it also reminds us of Starcraft with its three distinct and unique fantasy factions. At the same time, Rise of Legends doesn't feel like any old fantasy game, thanks to its imaginative and colorful new setting. And it looks like the game has the best of both worlds. It has excellent single-player gameplay that also translates into a fast-paced and ruthless multiplayer experience. Include the gorgeous 3D graphics engine and you have the makings for one of the best PC games of the year. Alas, we'll have to wait a bit longer for it. Rise of Legends is now entering the testing and balancing phase of development, but both Microsoft and Big Huge say that the game will ship this spring.