Ok so after a lot of port forwarding and disabling things, my brother and I have the same builds, windows versions, etc. I am on Steam, he is on the MS store version. We are both logged into xbox and even have the games bar and both xbox companion, and beta xbox apps open. We cannot use the invite. Neither xbox live (which just says loading forever) and the invite button doesn’t work. I upgraded my copy from the MS store and tried going that way (still poed none of my achievements transferred) and still nothing. We can play on lan and in the public lobby as long as we turn off windows defender firewalls., but the invites don’t work if we want a private game. Any suggestions? and does anyone know the rules to set up for windows firewall advanced settings?
Have u tried the invite function in the Xbox App or only the button in game menu? But it is also possible that the Invite function just does not work with Crossplay. Even in the 2nd part, so loved by MS, this function is buggi via Crossplay.
We have the same problem since a couple of days.
Yes we’ve tried the xbox apps and tried through crossplay. I think it is because microsoft is making the transfer to the new xbox app is part of the problem. We noticed that our other xbox games are jicky on achievements and invites. We both play solitaire and got achievements yesterday but they didn’t register until late last night. Weird thing is my AOEDE2 on steam achivements are registering in both places eventhough I don’t have the MS store version. My daughter and I had no problems last night playing the AOE2 2013 last night and she’s in another city. I don’t want to contact MS. The last time I did that they screwed up my computer so badly I had to wipe everything and reinstall and still find jicky things from time to time.
Sorry, then I cant help 
. But to contact MS would be useless.
I am having same issue…not able to invite anyone to start multiplayer game…need to be in public lobby and join!!! why is that? what happened to invite and join game???