Jared's space

To create a party in Age of Empires Online (or AoEO) select the brown button in the top left hand corner of the screen with a yellow person character and a green plus sign. This should open up your list of friends. Then left click on the right side button of the list and one of the context menu options will be invite. Click on invite and you should see that a party has been formed.

If you do not have a premium civilization the only thing (that I’ve discovered so far) you can do with the party is have them participate in co-op quests. If you do have a premium civilization (which I currently don’t have, but kind of had during the beta) then you can host matches in an arena, where you can select which members of the party will be in teams and you and your friends can face off against each other. If you don’t have a premium account you can still do Player vs. Player (either PvP 1, or PvP 2) by going to Sparta and the servers will select a random player for you to play against. You can’t pick who to play against.

Another way to create a party is by looking at the different gamer tags in the chat window, click on their tag, and in the context menu select invite. However, inviting random strangers probably won’t result in many accepted invitations, but I could be wrong.