[paulmd]

Speaking of dropping a town center anywhere... the Persians get a civ advantage of a double-HP town center, which makes it a viable strategy to use your town center in a tower rush (aka the "Persian Douche" strategy). It's very aggressive and can put an opponent off-balance because they don't expect you to be up in their face in the Dark Ages, but the downside is that if it doesn't work you're stuck with a massive research and economic disadvantage.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n4DF099-DNo

(and here it is defended successfully: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QcVTHFBeXM4 )

Apropos of nothing: I am not really into the whole "watching people stream video gamess" thing for the most part but I recently discovered that I do enjoy a lot of this guy's AOE2 videos. There's a lot going on in high-level AOE2 play and it's really nice to have someone who knows what they're doing breaking it down for you.

Also, shameless plug for youtube-dl, it's really nice to pull them down and watch them in a local video player instead of streaming them directly.