Hello,
so my problem is, that when I play with my friend together (2 humans vs 2 AI) the game runs really badly for my friend and later for me too.
Here is what is happening:
- It starts in lobby, when my friend join my lobby he has already fps drops (10-20fps, normally he runs 60fps).
- After I start the game everything seems to be ok for me nad for friend (friend 60fps, me 144fps).
- In the moment someone ages up, friends fps instantly drop to 14 fps.
- As the game goes, his fps randomly shoots from 14 fps to normal 60 fps. It happens mostly when someone ages (sometimes he get back 60fps, sometimes it drops)
- This is when the game starts lagging for me too (to this moment my game is ok). Around 100 pop, my friend show yellow clock (in right corner). This cause me to extremely lag also (even if game runs still on 144fps).
Friend tried to play single skirmish = everything ok, solid 60 fps whole game.
Please help us
Thanks
I believe there is an issue with Strong AI (Hardest/Expert difficulty) queuing tens or even hundreds of commands per unit per second, making the games very laggy. I play with many friends and when we go 4 humans vs 4 AI on hardest or Expert, the game gets close to unplayable as well.
You can always try to reduce your graphics to minimum just to make sure it’s not a hardware issue too, Age of Empires 3: DE is deceptively hard to run haha.
The way the game works I think network stability is quite important as well because the game will wait for other players, making the game stutter quite badly when others have bad connectivity so you could try to both play with an ethernet cable plugged in if you are currently playing on WiFi 
Beyond that, unfortunately, there is not much more you can do. Even I, with an intel i9 and Rtx3090, get stutters and fps drops especially in games with many players.
The definitive fix for me was to turn off Record Games. I’m not sure if it’s possible to turn off Ranked Recordings, but for Custom games this definitely did the trick for me. My GPU usage does not dip every 15 seconds anymore (presumably that was the Record Game File updating?).
I don’t think the problem is with ai, because my friend lagged when we tried 1v1. Soon around 100 pop (as I mentioned) my friend gets yellow clock and after that (even more pop) he gets red clock, which makes my game unplayable too.
Changing graphics doesn’t help.
That’s the thing with network, we both have solid internet connection with cable plugged in. We tried different servers, even local sever with no results.
It ran better with Record Games off, but still sometimes a freeze here and there. Now I’ve uninstalled Malwarebytes and the freezes are all truly gone!
We always play with Record games off. So the problem is not in this one.
So as I said, disabling Malwarebytes (or another active anti-virus) fully did the trick for me in the end. No dips at all any more!
So i turned off Malwarebytes (my friend turned off avast). We created private lobby to try it out (2v6 easiest ai). It looked promising, but around 140 pop it started again. We will try our classic lobby 2v2 (hardest ai) and I let you know
Out of curiosity, would you mind telling us what CPU you and your friend have? The game is designed to wait for other players to make it fair, so as soon as one person lags/stutters enough, the whole game will lag for everyone. It feels like your CPU can’t handle the high population (like I said earlier it’s really hard to run).
One thing I found helps is completely exiting and restarting the game in between rounds, it feels like there’s a memory leak or something…
That being said, I have an RTX3090 and a i9-10900 20 core cpu and still get stuttering from time to time, especially if I play 3-4 games in a row without restarting the game.
I have i5-9400F.
We both ran the ranked benchmark (or how is it called) with results of 1200 - 1300 points.
I don’t know it they somehow fixed this problem in previous updates, but it is actually fixed.