When they were first released, they felt like empires. ‘Theater of the mind’ was also more of a thing with older games.
Two decades time has a way of making big amazing games feel small or antiquated.
I have a feeling the Forgotten Empires mod around 2013 (well before HD and DE), which I had, had higher max pop count than 200?
Either way, an ‘empire’ in today’s terms is not the map size AoE3 launched with and had for 15 years.
I don’t believe this to be true. AoE3’s maps were tiny from the very start. And much smaller than what I had been playing in AoE2 a long while before AoE3 launched, imo. And if this isn’t the case, then I must have been using some map size mod for AoE2 because AoE3’s maps have always been miniscule in comparison for me
Not sure where you’re getting your info, or what suped-up AoE2 versions I’ve been playing forever, but this doesn’t match my experience at all. Seems like AoE2’s ‘Tiny’ map was comparable in size to AoE3’s largest map for years and years