The units you take with you into battle are handled beforehand and thus require strategy on the part of the player before deploying as you don't set up a base on an in-game map and grow and expand as in traditional RTS games. You have a set number of loadout points instead, and different units have different values, so you have to wisely choose the type and number of units to deploy to ensure your success in battle. This should appeal to tabletop wargarmers, TCG players, and any other gamer who enjoys having to strategize and optimize finite resources before before the competition begins. Once deployed, your units trundle around the map under your command, attacking (and looting) enemy units as gameplay progresses, and some of the larger enemy units are a sight to behold. The only thing that was odd during the gameplay demonstration was the utilization of fog-of-war. The whole map could be seen, including permanent structures, which only makes sense given the intel capabilities of contemporary warfare. Specific units, conversely, could not be seen until encountered, and the result was the pop-up book effect of units appearing out of the ether, sometimes well after it would seem that someone in one of your tanks would have spotted them. But, this is a minor gripe as it didn't seem to impact the gameplay in any significant way.

The most hyped feature of the game at the event was that you could have at least 51 players on the map at the same time. They said "at least" because they ran out of testers at 51, so the cap will likely be higher. I wasn't impressed by this much at first as it didn't mean much until seen in action. I remember participating in an event in Final Fantasy XI several years ago that had large, very nasty mobs walking around some zones that would have several dozens of people attacking it at once (they were that tough; the things literally took days of constant player beatings to kill), and it was a cacophonous mess. An entertaining mess, but a mess all the same. In EoN, though, it's 51 players attacking different points on a very large map as opposed to clustering around a lone mob, however big, so you have a dozen small battles being waged on the same map. Then you remember that in an RTS, 51 players != 51 units. Each player is controlling a dozen units at least, and each of those players is engaging in battle with many more units than themselves, so you have hundreds upon hundreds of individual units all engaging in battle at the same time. When all of this sinks in and you see it in execution, the effect is quite impressive.

I'm awful at RTS games. I turtle in a bottleneck with Protoss until I can summon the high-level helicarrier or assemble a Huntress mass to annoy opponents, and in both scenarios I just sit tight and hope the skills of my teammates will clear out the opposition. I have to cheat to beat these games on single-player modes, and it doesn't help that I don't view most of my units, particularly the low-level ones you can use at the start of a match, as ultimately expendable. (ProTip: most of your units in an RTS game are fire-and-forget, they're-probably-gonna-die units.) I am not a player you want on your Starcraft roster and I have no doubt that my lack of skills will translate into End of Nations, relegating me to permanent noob status. I will not be buying this game because there are other ways I can spend $10 per month to feel bad about myself. That said, I'm very interested to see how this game develops. Trion seems to be addressing an untapped market with this game, and though I know my skills suck, it still looks like quite a bit of fun that, I dare say, could provide some serious competition for Starcraft II (the biggest selling point being that you only have to buy one copy of EoN to get the whole game, BA-ZING!). As with all new ideas and adventurous outings, there is always the chance that this could bomb horribly, but the product Trion has so far seems to be quite promising and I look forward to hearing about its progression.