Played a lot of Age of Empires 2, fantastic game. Been spending more of my time playing 'Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance'[0]. It has a community lobby system over here[1] that's pretty active (over 1400 simultaneous players at time of speaking).

I got infuriated by some of Age of Empire 2s limitations (e.g. limited selection size, awful pathfinding, games tending to stalemate). The extra ~decade SupCom had seems to have helped.

The Steam version often goes on sale for a few dollars once a month or so[2].

[0] https://store.steampowered.com/app/9420/Supreme_Commander_Fo... [1] https://www.faforever.com/ [2] https://steamdb.info/app/9420/