Realtime strategy games the dizzying pace of professional StarCraft or stumble into the arcane lore of Total War: Warhammer and you might get the impression that the entire genre is comprised of systems-driven time sinks, where it takes hours of research on a community wiki to even understand how the menus work.
With its straightforward, pared-down mechanics, Age Of Empires 2 is a sharp contrast to that uninviting stereotype. There are only four resources (wood, gold, food and stone) and the research tree, such as it can be called, consists wholly of material upgrades for your military and agriculture. If you want to increase the productivity of your empire in one of the other best RTS games, you might need to fine-tune your citizens' wages or cultivate and implement a new form of government. In Age Of Empires 2, you must build a wheelbarrow.
