Why do you say so? The original AoE always struck me as kind of clunky, specially because of the atrocious path-finding. But I never actually played it in multiplayer.

The pathfinding was quite good when you consider the constraints - target platform (Pentium 90 with 16 _MB_! of RAM), dozens of units moving independently, etc.

And multiplayer was really where the fun was for many of us. This was pretty early in the multiplayer era, so being able to play with up to 8 players in the same game over the internet seemed amazing.

strongly agree about the multiplayer. not generally into re-playing video games from my younger days, but i'm really looking forward to this.