Thanks to me listening some of the older Dan Carlin's podcasts, I've been having an increasingly big itch of dusting off my old Age Of Empires copy and giving it a go after over I-don't-really-want-to-count years (The CD has "2003" printed on it, jeez), while somewhat remembering that the difficulty of the game was a bit "high."

I've completed the Egypt "tutorial" campaign with some pain in some of the levels, and I've found that, at least on the campaigns I've been playing, most of the levels comprise some specific, single, build order to repel the early and brutal attacks, then rebuilt the more or less ravaged base, then beat the shit out of the rest of the enemies once you've managed to clear/defend your starting area.

I've never been a really good RTS player (and my experience with AOE was some skirmishes with medium CPU's back in the day), and even though I've been learning on the genre slowly, I cannot avoid thinking that maybe I'm missing something here, at least in the campaign. Am I in the wrong here and I'm missing something on the game flow to not get trashed so soon? Did I got the game right and the only (and honestly, a bit shitty) way to beat the game is by trial and error on the starting stages of every level?