I went on a binge with that game recently. It is amazingly deep, I never got near all the possible ways to play. I was mostly enjoying getting my ass kicked by the computer in multiplayer.
Fun game. I'll probably get back to it eventually. Seems like it will be around forever.
ETA: There's a pretty large AOE2 community on Reddit (still? IDK?) and frequent vids on YT. I remember some very detailed analysis vids on YT when updates came out. And competitive is still a thing too.