I played it at a friend's house. It looks awesome. Is it like Civ only RTS? Including S&H, I could get it for $28 off Ebay. Should I get it?

BTW, It could use more ages. One minute I'm in 2500 BC, the next, I'm in 1500 AD.

Its not meant to be played like a TBS game. Its RTS, which basically means fast and furious. You're supposed to be in the Ancient Age one minute, then in the Gunpowder Age the next. Its fast paced. They say you can easily play a game in an hour; thats about right. Compare that to a good game of Civ3 which can take days if you play it straight TB with normal rules.

At its core, it pretty much is just an RTS Civilization. Thats not saying that its all that much like Civ3 though, because just from making it RTS that in itself means its pretty much a whole new game.

As I've said before though, RoN is basically just a nicely upgraded Age of Empires 2. If you liked AoE2, then its pretty safe to say you'll like RoN. If you like Civ3, and you also enjoy playing C&C Generals or Warcraft III or something like that, and want to see the 2 games combined (Generals and Civ3) then you might want to try RoN.

Buy it.

I second the fine opinion of mr wildfire - buy it
it has the good elements of AoE and its likes(EE...) + the border and city elements of civ3
-there is less micromanaging of cities, not much of a peaceful road to win and no government.
the conquer the world campaign reminds me a lot about risk - something which imho is quite a nice touch to it.

on the age issue - you can configure the game you're playing (or perhaps will be playing) to start and stop at certain ages, and I think you can slow the tech research (though any civ3 player would probably want to speed up the research...)
- but people have expressed disappointment with the speed of the game (it is faster than civ3 :D ) -> it takes some getting used to