Rulers of Nations Reviews

Got this off of Amazon in 2012. Then got it on Steam. The game starts out with a great opening cut scene and than you start the game. Wonderful map, tons of information, lots of choices. In fact, maybe too realistic, as everything you do, from minor adjustments to the budget to major dealing with other nations can have both short-term, and long term results. The people may love you, but the governing party or the army may decide to shoot you. Or the other way around. And it could be for the tiniest of things you did weeks ago in game time and can't even remember. A lot of the cause and effect is invisible, as like in real life, what you do may cause changes and events that you didn't even know were linked. A player can easily become overwhelmed and upset on how problems can pile up. And the game is SLOW - when you go 30 real seconds for a game day, it could take half the day to play a year! You start to notice little things, like many of the people look alike, have the same voice, and meetings with most of your own people don't really seem to do anything. Some leaders get mad at you for just offering them wine. Japan refused to deal with me half the time and I had, for a few weeks, 100% approval rating. You would think if all my people loved me the other nations would be more willing to deal with me. Wars are almost impossible to win and sometimes get way out of control. As China I invaded Taiwan. It took forever to get the military moving - the AI is stupid and when you have to do it all YOURSELF it can get tiring. By the time the conflict between us was over half the globe was still declaring war on the rest of the globe - it was like their reaction was delayed by a game week or something. There is also the fact that your people may wish you to help Russia against Poland or help France against the US of A. HOW?!?! If you China or India or a nation in the middle of nowhere, that's just unrealistic. Your armies and ships will end up pissing off other nations as they rush through their borders. A land war in Europe between Poland and Germany drew in Russia, Spain, England, France, Turkey, Iran and just kept spreading. The military units kept crossing borders to get at the enemy and triggered more fighting. Fighting broke out in South America between some of the European controlled islands and even Japan entered the war. Even while some people want you to join your allies others will get upset if you move one unit! Even the use of atomic weapons will get strange results. The UN once backed me up after I used it against Taiwan! What?!?! The end result is you'll very likely be shot or replaced within a year of game time. Many people don't last a month! And that makes for bad replay value too. I have to say I never had it crash but sometimes the words are replaced with nonsense code in the newspapers or the trade screen - something failed to be translated properly. End result - I miss playing Civilization I!

Too difficult to play even for veteren geo-political players like me. Too easy to be overthrown, unweilding political systems and unrealistic amounts of protests and resistance to changes in government policy. It made great efforts schedule meetings and convince politicans and cilivans to supoort you publically. This severally cripples the fun and potential reform of countries, making it totally unenjoyable. And to add realism to the weekly events of a nation's leader and well as great systems of government policy avaiablilty, (ie taxes, media, power of parliaments, condemning or avocating for people/organizations, etc). Filling trade and resource deficits somehow increase unemployment, and it's too diffucult to better realtions with other nations. This game had real potential, but fell flat on its face in making often positive changes in the nation you are playing possible. Too many times will you be "retired", executed or deposed, too early and unreasonably. Even playing as the US to balance the budget or be more environmentally friendly is too hard to do.

This game would be great if it weren't for the bugs. I've played this extensively and got used to certain bugs and did what I could to not do what triggers certain bugs and still enjoy the game. Now, I can't really play it at all. I can start a game and when I go to zoom, it zooms all the way in and the same when I zoom out. Has this game ever had an update? I regret ever paying for it.

Going on 100 hours with this game at the time this was written. I'll attempt to give a good review. First off, let me warn you: [b] IF YOU RUN A 32-BIT PROCESSOR, DO NOT BUY THIS GAME! THIS GAME CRASHES IF YOU TRY TO RUN IT ON A 32-BIT. [/b] Now, on to the actual review. [b] Pros: [/b] -Unique game design -You can literally pick any country you want, and play as that country for virtually all of time -Huge variety of things to do (i.e. managing immigration policy, gun laws, family laws, race laws, religious laws, military laws, and foreign policy) -Realistic government set-up -Congressional votes -Presidential Campaigns for re-election -Wide variety of espionage options (i.e. assassinations, government moles) -Ability to make any country into any government type (i.e. making the United States a totalitarian state, ruled by a ruthless dictator, banning free religion and speech. This cannot be done rapidly unless you want to put down civil revolts.) -Wars are somewhat fun, but can get a tad repetitive if you like conquering the world. -Nukes [b] Cons: [/b] -One of the glitchiest games I have ever played. -Absolutely NOT compatible Windows 32-bit of any kind. -The Voices can get annoying. -Some features may not work like they're supposed to. -The face animation needs some work. -The company that designed this game, Eversim, doesn't update it whatsoever. [h1] Final Verdict: 7/10 [/h1] If you can overlook the ocassional glitch, and you love Geo-political Simulators, then I definitely recommend this.

The game is buggy to the point you can't finish a game without running into something game breaking. If it isn't the construction bug, where you can't build anything new, then its the dreaded hospital bug where your cabinet members permenantly go into the hospital and never come out. Locking you out of the entire game mechanic regardless if you replaced them. Eventually you wont be able to build any new buildings, or control your nation in any meaningful way. The devs abandoned this game and there are no unofficial patches. For this reason, stay far away from this game as possible.

i was a worried this game would be a waste of 20$, thankfuly it was not a waste,there are so many mechanics at work here, for example i was just curious what would happen if i mobolized my troops along the border of another country and i was rather impressed with what happend, i have not seen anything like this in a game, what happend was as soon as i got my troops there the country that i had my troops next to said they were worried that i was going to do something to them, and as soon as they sent that, they ordered their troops next to my border to have a quick response to my invasion force. and this was the A.I. so yeah i was rather impressed. i do reconmend this game to people who enjoyed shadow president or other detailed games in the geo political sim genre.

Garbage. The game is buggy as hell. No word from the developers as to how to fix this game. Asked for a refund, they basically said tough shit. Extremely poor quality for the extortionate price. No one, and I mean NO ONE buy this game.

Regretting my decision to buy this. Gameplay concepts are interesting, but the tutorial does next to nothing to teach you how to play the game. Nothing is explained past a couple of examples of how to introduce a piece of legislation into the parliament and how to order a military operation against a terrorist cell. Budgetary information is poorly presented, making it cryptically difficult to know what measures are affecting the bottom line and by how much. The UI is attrocious. After a couple of hours poking around, I feel like I've made no progress whatsoever. I have no idea what to do, what I'm doing or what in the world is affecting what. It's a complete mess. Although I have a degree of interest in politics and world affairs, I'm completely lost. I find that without a sufficiently solid understanding of economics, the player is going to miss out on a whole chunk of this games appeal. Unless you're a student of economics and/politics, and can put up with a clunky interface, and occasional buggy elements that don't make much sense, steer clear of this one. 3/10

Despite all the negative reviews online, I decided to give this a try as it's exactly the kind of subject matter I've been wanting to explore in a video game. Rulers of Nations is a mixed bag. Not as bad as some are saying. I expected a total mess of clutter and illogical AI. To my pleasure, the game is neither impossible to learn nor enjoy. There's actually quite a comprehensive and well thought-out simulation of running a modern state lurking under the poor graphics, cheap UI, uneven difficulty and mountains of stats. You'll certainly be kept busy with tons of decisions to make about laws, budgeting, trade, diplomacy etc. I've seen reviews comparing this unfavourably to games like Superpower 2 and Supreme Ruler. I disagree - this game is definitely superior to either of those. If the price were lower, I'd recommend it strongly to anyone interested in the subject matter. As it is, I'd say buy it only if you're really curious and have some cash to spare.

While I recommend this game, I can completely understand why so many dislike it. This is not a wargame. This is [i]very much[/i] not a wargame, although there is war in it. In fact, you would be better off playing Civ than this if you prefer a good war element. With that out of the way, I can understand one other major frustration: the bugs. The most annoying one (and the only one I have really noticed so far) is the building glitch. Don't expect that to get fixed, as the new version Masters of the World has already been released. Now for why I recommended this. Quite simply, this game is addictive. Once you get the hang of it, you find youself so concerned for what happens to your country next that you find yourself thinking about it all the time. How will I finish this war? What am I going to do with my new-found funds? Should I subsidize my X industry or Y industry, if I can't subsidize both? Lots of decisions to be made. The spying is one of the best made systems I have seen from any game in a long time. It isn't 'wait X turns to have an 80% chance of stealing a technology.' It has much more to do with infiltrating terrorist organizations, assassinating others, political espianage, and more. There will sometimes be moles in your organization that will mess up everything, and you should have a decent amount of spies keeping an eye out for others trying to spy on you. The accounting/economics is a bit over my head, but they do a good enough job of explaining it for me to have half a clue what I am doing. Overall, fun game. Looking forward to Masters of the World eventually.