Another game to check out is Age of Mythology. Unless I'm mistaken, it is by the same people who did Age of Empires.

Yeah, that's correct. There's a good post-mortem on it in a recent issue of Game Developer. I liked their development philosophy: Get a playable version really early on, even if the art is just placeholders. Then just keep tweaking and re-working the gameplay elements until it's ready to ship.

Too bad I had already burned myself out on that style of RTS with Warcraft/Starcraft by the time Age of Empires had come out.