Hey Phill, interesting point. But have you actually run into people who claim to be EE experts? Boy, for me that game was boring just about right away. I cannot imagine anyone staying with it long enough to become an expert. Geez, jet bombers showing up to nuke your clubmen, what a concept.
I think the problem for EE experts, and even for AoK experts, and even to a certain extent RoR experts is not that AoE is simpler. In fact, AoE is in a very significant way a lot more complex than the later games in the series. AoE doesn't have any shortcuts.
Your AoK expert orders a group of buildings to each produce a dozen or so, oh, say, pikemen, and then sets a gathering point where the pikemen will report for battle. The expert is then free to move on to management of the ever expanding economy, making new TC's, setting gathering points where the villagers will automatically begin gathering resources and then switching back to see how the battle is going, arrange the pikemen into some kind of formation, and setting them on patrol or some other kind of repetitive movement cycle.
In AoE, you have to instruct the building to produce that archer every single time you want to produce an archer. And then you have to go round up all your archers and send them to the front. You have to order the TC to produce a villager each and every time you want a new one and then you have to go find that villager and find a place to put him to work. Then you have to go find your archers again and make sure that they are actually engaged in military activity. Actually a lot more complex, wouldn't you agree?
Just a side thought here, have you ever seen the damage that can be done to an attacking force by a really, really large group of fully upgraded Minoan composite bowmen standing on a hill? I mean a really, really large group.
Pay no attention to the ManBehindTheCurtain.