After excitedly playing my first game of AOE3 recently I saved it to come back too later which is quite a common thing to do. When I came back to replay the game an hour or so later though I was faced with the message ‘Game Paused’ and no obvious way of getting the game to continue.
I knew that the solution must be simple but there was nothing that indicated what to do so I did a bit of digging.
To get Age of Empires 3 (III) to play after opening a saved game which is paused by default you need to press the ‘Pause/Break’ button on your keyboard.
According to Microsoft pressing F7 should do it too.
It might also be worth checking you have the latest updates (Tools->Update from with in the initial game menu).
Once you have updated and restarted AOE3 the game should show a prompt giving you the option to resume a saved game when you open it.
You can read the help from Microsoft on this topic at http://support.microsoft.com/kb/910814