I had the same problem as you, my friend, and through a little innovative hacking, i was able to solve quite easily.
The problem here is that the eulaxp1.dll is corrupt, and in order for you to play the game for the first time, RON is requiring your agreement. Thats all thats wrong. Its not like you have bad game data or anything, it just that cannot process eula's (End User License Agreement) as it should. So, lets just use find another dll that can handle eula's and tell RONTP to use it. Sounds daunting, huh? But really, its quite simple.
It just so happens that RON comes with another eula-handling DLL named EBUEula.dll. Fortunatly for us, this dll handles EULAs in a way thats compliant for RON. You can usually find this file in C:\Program Files\Microsoft Games\Rise of Nations. Just make sure you have it.
Now to tell RONTP to use this new DLL, we have to edit some settings. Go to your RONTP data folder, and you should see a whole load of xml files. Mine was in C:\Program Files\Microsoft Games\Rise of Nations\Thrones and Patriots\data.
The file your looking for is called eula.xml.Before you start, please back up the original file. Just copy and paste one in the same directory with something you can remember, like eula.xml.backup. Now, open the real file and you'll find some data that tells RONTP about displaying the eula and stuff. The only line we're concerned with however is the <DLLNAME> line. Make yours look like this:
<DLLNAME>EBUEula.dll</DLLNAME>
And there you have it! Dont touch anything else. Try to run the game....works, huh? and this whole mess was just so you could see the eula, which no one sane reads anyway! Happy gaming!