I appreciate the avoidance of front-loading the tutorial page, even in spite of this game's rampant difficulty with out a proper understanding of the mechanics. The first thing the book doesn't teach me is that the bottom turrets are just set dressing, so that means it has less defense but also less opportunity to make money. It has a finely tuned challenge where a few attempts were only a few seconds away from three stars.
The game is a novelty among its peers as a grain sitter; only one other so far has evoked this mood, and it was only vaguely lenticulated on a survival rhythm. The difficulty in creating this mood is apparent by the lack of more than one level; to create variations within a base set of variations is an exercise in plumbing the depths of creativity, and so I think it was the right choice to simply focus on that base set.
Age of War is a classic among flash games, and all games of this size excel for their ability to discern when less is more in different ways. When comparing animation, Age of War has a large assortment of humanoids that need to move across the field, and now this is sidestepped with flying machines that can afford to animate on a static frame. In contrast, the simplicity of the user interface and text objects is less work for better understanding of the economy, rather than paying for upgrades at an unknown price.