You mean fixed point numbers presumably, because at the time using integers that use a variable amount of memory was totally out of the question. Today it’s still terrible for performance because you can’t use caches and simd effectively when numbers can’t be packed directly in arrays.
Does AoE2 do that? Packing numbers directly into arrays? Or does it rather deal with objects, which are variable size anyway? I am not sure how much high performance work has been done in AoE2. Maybe not that much.