Oh yeah my bad. Maybe you should then upgrade the SSD to fit couple of games too? It’s not like you’re gonna lose it if you even upgrade anything else.
I’m not sure how much difference dual channel does on desktop, but I got 30-100% better performance after upgrading single channel to dual channel.
For now it’s fine to run the game off the HDD. I don’t really need UHD to enjoy the game, and other games just are bit slower in loading times. They don’t get hampered on FPS, which makes a 2TB HDD for my steam library an excellent proposition. I can life with it. At some point in the future I’ll be scrapping my main rig and just reallocate its SSD’s.
Sounds fair, as long as its good for you! 
I think there’s way more problems than the devs have answers to and it seems like it’s gonna be this way for a while. Sad but many of us saw this coming.
I think your issue here is with your laptop, not the game. Your MacBook Pro will be thermal throttling the CPU all the way down to ~900MHz at which point it can go no lower and shuts down. Any extended CPU benchmark test will have the same results.
I recommend pointing a fan at your laptop to help cool it down. I’m serious. It has helped for me.
Yes the fan does kick on but I’m well above the minimum specs and so this shouldn’t happen.
Your computer cannot adequately cool itself. After some minutes of playing your computers performance goes below the minimum specs because it is getting too hot. Then after it cannot lower its performance anymore it shuts down to protect itself. This is no fault of the game, and is in fact the fault of the computer manufacturer (Apple in this case).
If it didn’t do this, your computer would be permanently damaged.
Monitor your core frequency and temperatures. Check if the core that is well above minimum specs doesn’t fall below said minimum specs.
I completely agree with the OP, this game is a buggy mess and I am extremely angry and frustrated the game was released in this state. I participated in the beta and gave the same feedback in each one - the game is not ready yet. I think it’s quite frankly embarrassing to launch a multiplayer game in this state where you can’t find a game, or sit in a queue for 10 minutes only to receive a “server did not respond” message after that time. For all of the people that were looking for reasons to hate on this product you have given them all of the ammunition they need.
As it stands I could not in good faith recommend this game and it’s sad that in order to play multiplayer AOE2, I’ve had to go back to Voobly on the launch weekend of the game.
It’s such a shame because there is a great game and experience in here somewhere, it just needs an additional 3 months of QA to fix.
I hope you don’t expect them to optimize for Xeons and Titan cards, do you? They’re having a rough time optimizing for gaming hardware already. It’s a 20 year old engine. Coding for ever changing hardware is not as simple as writing a book.
At this point I don’t expect anything from this game.
Wow you actually do run Xeon 
This system is very subpar. The game is CPU intensive, and has recommended (recommended=decent settings to play on, not ideal) specs for a CPU with a base clock of 2.4GHz. Your Xeon processor (assuming it’s cooled properly, doesn’t thermally bottleneck, etc.) is 0.8Ghz short of even that (that’s massive) AND is a workstation optimized CPU, which means your games will never run as smooth as they would with a same priced intel core series processor/ryzen for example. Your GPU is just ok, honestly a GTX 960 is really outdated right now, but ok just for this game, only because it’s mainly drawing on CPU. Your RAM size is the only thing that is ideal in your system.
I hate to break it to you and don’t like being the guy to tell kids that Santa ain’t real, but knowing your hardware will save you lots of time, money and complaining. You just got played by Dell marketing. A 1200-1500$ custom built PC (even built like 2-3 years ago!) absolutely DESTROYS your build in every aspect (including workstation and productivity aspects) while being perfectly optimized for games. The poor performance you’re getting is basically on your end. Know what your buying. Heartfelt advise; never buy prebuilt systems and as of 2019 onward, a high end ryzen 3000 or intel core i9 should cover 99.9% of the high end people’s needs unless you want to run stuff like fluid simulations or computational science software, which you don’t cause you cannot do that with 16 GB of RAM. You don’t buy hardware for its price, but for its capability to do the things you want it to do, and failing that with your budget is unreal to put it mildly.
That being said though, AoE2 is not well optimized either, and guess what, will probably never be, courtesy of its 20 year old engine. Pretty sad, but still by FAR the best implementation compared to AoE2 HD and the original game as far as modernisation and playability goes.
Game runs 60 fps, the issue is multiplayer , can’t find games in lobby or pass the benchmark. Personally, I don’t play campaign or single player so the game is useless right now.
You wasted all that time making a point that was useless. And for the record I can play almost any triple A title on max settings no problem, so as far as performance goes, my card and setup is fine, mainly use it for video editing and the occasional game.
It seems you’re missing the point. Your CPU is optimized for workstations, which means it’s perfect for video editing and can handle most AAA games since they usually require more out of the GPU.
AoE (and strategy games in general) need more computing power and they put it all on the CPU to handle. Unfortunately since most of the operations need to be synced to each other it can’t use multiple threads, so it creates a bottleneck depending on the single-core performance of your CPU, which has sub-par speeds.
I don’t want to criticize your choice, especially if you mainly do video editing with your setup, but it’s fair to say your cpu is not a good one to play this (or any cpu-intensive) game. I certainly hope with some performance patch you’ll be able to play, but i fear it won’t be possible.
The problem isn’t the gameplay, I’m fine with 60fps on this title. The problem
is all the other issues dealing with multiplayers / ranked matches. Very underwhelming launch considering. all the feedback and recommendations we gave the developers in beta who clearly ignored our requests to delay the title. So now we’re at a point where the game works for some and not others making the player base even smaller. It’s unfortunately the same outcome as the fist DE.
“You wasted all that time making a point that was useless”
Clearly you either didn’t read or didn’t understand my comment. The fact is you come to a game’s forums criticizing its performance, but your hardware doesn’t meet the requirements. You don’t have to be a hardware enthusiast to read requirements. I’m copying from their steam page;
CPU recommended clock speed; [2.4 GHz or greater] Your CPU clock speed; 1.6 GHz.
Quick maths; your 1.6GHz is less than the recommended 2.4 GHz. So your experience is guaranteed to be less than what they would recommend it to be (and even less than the ideal).
You don’t care about recommended specs? Here’s what they list as bare minimum, again on the game’s steam page;
CPU MINIMUM clock speed; they list core 2 duos, which come at an excess of 2.0 GHz for the last couple of years. Your CPU clock speed; 1.6 GHz. Quick maths; your 1.6GHz is less than the MINIMUM 2.0 GHz that they require. So the game MUST not run on your system. The 60fps you’re getting are on Single Player I assume, there’s no way you can maintain that on a multiplayer match with many players. In other words, if you ever run this game on your system, you are lucky they optimized it so well for such a thing to happen. You will never be able to play multi with your specs. End of story. Not the devs fault if you can’t read required specs.
I’ll repeat the advice I gave you in my last comment. Know. Your. Hardware. Understand what you’re buying at all times. If you don’t, ask someone who does, that’s fine and honestly what most people do. Not my job to criticize your PC, but I know for fact you could have bought a better system for less than half the cost of the one you have. As well as I know for fact you should not have bought AoE2 Definitive cause you simply don’t meet its requirements. Aim for games whose recommended requirements are significantly lower than your hardware.
Your hardware will never run this (CPU-dependent) game as is, you’ll have to upgrade above minimum specs if you want to do that. If you need any advice regarding hardware choices, feel free to PM me, I’d love to help. In the meantime, please acknowledge your mistake, there’s no point repeating your complaints when the misunderstanding is on your end 
Again you’re wasting your time. The problem isnt with my personal performance, game runs at 60 fps, I’m quite fine with that. Over 2.1k people have read this post which shows majority of people are having issues with an unfinished game thats poorly optimized. It’s really that simple. We warned the devs in beta, but they chose not to listen so here we are with dead lobby’s and a lackluster launch. Single player & campaign work just fine, but for multiplayer people, this game is a joke at the moment.
Not sure as to what you don’t comprehend about that simple statement.
yeah, there are issues, like any other game at launch. It’s not an excuse but it’s realism, no game, expecially if multiplayer, is going to launch without problems. Delaying the game probably wouldn’t have solved most of those problems (like lobbies not showing up or missing MS store updates)
BTW 2.2k views doesn’t really mean anything, and there’s no way a “majority” of players is having such big problems as you’re saying.
I’m really curious to what specific issues were ignored during the beta that led some players to ask for the game to be delayed.
If you don’t think that the majority of players are having issues with multiplayer then go take a look at the online lobbies and let me know if that’s normal for a game that came out less than a week ago.
This game was forced to market because it fits in with the timeline of the release for age III: DE and then Age IV. It was a money grab that they plan on trying to patch post release , but it comes at the cost of losing a loyal player base.