Platform (Steam or Microsoft Store)
Microsoft Store and Steam
Issue:
When playing with my wife (she’s on steam and I’m on the Microsoft store- thank you gamepass), the game gradually becomes more and more unplayable. This happens regardless of graphical settings and regardless of local LAN or server. See the video here: https://www.reddit.com/r/aoe2/comments/eg1z3g/really_glitchy/
Slowly things become less and less responsive. In the old game, I think it would just be a desync. Her computer has integrated graphics and mine is GTX 970, so I have the UHD and she doesn’t. Turning that off seemed to make the game last longer before it got unplayable. Game seems to speed up and slow down. There is always a blue clock next to our names (sometimes one of us has a red clock), though I’ve been unable to find documentation on what this means.
Already filed a bug via feedback hub, though I suspect that might go on the app compat team and not you guys since you aren’t in COSINE.
Reproduction Steps:
Start a multiplayer game
Play for about 12 minutes
Units don’t respond and rubberband
(ATTACH A SCREENSHOT IF YOU ARE ABLE!)
Video works better (wasn’t able to upload here)
Same issue here,
This happens only for the host of the game
(play 1v1 with a friend) → huge lag after 10mn and unit doesnt respond while the game continue …
My friend can play without any issue while I can’t do anything
My friends and I have this same issue as well. Common settings are:
3 Human Players and 2 to 3 NPCs.
Difficulty = Hardest
Map Size = Ludicrous
Population = 200 - 300 (depending on game)
Maps = Blackforest, Baltic, Team Islands, Rivers, and a few others (doesn’t seem to matter)
Treaty = 45min
Issues begin around 1 hour of gameplay. The game seems to lag, note F11 and GTX both indicate 60fps solid performance. Net lag jumps from around 80ms to 300-400ms. Visually the game gets jumpy and looks like lag. Within seconds of onset, it makes the game unplayable and sometimes crashes.
Recorded a game for this purpose and found the NPCs doing some insane things…
It micros (individually controls) most of its units every second… straight up cheating (not a human ability) FIX = limit NPCs to a max of 5-7 actions per second total. this decreases the workload on CPU
Queuing single units upwards of 20-30 moves. THIS IS INSANE!! totally broken… it constantly reassigns these movements every second for no reason. FIX = limit NPCs to a max of 3 movement ques per unit. This causes even higher stress on the CPU.
With these few fixes, I think you will see a massive increase in gameplay performance.
Side note our PCs differ in specs all of them are top-line gaming rigs. Running Witcher 3 on 4k ultra settings isn’t an issue with 60fps to 90fps.
These effects do not happen on PVP games with 5 - 6 players. Only with NPCs. Therefore programming and network limitations must be the issue.
Same here for online private multiplayer matches on the latest version (2 humans vs. 3 AI today). Has happened a few times the past while, including today. Since I don’t play online much, I’d say it’s about 75% of my matches where this happens. I’m on latest version of the game.
Game starts fine. Then eventually (~20-30 minutes in) a 30-second lag kicks in, then creeps up to 45-seconds, then 1 minute, 2 minutes, etc… the longer you go the worse it gets. Along with slight rubber-banding every so often. Yet our chats remain real-time.
Not sure if it matters, but I’m the one who creates the lobby each time. It doesn’t always happen to him, like today he was fine. (UPDATE: The same issue happened to him a while after I had resigned, too, so he ended up closing the game, as well, since it became unplayable.) We use WESTUS2 server each time because I don’t trust default/automatic, as that didn’t choose the best server once, imo. Other variables:
I record the games
Moderate difficulty
Giant map size
400 pop max
Robinhood map today, but it has been different maps before.
We try to save and restore the game to fix, as this tends to resolve it for a short time, but the issue then creeps back in over 5 or so minutes of further gameplay. I think one time a few weeks ago a save/restore let us play to the end without issue, if I’m not mistaken.
But when I stopped playing just now:
I would send a flare and it would take 2 mins to appear on mini-map and make sound.
When I’d tell idle villagers to construct a mine, it would take 2 minutes for them to start moving and go build it
When I told them to build gate, took them 2 minutes to respond
When I sent resources to teammate because I was giving up for the day and he was going to keep playing, it took 2-3 mins for him to get the resources.
I’ve done Internet speedtests, and I’m at 24Mbps, before, during, and after the game. He’s at a solid 90Mbps. No anti-virus scans or other intensive processes are going on. My PC gets high-level AoE2:DE game benchmark results each time; my CPU and GPU can run this game no problem.
Having the exact same issue, trying to trouble shoot for two weeks, posted in multiple threads, multiple users experiencing the same issue, these aren’t isolated incidences and need to be addressed already, what’s taking so long, game is literally broken
Yeah, this is too bad. Fortunately, I’ve never seen this on single-player vs. AI games, so we could still play there. But it’d be nice to not run into this when we do actual MP.
EDIT: When I said I had never seen it on SP vs. AI games, I mean from the main menu, choosing “Standard Game” and setting up a game with me vs. AI. (I do not set up such SP games by choosing “Multiplayer” from the main menu and creating a server-side lobby there (even though it is possible); in case that’s an important differentiator.)
Yeah, multiplayer + AI causes severe lag. If you look at the recorded game afterwards from the AI point of view, you’ll notice when he sends troops, he keeps updating the (attack)move command every tick. Now imagine that for 100-200 units per AI. Use the HD AI until they fix new AI behavior (I’m assuming that would alleviate the issue a bit)
Jup, same here. Yet, any game that includes AI gets like 20-30seconds “rubber banding” or pure action delay (if actions are registered at all) over time. It gets worse from feudal onwards (when military units are being produced by AI, which confirms my theory about military unit high frequency command issues from the AI)
Sigh. Hope it gets fixed soon. Is hard to know if they are even aware of this bug or are tracking it, as this thread was created in December and it seems like it’s a pretty important one
I‘m experiencing the same issue when playing multiplayer with two players and two or more AI players. We are not able to finish any game, since it severely lags and then finally crashes. It completely ruins the game for us
The host computer runs on an i9 9900k with 64 gb ram but can’t handle the game longer than 45 minutes max.
After the last server maintenance I have the same problem here, but only happens in multiplayer game, I checked my internet, pretty sure this is the game server problem or only happens when I play multiplayer game.
This was the case during beta, I had many of these rubberbanding and lag issues up to the point when DE simply froze. Nothing to do with people’s connection, just bad servers and poor network coding. Of course this is still not fixed half a year from release lol. They do not care.
Does it even happen to you when you click “Standard Game” here on the main menu and set up a SP vs. AI game there?
I’m only asking, because I just tested and it looks like it’s also possible to instead go into “Multiplayer” from the main menu and set up a SP game vs. AI there; which would be using servers for your game.
I’ve never played SP games from the “Multiplayer” area.
And since I’ve never had the lag issue when setting up via a “Standard Game,” I just wanted to see if that’s where you were saying you’ve had the issue happen, or if it was instead in the “Multiplayer” (server-based) area where you had the issue.
I tested it out on the Standard Game option and there is no delay in commands, no lag and no latency issues, I played 3 complete games fine in “Standard” mode. The issue seems to be when you use “Multiplayer” and still only play alone against the AI. The problem is I can’t play with friends vs AI without the game lagging out and someone disconnecting. Playing alone completely on Standard is fine
Right on, thanks for confirming that, SuperNESDisney! That info will hopefully help the devs if and when they see this thread; if they haven’t already.
i wanted this thread to continue as there is no update regarding that problem. It is really fun to play against AI with my friends but this ruins it. BTW we dont have any problem playing 3v3 against AI but when we play 2v2 the problems start.
I am having the same issues, Deathmatch on Black Forest, 2V2 with 2 AI and we experienced the same issues within 5 minutes of the game. initially moderate rubber banding became extreme. The AI we were playing against seemed to have the same issue as they did not attack us after the expiration of the treaty (which they normally do instantly) anyone have any fixes?
