So I downloaded the demo at work yesterday and started playing it. I noticed that if I hit alt+tab when people came around and I had to work that while the game was minimized, all the little villagers kept on working. The game didn't pause when minimized. Since this was the demo, I was playing single player mode. I do this a lot at home with aoe, aoc: play for 15 minutes, flip over and work for 15 minutes, etc.
I also couldn't find a pause button on the menus. Is there a keystroke that will pause it? Haven't had that much time to search the docs. I tried this playing in both window and non-window mode.
BTW, it plays just fine, if a little slowly, on a Dell Optiplex GX110 with a measly 4 meg integrated graphics card.
At home it played just fine with my GeForce2mx with 32. Although in both places, switching the screen resolution didn't really seem to have any effect. A demo limitation?