It seems like it worse than its ever been before. 3 out of 4 games out of synced before they were finished yesterday for me and 7 other players. One game even Out of Sync immediately on game start, literally second 0. Everyone of the server had good computers, we know each other and have played together regularly for years now, there was no or minimal lagg.
For how old this game is, is it really too much to ask for the game to run smooth enough for 1-2 hours of gameplay? Basically one Treaty 40 game. This may come off as a flex, but I have played this game since 2005, I was there at the start (insert 3000 years ago meme), and I can confidently say that the game back then, almost 19 years ago, had better performance than modern day AOE3, even on goddam dial up, 56k connections! Out of sync did happen, but it was rare.
We already have the burden of restarting the game after every Treaty game because of a bug that has for some reason never been addressed since Day 1 (it laggs like hell if you dont btw new players regardless of how good your PC is). The game is riddled with small bugs that are mostly only seen after X amount of time that it runs, like villagers getting stuck in buildings for example.
The Treaty community largely gets ignored in most patches, I dont think there is even 1 line of the new patch that is to do with Treaty? It desperately needs balancing. Some civs are so wildly unbalanced that its almost comical, yes Ethiopia/Mexico im talking to you. Then at the polar opposite side of the spectrum, we have the 2 newest civs in the game, Malta and Italy, that arent even playable because there are grossly underpowered and weak, at least competitively. I know its challenging to have balance for every game mode, but more effort should made when designing new content otherwise a portion of the community just gets left out and it honestly feels bad.
It is still an active game mode. I know there is no where near the amount of players compared to supremacy, however these players spend a signifcantly longer time in the game compared to most other game modes and should not be ignored like they are.
Rant over.
Just to add something important to note: The solution to the problem would be to absolutely Save Game and continue playing, however this simply does not work for Treaty and is also broken. Read this: Fix Out of Sync errors + general rant about Treaty - #6 by FedSmoker5827
