A legal one, I mean. I had the CD version a long time ago but no longer. Now I re-downloaded the demo and thought this would be a nice game to have on the hard disk for the occasional quick match.
Except that there doesn’t seem to be any download version. There’s still the old disk-based version available here and there, but the status of updates and no-CD cracks is unclear and I really don’t want to be tied to a key disk with this game.
I hear this “Microsoft” company that published RoN has a few servers on the Internets, and the whole game is small enough for my DSL connection to manage. But they don’t seem to bother selling the game. Does nobody want my money?
Well, at least in this case there’s a happy ending: I just found a copy of the DVD Gold edition in a store, and for €6.99 I thought I’d give it a try and see if I can somehow work around the disk check. Turns out there isn’t one! No copy protection at all, other than the product key for multiplayer games. And it’s a multi-language edition, too, so no awkward German localization. Yay!
But I agree, it’s silly that you have to hunt around for physical copies of these classics in the first place. The combined RoN + expansion installation on my system is just 1.5 GB – not a quick download on my connection but manageable. Some demos are over 1 GB these days, after all. And the fact that there’s no disk-based copy protection makes the lack of download distribution just all the more mystifying.
I would actually try to avoid letting the games too far into gunpowder era. It just seemed that the medieval / ancient combat, with the melee leading the way and the catapults/archers following them up was much more fun that tons of infantrymen, nukes, and artillery.
(Granted, launching waves of bombers at someone was fun though.)
