Hello,
I play AoE2 mainly, AoE3 rarely, never played AoE4 and Retold. I really like how AoE3 was very different from the other AoE games. My only issues and what kept me away from AoE3 were the weird unit movements, that you have to do some very weird micro to speed up units and such, and with the animals hunting system that you have to make sure your villagers don’t run away from the base (which is probably why my favorite civ is the Japanese), but at the end of the day AoE3 is a very beautiful game, both visually and gameplay-wise.
It’s also the only AoE game where I can play as my nation, the Romanians. Although it always bothered me that Romania is not a revolution from Germany too.
I even got 1200 ELO in multiplayer with the Japanese, respectable for how little I play AoE3 and given I don’t know the meta of other civs.
I still remember the opening: send vills on food fast, move explorers in same directions but not together, place berries fast next to TC, send all new villagers to berries, first building Consulate → Portuguese fast, Heaven Card, put 1 villager on wood after you are done with crates, spam shrines all over the map but it’s best to start with the opponent side first, first age-up building the large shrine, research upgrades from market, barracks with Ashigaru. They can be aggressive with Daimyo and switch to Isolationist right away and Ashigaru card upgrate but are best at boom-ing. Daimyo extra dmg/Shogun extra hp are very strong and can train units on the go, like a hero. Age up: Large Shrine > Tori > Shogunate > GoldenPavilion/Buddha depending on case. Late game: Consulate → Isolationist for fights, Units: Naghinata Rider → heavy cav beats infantry like skirmishers and archers ; Ashigaru → one of the best muskets in game with speed and higher stats beats cav in melee one of best muskets in game ; Yumi → one of the best skirmishers in the game and are very upgradeable beats heavy infantry like musketeers and samurai. Generally I go Musk + Cav.
But if Poland & Denmark would have been released, I’m 90% sure Poland would have been the 2nd civ I would actually learn because WINGED HUSSARS. It was a DLC that me as an AoE2 player was really excited for, and, they did you dirty, there is no other way to put it.
There is one thing to say that they are going to end all future updates for the game, and essentially just keep the game on life support. It’s sad, but understandable. But completely another to trick you into “we are going to release a new DLC!”, get your hopes up, and then be like “nevermind, it got cancelled”. On the release date no less. When the DLC was supposed to be finished, it wasn’t even started.
While I like that Return of Rome was added in AoE2, I can’t help but feel like they did the AoE1 community dirty too in that case. Return of Rome should have been an update/dlc for AoE1 not DLC for AoE2. I’m not sure what they were trying to achieve with that but it did not work.
So yes, being cheated, it’s not the first time it happened to this community. I get that when a game is at the end of its lifetime it would get no support. But I bet there are better ways of doing it than… this.
And the way they said it… “While considering the inclusions for last year’s show, we wanted to ensure that Age III: DE players felt part of the franchise celebration as we know you have huge passion and love for the game 
” this is literally “we wanted you to believe a dlc is still on the way so you would buy our products ”.
Everybody cheered when AoE3 got free to play. To me, that looked like the first sign of the end of the game. If the game would have sold well it didn’t need to become F2P but it looked like it was a sign towards the end of the development.
AoE3 was truly a unique game. Perhaps, if it would have gotten more attention from development this wouldn’t have happened, it didn’t get new civs since 2022. It should have also gotten new campaigns. AoE2 has so many campaigns, AoE3 has too little.
RIP Poland. RIP AoE3. You will always be missed.
So from an AoE2 player to the AoE3 community, I’m sorry for your loss.