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Yep! It's based pretty heavily off how AoE and later games do it.

Are those games open source or has it been possible to reverse engineer the algorithm, or ...?

The original 0 A.D. pathfinder was based largely off reverse engineering the AoM one. [1]

Engineers have presented some of how their algorithms work at conferences and in other places.

Know of any video links to talks that you could share?