I haven't had any issues installing AoE Gold under Wine. Furthermore, stuff on Steam is usually trivial to get running (just click and play). With Heroic same goes for stuff on GOG (and presumably Epic as well, IDK). PlayOnLinux and Lutris have good support for games you install from CD (I probably could have used either of them to install AoE Gold, but I've been using wine directly for so long I find it more convenient to do it myself).