Age of Empires I I thought was a lot better than it's successors (I've never played Age of Empires III but I have played Age of Empires II and I was a bit... disappointed). It was a lot more fast paced and it's graphics were pretty amazing for the time they came out. But some of the controls in the game were annoying, but that was maybe because I was too used to playing Starcraft, Warcraft II and Warcraft III as well as the Command and Conquer games. There were so many different civilisations, but they lacked variety, although some techniques of gameplay required only using certain civilisations, which made it slightly more interesting. In terms of difficulty, Age of Empires I was also a hell of a lot more harder than Age of Empires II (I loved the Castle in Age of Empires II though!). The cheats in Age of Empires I were also... amusing.
I completely agree with this post here. It seems to be this way with most games though. The first one is great, and really builds up anticipation for the next ones, and then BAM! they shoot down our wishes by giving us a piece of crap. If you notice, it is as if the game companies decide that graphics are more important than the gameplay(but then again, a lot of people won't even play games with bad graphics, solely because they just bought their new $3000 pimped out computer and do not want it to go to waste.)
As for the cheats thing, I loved making the cars and just pounding buildings in like two or three hits. I think that was in the first Age of Empires at least, might have been the second one.
I did like, however, when they upgraded the farms by allowing the villagers to auto remake them. That's probably the best upgrade they ever added to the series. Nothing sucked more than looking at your farms and finding out you had 40+ people just sitting there due to having already cleared their farm out.
This all seems to be a little different when it comes to Command and Conquer, though. In my personal opinion Red Alert 2 and Command and Conquer 3 were by far the best of the series(excluding of course Renegade)


