The 3 of us are not great at RON. We're not hardcore or anything like that. We just like teaming up against the AI. We worked our way up to 3 toughs and that's when we started to hit a wall. 1 tougher + 2 toughs was exponentially harder. 2/1 was worse still. So we set our final goal to beat 3 tougher AI.
We play peace until Gunpowder because we don't think rush attacks are particularly interesting. But this really accentuates the advantage the AI gets (they get bonus resources).
We fought 3 Tougher AI almost every day for months. We conceded we couldn't take them in a straight fight, so we kept refining our strategy. Until finally this epic battle took place.
The video is up on youtube (trimmed down to < 15m). http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JnCBmMJ0zWU
I'm submitting one other file where we fight 3 Toughests, but this fight, frankly, was the most awesome RON battle I've ever been in.