I tried Empire Earth (from 2001) and was impressed by its depth vs AoE. I've been thinking about installing it on Windows 11. But this is somewhat beside the point, I'm sure both would run on Wine. I guess AoE II was published by Microsoft, but it was made by Ensemble Studios before MS bought them. And Office can do one.
EE has depth? Then why is AoE2 played competitevly and noone plays EE?
AoE2 has a lot of micro depth:
- quick walling to trap enemy units in or out
- each arrow is a projectile that you can dodge
- ballistics helps to hit moving targets, still can be dodged by good players
The list goes on. Watch any modern caster for this game (MembTV or T90). There is a lot to enjoy.
What I dislike about Microsoft+AoE is the fact that they publish DLCs with less and less content for huge prices. And AoE mobile is obviously a joke.
It's hit or miss... As bad as Outlook has gotten since the backend shift to O365, it's still got better contact and calendar/meeting integrations than anything else I'm aware of.
I mean, Google's calendar is "good enough" for most things, but shifting a single instance of a meeting, or more interesting repeat cycles is a pain by comparison. Let alone 3rd party integrations.
If I ever came across F-U money, I'd build an open-source outlook+exchange replacement. Probably 3 versions, one for a single domain for easier deployment, one for mid-large companies with multiple backends, and something with more cloud integration/distribution.
I think if cloudflare had workers for TCP services, doing an email service on cloudflare could be awesome.
Microsoft... do something good?
Have you tried using Microsoft products?