One of the last games which I looked forward to similar to RTW was Age of Mythology. I did the same kinds of things - gossiping about rumours on the forums, eating up any scrap of info about the game before it came out - the whole thing. When it came out it more than met my needs and also amazed me by the fact that Ensemble Studios (those who developed the game) had created from scratch an entire Online gaming server - ESO (Ensemble Studios Online). At first I was pretty skeptical being a Starcraft player coming from Battle Net - but the devs really put it up to the plate and made a relatively smooth and easy to use interface. THere were a few complaints but they were very minor things such as "I wish we had more chat rooms! Why dont' we have a buddy list? Unit X is over powered" and so on. THere wasn't anything as ugly as these problems, and that's really unfortunate. How in HELL can you hype a game up so much and then totally rape yourself by not having something as substantial as MP setup even on a mediocre level? It would be like HalfLife coming out with surprisingly little Mod abilities. Unbelievable.