Input Delay/Desync Issue

Age of Mythology: Retold Report a Bug
1

  • Game Version: Standard / Premium / DLC

    • Premium With Expansion Pass and Demeter

  • Build Number: (In-game in Settings Menu)

    • v.100.18.65484.0 (589772R)

  • Platform: Steam / Microsoft Store / Xbox / PlayStation

    • Steam

  • Operating System: Windows 11 / Windows 10 / Windows 8 / Windows 7 / Mac / Linux

    • Windows 11 Home

Issue:

(please provide a detailed description of the issue)
(use the upload button image to include a picture or video of the issue in action if possible)

When playing a multiplayer game, there is a sort of input delay/desync issue in later parts of the game, which causes several to 10s of seconds for a command to go through, making the game essentially unplayable. An example of this is below.

In case the video doesn’t display properly, at 5:58 game time I issue a move command to a toxote, who at 6:10 finally receives the command and moves. At 6:14 I issue a different move command and at 6:27 he finally receives and carries out the command, even after briefly getting distracted by and attacking a passing aerial enemy in the meantime.

For the purposes of obtaining this footage, I played an ultra res lighting game on fast speed on a 5v5 standard size map (in a multiplayer lobby, even though I’m the only human player in the multiplayer game), but I have experienced this issue as low as a 4v4 on standard game, speed, and res settings (albeit at later game times since it takes more time to amass armies). When selecting the server, the server reported around 20ms of ping. When playing with a friend in a different game, we were able to verbally verify that I was at a game time 9 seconds behind where he was at (and given he was also experiencing delay, he himself was likely behind where the server was at).

This only happens in multiplayer. In singleplayer I can run 6v6 on large size map with no issue. My specs are as follows:

-RTX 5050 8gb vram GPU Laptop
-Intel 8-core i5-13420H Processor
-32 GB RAM

This is actually the second time I reported this bug, the first being here: Game Time Desync in Multiplayer

I had worse hardware at the time, and it seemed that lowering the resolution provided some relief for the issue, though I would later find out it didn’t resolve the issue completely, but up to a certain point I just thought maybe the hardware was a little old. This time, though, my hardware well exceeds recommended specs (at least I think, unless I’m missing something), and lowering the resolution did not provide sufficient relief even in the 4v4 game. Windows is up to date as are the nvidia graphics drivers, and I specifically set AoM to use the dedicated gpu in the windows settings.

I should note that, for whatever reason, my computer has trouble with the benchmark test, varying from 600-1200 without even seeming to correlate with how high or how low the settings are. During either the benchmark or during a game, when I check the task manager none of the components seems to be maxing out, so there is no identifiable bottleneck that I can find.

Trigger Event:

It doesn’t seem to happen due to any one thing in particular. It seems to eventually happen when a large match gets to late game enough.

Repro Steps:

  1. Host a multiplayer game, with or without other human players, though make sure there are at least 8 slots filled with humans/bots.
  2. Start and play the game as usual.
  3. Eventually you’ll start getting massive input delay and be behind other players/server game time.
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Believe it or not, desync also happens very often in AOE IV and AOE II. It seems like a plague for all of MS’s game

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So I fixed the benchmark thing at least. Apparently the power mode on my computer was set to balanced even for plugged in mode. Changing it to performance, predictably, allows the program to use more computer resources. This also improved the multiplayer input delay issue but hasn’t gotten rid of it completely (though even 12 players on a standard map seems playable if I lower the resolution and some other settings).