Hardware optimization in DE?

Hey there,

Played a few games of DE with my friends recently, and noticed something interesting: On task manager, it's saying that all 16 threads of my Ryzen 3700x are being used. Only thing I had in the background was steam, and that only uses like ~20% of one thread while in a voice call.

I'd heard for the longest time that RTS games (but particularly the Age of empires series) was heavily single thread bound.

Now, it played incredibly smoothly (until we got to the 500 pop trash wars where there was some pretty disgusting frame stutters, but that's to be expected) so this isn't complaining about anything, but i'm just surprised that I was hitting every single thread for a reasonable amount.

Am I imagining things, or have there been some optimizations to the DE (specifically AOE2DE) that cause multi-core support? Do the other Age games (And the older versions of AOE2) only hit 1 core?

As a side note - is the DE version very GPU intensive? Also, if one of my friends has a potato for a pc, will it cause everyone else to stutter during those massive trash wars?

Thank you.