All settings/progress erased after each playing session

Hello Aoe3 community,

Last weekend, I bought a €1.5k laptop to just be able to play my all time favourite game after a pause of 10 years. Now I noticed that nothing, literally nothing, gets saved in my game.

After each session all campaign progress and all changes in settings (e.g. hotkeys) are erased. Each time I open the game, I see the note on “We are respectful and consulted First Nations consultants etc.” and a prompt to choose between the UI layout. However, if I save skirmish/campaign games, the saved games can be loaded though.

Would there be any fixes to this issue? Or do I need to wait just for the newest patch? I’m running the latest 14825.0 (145897) version of the game.

To summarize the issue,

  1. Closing the game erases all saved data and opening the game is each time as if I would open the game for the first time

I’d be very thankful for any help!