Rediscovered this game a year ago, and am absolutely loving it.
The r/aoe2 community is also generally welcoming and helpful.
It's kind of crazy how nice people in multiplayer are. Nobody says anything about my mother or what kind of content I'm downloading to cause lag. Everyone's got the personality of, like, a chill dad now. People are more interested in a good game than just winning. It's really nice.
The other day, I was playing a noob game where one opponent on the other team was way better than the rest of us and rushed. His own team came down on him after.
I also really like to play 0 A.D. Similar game but open source, looks great, frequently updated, runs on Win, Mac, Linux.
https://play0ad.com/