Exactly. Take the Age series, give it the Civ structure and philosophy, and you get RoN.
Like EE with a detailed economic/trade/research model and borders, with better AI.
They reduced the micro management all over. One example is there is now no need to build transport ships for troops. Click your guys, and click on the other island, done. Your ordered troops walk to the shore, turn into a little ship, sail to the desired island, land on the shore and walk to where you sent them. Of course you must have the proper techs and resources. And there is something like 28 resources, again more like Civ than Age.
And borders is a big plus. You know how in EE, you could go right up to the enemies base and throw up a tower real quick?
Well in RoN, you can't build outside of your nations border. It could be viewed that some of the new rules and aspects of RoN killed rush and border push strats where in fact the new features force a player to out think rather than just out click his enemy. Ramping unit costs and whatnot. You can still rush or unit spam, but you have to set yourself up right or you will be behind in development, or outnumbered.
Instead of a scramble for the closest resources, and the mass producing of the cheapest unit, and the standard, wood>food>civvies>stone>metal>buildings>units>one big battle end of game RTS, RoN forces a player to develop cities, and civic structure.
I guess there might be some SimCity in there as well.
I used to help out over here, nice group.
http://ron.empiregaming.net/
This was my story.
http://ron.empiregaming.net/pages/ar...ease_party.php
And Heaven Games would be the community leader in forum activity, latest info. And one of their old admins, Graham Somers actually landed a job with Big Huge Games as their web developer, head of public relations.
http://ron.heavengames.com/
If you have any questions, feel free to ask. I haven't played in awhile, but it's a fun game, and has a great community.