Europa Universalis is much more like Civ and SMAC than it is like AoE. It IS a “real time” strategy game, because it is a strategy game that takes place in real time. But it has none of the silly mechanics of the RTS genre–workers gathering resources, buildings, tech, etc.
I’ve played and enjoyed Starcraft and AoE, but I vastly prefer Civ type games. But Civ really abstracts a lot of concepts. Civ is fun, but it isn’t really a model of how civilizations actually develop and compete. EUII is a game that at least attempts to model how countries interacted in the Age of Exploration. Yes, there is abstraction, and yes sometimes things are done for game reasons that don’t make sense historicly. But if you want a game that gives you the feeling of running England or the Ottoman Empire then EU is a much better game.
To give you some idea of the game mechanics, EU divides the world into a couple thousand provinces and sea zones. Each province produces a certain amount of wealth, which you can use for various purposes…raise armies, send missionaries, build navies, build infrastructure, improve technology, send colonists, or use for diplomatic purposes.
Your goal is to incorporate as many provinces as you can. You do this by attacking other countries, conquering their provinces, and demanding concessions in a peace treaty. Or if you find unowned provinces you send colonists there…there are lots of unowned provinces in the Americas, Africa and Asia, but you must have explorers to find them.
The game is real-time in the sense that a clock is running, but you can pause at any time to issue orders, review your status, or make decisions. You move by ordering armies or navies to a province, and they start marching there and will get there in a couple of months, you order infrastructure improvements and they take several months to complete, artillery and cavalry take longer to raise than infantry, etc. Games are usually multi-day affairs, like Civ games.
So if you like Civ style games but want something a little more historical then you would probably like EU. The main drawbacks to EU are that the map isn’t customizable…you are stuck with the same map of Earth with the same provinces. But you can customize the countries. And the user interface isn’t as smoothly done as in most games. A lot of information is given to you via pop up windows…you are constantly pausing the game to read the windows and respond to what they say…“The peasants in Picardie are revolting!” “The filthy traitors of Spain have captured the province of Languedoc!” If you don’t respond quickly the rebels or the Spanish or whoever have time to create havoc while you are dithering. But since you can pause any time and give orders while paused, the game plays much more like Civ than it does like AoE.
For more info see http://www.europa-universalis.com/