Sorry to disappoint, but Ruler of Nations SUCKS. A huge waste of money. Stupid, unrealistic, the 'personalities' and voices are terrible and really annoying. I think the advisors must be intended to be mentally challenged. Even tried some crazy strategies too like being ridiculously aggressive war monger, or uber-libertarian, or corrupt tyrant, in a vain attempt to try and find SOMETHING fun and interesting to do in the game... but it's just retarded and repetitious no matter what you do. The same obviously scripted/generic randomly generated "events" over and over, regardless of the nation or play style! Crap!
Ya that's what I was afraid of. Back to Supreme ruler 2020 for me til Supreme Ruler coldwar comes out(that games gonna eat away my time lol)
EDIT* I almost went on a 3 paragraph long rant about the greatness of SR2020 but didn't wanna seem like I was trying to sell it lol
So i'll just say this.
Huge number of Real life units represented.
Supply system means Logistics is HUGELY important in war.(You can do stuff like drop your green berets behind enemy lines and support them via airdrops from C-130s until your ground force can secure a supply line to them... if they run out of supplies then they are sitting ducks. Supplies = ammo and fuel)
It lacks in the political and diplomacy areas but it gets the war part so well its forgivable. They added a few things to help that in the expansion Global crisis but its still lacking(just noticed impulse has the gold version for 30$ which is both).
Blah I did it anyway 
I'm a shill lol
(not really but my post ended up reading like it, to be fair though I only touched on the basics of the game.. this post could have been MUCH longer)
BTW on the metacritic thing.. Sr2020 is a perfect example of why I don't use pro reviewers anymore. Most of them deducted points on sr2020 for "too much micromanagement" and "too steep of a learning curve". Which happens to be what I WANT in this type of game. Reviewers say things like that, deduct points for complexity and then we wonder why Civ V was "streamlined", and got rave reviews. 
*/end edits
Sorry for derailing the thread. YAY For impulse sales, i picked up Political machine 2008. I don't see a lot of replay value but for 3$ i can't complain