Hello, and thank you for sharing you passion for Age of Empires, the RTS genre and our project!
We've played Age of Empires since we were little kids. I remember when I was 9 (this was in 1997) my best friend and I were camping in a tent in the yard, and we had brought a game magazine with us. In it was an article about Age of Empires. I still remember a picture of villagers standing in a circle around a shaman. I thought he was talking to them and that the game seemed really realistic!
Moving on from nostalgia, our goal is not to mimic Age of Empires. We understand that the inspiration from Age of Empires is the most obvious, but it's inspired by a handful of RTS games that we love. However, most of all, the game mechanics are inspired by history.
We did initially experiment with upgrading through ages (one of my favourite features in Age of Empires), but it was an idea we quickly tossed away. The Fertility Crescent will only focus on the Bronze Age of the Near East.
Another obvious difference is how technology is researched. For example, we initially implemented that technology has to be researched in buildings, like in AOE, but we soon discovered that for our concept a technology tree is a lot more powerful. You have a better overview of technology research because everything is in one place, and part of our vision is broader paths of strategy.
To answer your other questions:
- Queuing construction of buildings for villagers is definitely something we'll look into when we start implementing walls.
- We're not planning to add upgradable units like the ones you find in Age of Empires. To improve your units you will need to research certain technologies (like Composite Bow for Bowman) or equip units with copper and bronze equipment in the Furnace.
- We will keep a free version of the game on itch.io, but for the premium version we will have to charge everyone to be able to support development, servers etc. These types of games take thousands of hours to develop and we have families to provide for. The price will reflect the amount of content and won't be ridiculously high - promise! :)
Of the content you're suggesting at least 7 of the bullet points are 100% planned. We'll just have to wait and see about the rest!