Age of Empires

What it is. An RTS where you spend most of your time not fighting: you harvest four resources, sink them into a tech ramp, and cash the whole economy in at an age-up — a discrete power spike that unlocks a better army and a better economy at once. The build order — what you build, in what sequence, timed to the second — is the skill.

Player fantasy. You are a civilisation becoming. The dopamine is watching a handful of villagers snowball into a stone-age hamlet, a feudal town, an imperial war machine — each age a visible, audible level-up you earned by planning ahead instead of fighting now.

Design DNA

The engine is a delayed-gratification loop: every resource spent on economy or tech is an army you didn’t build. The tension is always “expand now, or convert to power now?” Ages are the commitment gates that make that tension legible — you can see the next tier of units greyed out, and you know exactly what banking toward it costs. Combat exists to punish players who over-bank (you die with a great economy and no army) and reward players who time the spike (you hit Feudal with an army while the enemy is still stone-age).

Load-bearing structures

Structure	Why it works
Multi-resource economy (food/wood/gold/stone)	Each resource gates a different axis; scarcity of one forces build-order choices. Reduces to faucets/sinks → `system-economy`.
Villager compounding	Workers make workers; early economy investment pays exponential interest. The core `pattern-feedback-loops` runaway.
Age-up as discrete power spike	A single expensive gate unlocks a whole tier at once — a legible level-up, not a slow drip. → `system-tech-tree`.
Build order	A near-optimal opening sequence, timed to seconds; mastery is executing it under pressure. → `system-mastery-curve`.
Tech tree with branch cost	Upgrades are cheap individually, ruinous in aggregate; you can’t have everything, so you specialise. → `system-tech-tree`.
Timing attacks	The whole game is “hit the enemy in the gap between my spike and their spike.” Skill = reading tempo.
Counter roster	Units answer units (spears→cavalry, archers→infantry); army comp is a live rock-paper-scissors. → `system-counter-systems`.

What to steal

The age-up gate: one expensive, visible, irreversible spike that unlocks a tier, not a stat. It converts a grind into a milestone.
The build-order skill floor: a deterministic opening that rewards knowledge and execution — the thing a null “just make army” player loses to hard (FUN.md law 2 skill-delta).
Idle-worker guilt: surface the number of idle villagers as UI. The exposed inefficiency is the macro game (cf. the city-builder “+N” cursor, FUN.md §17).
Bank-vs-spend tension at every second: the economy you build is the army you postpone. This is the whole loop; keep it sharp.

What’s just theme (drop it)

The historical civilisations — Britons vs Franks is flavour on a shared spine. Real asymmetry lives in system-faction-asymmetry, not in names.
Four specific resources — the count is tuning. Two well-differentiated resources can carry the same tension (see system-resource-loops).
Wonders / relics / one-more-victory-condition — win-condition garnish, not the loop. Cut them until the ramp is fun alone.
Literal town-building sim — the base is a means to the ramp, not a SimCity.

Composes into

genre-rts — the parent; AoE is its economy-first exemplar (mass under command, but macro over micro).
system-tech-tree — the age-up spike is a tech-tree gate; this is its home system.
system-economy · system-resource-loops — faucets/sinks and the gather→convert→spend cycle that funds the ramp.
system-unit-rosters · system-counter-systems — the army the economy pays for, and why comp matters.
pattern-feedback-loops — villager compounding is the runaway loop that needs a comeback brake.

Twist seams

AoE but the age-up is a roguelite draft (structure) — each age offers a choice-of-3 civ perks instead of a fixed tree; runs diverge. Pairs with system-meta-progression.
AoE but hunger is the fifth clock (mechanic-swap) — food isn’t banked, it drains; your economy starves if it stalls. (This is Fertile Crescent’s signature bend — see process-the-twist.)
AoE but you command one age at a time on a single screen (constraint / perspective) — no map scroll; the ramp happens in one arena, tower-defense tempo. Pairs with genre-tower-defense.
AoE but cozy (tonal) — drop combat entirely; the “spike” is a festival, the pressure is a seasonal deadline. Pairs with genre-farming-sim.