I'd like to remind you that there's openage, a free engine for Age of Empires 2.
https://github.com/SFTtech/openage
It will be the future if you wanna accomplish things the original engine is incapable of doing, especially a sane mod API.
Help us make it more awesome :)
Thanks for sharing! I actually thought this was going to point to 0ad [1]...which because it deals with ancient warfare, I had just assumed it was sparked by AOE2 community. Good to know of openage.
Out of curiosity...how much do you still play AOE2? I guess that would implicitly indicate how far along openage is...but I was also interested just how much someone has to love a game to rebuild it from scratch :)