Age of Empires Town Center

[Lonecat Nekophrodite]

What is 'Age of Empires' Town Center actually represents in real life as per ingame graphics?

1. A Magistrate or Mayor office. complete with all sorts of basic Local Administration departments each village or township ('Tambon' level I think) can have, and this including finance and revenue departments as well as built in vaults (to keep cashes inside)?
2. An entire 'Small Town' or even a 'Village'.
since it has a fence (or basic walls of any kind, either palisades as in Era 1 or masonry walls as in later eras). a gate wtih a building above very similiar to city gate.
3. same as 1 but with housings for a mayor, magistrate or even overlord (a kind of 'castle')
4. Motte and Bailey (In some AoE4 scenarios (skirmish games particularly) the First Town Center usually located on the high ground, sometimes a the hilltop. and that's exactly what Motte and Bailey Proto-Castle is

 

[Evie]

5)An oddball mix drawing inspirations from all of these, not perfectly corresponding to any single historical reality but more to gameplay necessity.

 

[Snowygerry]

Looks like a square farm as was common here in the 18th century :

Best known is probably this one :

Hougoumont - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

 

[Kyriakos]

Looks like a square farm as was common here in the 18th century :

Best known is probably this one :

Hougoumont - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Those farms keep breeding people and researching advancement of ages

 

[innonimatu]

Looks like a square farm as was common here in the 18th century :

Yes it comes across as a single farm. And a very small one in that AoE image.
I think they wanted to represent a lord's house. The old versions of AoE did a better job of representing that!