Kids can be very, very good at playing 0 A.D. and many other games as well. The AI is, in fact, very easy to beat with a bit of practice. And you don’t need to defeat the AI on Very Hard before moving on to multiplayer. In the lobby, you can find all kinds of player profiles and skill levels. it's not all tryharding.  The AI needs fundamental improvements instead of compensating for its weaknesses with production and gathering handicaps. Things like better decision-making and creativity. As it stands, the Very Hard AI is much easier to beat than the AI in StarCraft II on Brutal. Also, this game is far less click-intensive than others in its genre. Improving the AI and adding campaigns would be a major contribution to retaining and growing the single-player community. There’s a lot of work to be done, and not enough manpower.

Thank you. Putting this here for future reference: I think mimicking this aesthetic style would still be nice:

I think one of the many Maya glyphs would be nice, but I don't know if there's one simbolising the Maya people. The closest I can do for now is to give one referring to one of their main cities, Tikal (the Maya lived in city states, not a unified empire, so it's like I'm giving you a glyph for Athens representing all Hellenes): https://www.famsi.org/research/pitts/MayaGlyphsBook1.pdf, on page 72, maybe the one on the right is the better one (all 4 glyphs mean Tikal, they had many ways to write the same thing).

@Stan` and I have actually started a repo for Empires Besieged here: https://gitea.wildfiregames.com/0ad/empires_besieged.  The last change was 11 months ago, but I'm working on things in DE (Guptas and Sasanians; a big thank you to @Duileoga and @Lopess) which will directly translate to EB at some point in the future. So, whether EB becomes it's own "game" or an "era" or an "expansion" or a "release" is up for debate. I personally advocate for a "0 A.D. Eras" concept, where players can swap between eras (Empires Ascendant, Empires Besieged, Masters of Bronze, Millennium AD) and only play those civs, or choose to play with all civs available at once. 

I would love to have such a feature in the game for multiple things, such as wheat fields. But for now, what I mean is that we can have different variations of the structure so that it will look different sometimes when you build one (like how there are helmet variations).