I only played the demo a long time ago, but from what I remember "Empires: Dawn of the Modern Era" was a little bit like AoE.

The AI isn't great, honestly. What I've played of the single player campaign was fairly uninspiring. Multiplayer is a lot of fun though. The people I played with never made an (effective) rush, just because it's not hard to ward off in the early stages of the game. By the end of the game, it's pretty much inevitable that there will be constant war on a large scale. The strategy is much more about managing infrastructure than using geography to your advantage in battles.