Maybe I should, but I also find it can work on me.... call it a guilty pleasure :P

I'm not really justifying it, but I accept that devs will do it these days to get people to keep playing. Blame WoW.

I agree with your stance (although I understand the developer's decision based on financial reality, you need to "hook" casual gamers) but in this case if it's "only" 10-15 hours of grinding to reach the proper end game then that's piece of cake for me. Not that it justifies what they did perhaps but I just personally think I can deal with it.

At least I think you said 10-15 hours to reach a high enough level? If it's like 40 plus hours then I likely won't bother.

I won't accept that from someone who already admitted he didn't play the game up to level 20.  Like I already said, the games difficulty triples after Level 20.

Yeah 10-15 is a good estimate, took me just several hours to get to where I got.

You misunderstood what I am talking about. I am talking about using the levelling mechanic outside of an RPG. Also, the fact I couldn't stand the game to even reach 20 and all that is awesome should tell you just how pissed off I was at the crappy design choice.

You know, I don't understand why people still bash WoW about that. Yeah back in vanilla it was a pain to raid. However I hear that nowadays doing the quests, especially with Cataclysm, is actually a lot of fun. Plus, yu gotta remember it's an RPG, your character's rise to power is part of the whole role-playing "I am fucking awesome" alure. An RTS is an RTS, you go, and you win with your strategy, or lose because it wasn't good enough. There shouldn't be persistent levelling involved. I understand the draw it has, but it creates an artificial "quality" crutch.

Have been playing it for the last 5 or maybe 6 hours, after an over 3 hours long struggle with GFWL.

I'm liking it so far. I mean, sure everything is really easy up until now and I hope it ramps up a bit, but the core gameplay is still age of empires. It does seem like it won't take that long to get all leveled up and I find custumizing your race interesting.

I do agree it can be a problem to basically have to unlock the game if the difficulty doesn't pick up tho. But then again you can get experience in PvP, can't you?

I like the cows and how the animals in general skip around lol. The boar is a pussy now tho. I may be missing it, but I don't like that desselecting a set number of units doesn't seem to be possible, even if it's not that big of a deal. Not being able to queue units over the population limit (or build extra houses) and the population including everything queued is probably my biggest problem with it.

Talking about population, is there a way to see your villager distribution? Like how many farmers, lumberjacks, etc?

But yeah, it does feel like Age, if a bit faster. Does the village center limit ever go up?

Anyway, liking it so far, loking forward to some PvP.

So is it too late to download the beta? I had problems with the Windows LIVE client last nite too. Damn!!!!!

To what extent will this be free-to-play? Will a dedicated player be able to get all of the benefits of a paying player?

Not sure. As I'm posting it probably is too late now. They were testing the server load yesterday by getting as many people online as possible. I kept getting disconnected so obviously their servers suck!