AoE 3 install on Windows 10

Hello,

I hope you can help me. I am trying to play Age of Empires III - Complete Collection (CD version) with The War Chiefs and The Asian Dynasties expansion packs.

I installed it ok with the 3 cd’s (I just installed, just the base game, not the expansion pack.) It installs fine, by that I mean it took less than 10 minutes and seemed to not have any problems, it asked for each CD I put in and completed the installation. all went well and at the end of the installation it asked for disc one, I put that back in and it came up completed install. I clicked finish and that box disappeared, however, I noticed that no shortcut was automatically added to the desktop so I clicked on the disc to start the game nothing happened.

I looked in the task manager and it showed age3 in there with a RAM usage of 4.5MB but the game itself did not start up, there was no error message, just no game playing but RAM being used by it.

So I ended the process, restarted my laptop and this time I went to the MicrosoftGames folder and started the game that way. However, the same thing appeared in the task manager but did not do anything.

Things I have tried,

1, selecting DirectPlay in Programs and Features

2, made a shortcut to my desktop then I right-clicked and selected it to run in compatibility mode for Windows Vista Service Pack 2 and clicked apply

Any ideas on how to get this game to work on Windows 10?

Hm, the steam version works perfectly fine, on windows 10 and 11
Make sure you have the game patched to version 1.13