does it work?

Yes, it works.
In WinXP I had to switch to single chip only, but it runs flawlessly.

I've been playing with the settings trying to get Rise of Nations to work, and have also found that single chip mode works great.  But it's still unplayable for me.

I found that switching to 16 bit color keeps it from crashing right after the intro movies.  But I was getting massive graphic glitches where the screen was nearly cut in half.  Anti-aliasing either 2 or 4 sample seems to fix that, which allows me to see the cursor well enough (between flickering) to change the game resolution to 1600 which makes the graphics nearly flawless.  Except for the flickering.

Single chip mode makes the flickering almost instantaneous, and the mouse isn't as choppy as before.  But in addition, there are also no backgrounds while playing the game.  It's still overall unplayable even though that it's a major improvement.

Any ideas?  I'm using Windows XP SP1, Voodoo5 5500 AGP, with the Amigamerlin 3.0 drivers.

Did you try 3D-Analyze with the Voodoo flicker fix ?
Just a thought, it might help...

I've never heard of it.  But now I found this 3danalyze, so what settings should I be using to run this game?

It's not an actual screen flickering.  It's that something about the screen is choppy.  The mouse is choppy as a result.  With the single chip mode enabled in 3dfx tools it's almost unnoticeable, but it's still there.  And for some reason there are no backgrounds in the game.

Anyways, I did ultimately find a way to get RoN to work.  You have to install the Microsoft drivers that XP offers to automatically install.  That was the only way to play it.