I never quite got into this game as much as AOEII, but I know plenty of people for whom this was their definitive AOE experience growing up. It's still a really good game, and the ability to level up your base was a nice change to make this game feel very different from AOEII. I also appreciate the effort they put into the campaign for this game, which was very fun and expansive. All in all, if you go in expecting AOEII but better, you'll be disappointed, if you treat it as a mostly different RTS system, it's a lot of fun.

There are two completely different experiences a person can have with AOEII:DE. Some people play online multiplayer, where they either get good or get demolished by people who put hundreds if not thousands of hours into the game. Then, there are people like me who mostly play campaigns / random map games, with a very rare local multiplayer game. If you're the former, you have to care about all the updates and patches and rebalancing the devs do, but for me, I can just play the classic AOEII I love and mostly not worry about it. Some of the campaigns are fantastic, and some are kinda duds, but there's so much content in here that the good drowns out the bad. 100% a game I will never be done playing.