Copied from the other thread, this post was supposed to answer OP's question but ended up being about crates.
Well for some people the crates aren't imbalanced enough for them to be worth getting rid of. The trade off of fixed crates is making discovery age stale, as in there's a little less adaption, less variation, less micromanagement to get your build off right, etc. Some will rightfully argue that this doesn't separate good players from bad players and that the age 1 phase of the game is boring anyway (though that being boring is subjective). The way I see it, I don't see the problem with variation at the start of the game. It does add something. I think the balance issues regarding crates can be overblown, but I'm not as high a level a player as diarouga so I won't argue his points. I do want to note however, that if one argues to fix crates, one naturally argues that treasures should probably be eliminated from the game and that maps should no longer spawn randomly. After all, that is both more balanced and less RNG.
The issue with "more balance, less rng" is that Age of Empires 3 is a game which does not really suffer from the inherent randomness of maps, treasures, etc. Variation is what makes a game more deep and interesting, look at LoL with their huge champion pool, same with Dota. Variation and randomness is part of the Age of Empires package, it's what makes the game as deep as it is. For example there are several different ways to open the game: market, TP, nothing. Fixing crate starts means that every civ suddenly has one "best" opening and all the others are inferior. Sure, it's not like the different variations are what make AoE3 the good game that it is, but they're still there. Fixing crates just reduces options, which I inherently dislike. Age of Empire games are inherently about adaption and the game is designed to work with procedural generation. That's a huge plus, as far as I'm concerned. There is some good youtube material on the subject, linked here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R5SAfTSIOE4https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gYodywXM_ps