It can be frustrating to see your army massacred because you ignored the suggestions, but it's also a hard lesson in military common sense. There's advice but minimal hand-holding, and even in the early levels it's easy to make a bad call - wasting resources building things you really don't need, a mistake which can leave you with nothing to bolster your army with when the enemy attacks, or taking too long to launch an attack and instead, having to face the enemy unprepared as they turn up and start bashing down your walls. An overall goal, like breaching the Great Wall of China, is broken down into smaller objectives. The single-player missions work as both a gentle onboarding process for the modern military tactician and are satisfying in their own right. Elephants! Each civilization has beautifully detailed differences in their clothes and armor and architecture, so even if you're playing as the boring old English there are tiny visual treats to savor. The Rus, or Russians, have Warrior Monks, the Abbasid Dynasty have camels and a House of Wisdom that can be expanded with extra wings to grant new research options, and the Dehli Sultanate has elephants. The Mongols are also impressively mobile, able to pack up the settlement's buildings to move to a more strategic location. My personal favorite is the Mongols, who can earn resources by burning down enemy buildings - rather than focusing on just building out a base with numerous farms and mines and mills - and travel with their own sheep. There are eight different civilizations to play with, either in campaigns or in Skirmish mode against other players, and each has been meticulously designed to offer different gameplay experiences. Maybe you'll terrorize the local populace with endless legions of archers and swordsmen, or maybe you'll work on your defenses and focus on building a "Wonder" to prove your people's dominance. Winning is about using all of the above as efficiently as possible depending on the enemy, the map, and its resources and landscape. You need food, gold, wood, and stone to purchase everything you need, collect or trade enough and you can advance your civilization through different historical ages, offering more advanced technology. You'll have worker townspeople at your disposal to build up settlements and collect resources, and an army - complete with specialized units and siege weaponry - to command. Control freaks, step right up because you are about to live your best life. If you're new to the series, think of it as a management sim, but one where the aim is to save your people from invaders or to crush whole nations beneath your mighty fist.