When you're not playing the campaign or the turning point battles, you can enjoy the new quick start mode for skirmish and multiplayer games. Quick start is basically a way to skip the mundane base-building and army-raising that's standard in most real-time strategy games, a problem especially in multiplayer, when there's nothing going on for the first 10 minutes because everyone is trying to build up their forces. Basically, you get a set number of points you can use to purchase units and buildings that you'll start with, which will let you get into combat faster. You can create quick-start templates that you can use over and over again in skirmish and multiplayer, each one custom-made for a certain epoch. For example, you can create an ancient quick-start force if the game starts in the early ages, but you can also create and save a modern-day quick-start force for when a game starts in the modern age.