Is it really excellent? I mean, the game still FPS drops, when only one person in a multiplayer match is lagging. But maybe that could be attributed to engine problems, rather than network code issues.

The rest of the code seems not too great either, considering the humongous system requirements, compared to the historical versions of the game. If you ask me, they could have kept it 2D sprites and it would have been completely fine. But they had to go 3D ...

That's just been my experience. LAN especially seems rock solid, once it's going. All sorts of issues getting it to connect sometimes. Definitely lag sometimes online.

I'm with you on the system requirements bloat. Really sad honestly. That said, I don't think the engine is more 3D than it used to be, is it? I believe it's still isometric 2D with 3D physics. Could definitely (definitively?) be wrong though.

Here's some discussion on it: https://www.reddit.com/r/ageofempires/comments/16aowwc/are_t...

Hmmm that would mean incredibly bad performance though. I mean, there is even a machine performance test, before you can play online, because the game is too heavy for many machines these days, while running 8p games just fine back in the day on waaaaay weaker hardware than most people have these days. What then is causing the massive performance regressions? Maybe resolution increase?

To me it looks kinda 3D, when you pane left right and look at buildings, but I could be wrong and that could be merely some effect, that also takes some on the fly calculation.