I think this was a question asked on Twitter somewhere, and I only thought to ask it here because yesterday I impulsively bought Age of Empires 2 DE, and I've never been the biggest AOE fan - often finding the first one incredibly boring, buying AOE3 and finding it equally boring, and only dabbling in the original version of AOE2 for the same reason, but I found myself stuck on this one for 9 hours yesterday before I checked the time. It finally clicked. And I couldn't stop playing.
Very addictive game. Playing more of it today