THE GAME IS UNPLAYABLE ONLINE to prove that …Just go with your computer or any “highend” to the online lobby right now and try to play a friendly game 4x4 300+ any map huge or above and see if the game dont start to lag to you or any of the other player after past 20+ minutes. you will see the watch of at least 3 or 4 turning yellow and red !!!
Dont worry about my typing or exclamations or my attitude … just help to fix this know issue. You didnt answaer my question. so the fix for this issue is just to throw away this laptop?
So what is the fix to this constant lagging trying to play online 4x4 or 3x3 with 300+ pop like we used to for the past 20 years?
I just did an interesting test for fun. Moved the in-game FPS Limit setting down to 15 to see if it would affect my benchmark score and it definitely did.
Yesterday, with FPS Limit at infinite like I always do, I got 1265.8
When putting it to 15 just now, I got a 955.3 score, and this message:
Interesting that the benchmark test takes that setting into consideration, completely (or mostly?) bypassing my actual hardware and ability to keep up with the action in a sense. I wonder if I kept it at 15 FPS if it would wreak havoc on an actual multiplayer game connection?
If so, are there some players who reduce the FPS limit to give the game a more “retro” stuttery look? They could be wreaking havoc on their MP matches if it impacts latency somehow. More testing would be needed. Plus, are there really any players who do that? (could be a non-issue)
@sandman5080, what FPS Limit are you set at? You might try bumping it up higher.
Also, try disabling all the ‘extra’ graphical things (under Advanced Options of the Graphics tab), like “3D Water”, “Blood”, “Render Beach Waves”. Reduce “Particles” to “Low”. Disable “Depth of Field”, “Bloom”, “Anti-Aliasing”, “Animate Fog”, and “Animate Fog Border”. Maybe also disable “Vignette”. Don’t “Record” games. Put “Display Mode” at “Full Screen”. And any other setting you can find that could help lower the impact on processing. Could be a good test anyways
Strategy games allow you to play them in ways that practically infinitely increase hardware demands. You can play 4v4 500 population with infinite resources. Or even make a custom scenario where units cost 0 population or something like that.
AoE2 was supposed to be played with 75 population and was capped at 20 FPS on release. Only the Definitive edition removed the 20 FPS limit in multiplayer (HD had 60 FPS in single player).
I used to play shooters with 20-30 FPS when I was young, nowadays I wouldn’t even consider 60 FPS playable anymore.
The issue isn’t you. It’s the other people. If they lag you can’t do much about it nor can the developers.
Any game with human interactions has the problem that all those humans can cause issues that can’t be prevented by the devs.
No. You can have the best computer in the world but as long as other people lag it won’t help you much in a 4v4.
Also even in single player every computer will become laggy at some point with enough units on a large enough map.
But yeah. Gaming is not the cheapest hobby. You will have to by new hardware from time to time. Still cheaper then the gear you need for many other hobbies though.
A desktop computer is always more powerful then a laptop for the same budget because it doesn’t have to be build with as much space and power efficiency as a laptop has to.
actually decided to run some tests with 8 AI players on a ludicris map size with 500 pop, results were about what i’d expect (12 fps at worst point with occasional freeze), thing is, no hardware will fix this, you’d need 8x current single thread cpu performance (using my i7 12650H as reference here, roughly desktop i5 12600) to run this smoothly, and rewriting aoe2 into multithreading would probably screw with the game’s atm very stable inner workings so not really an option
not the latest and the greatest i9 kind, but nowhere near old age given the lack of big single thread increases over the last few years
Not what I was saying. I was saying Low FPS for high CPU/GPU might make matches worse. I have high CPU/GPU and I got a 950 score after doing that. Can’t really tell if you’re being sarcastic or not, sorry
As someone with high CPU/GPU, I might like to choose low FPS as purely an aesthetic thing (retro look). I can see how others with decent or high CPU/GPU might think it would have no bearing on their multiplayer games since the raw technical prowess behind it all is absolutely fine. 15 FPS example was extreme, but I was thinking more like what if 30 or 45 FPS was selected. Anything lower than what you’re system can handle may negatively impact MP games, it seems. (More testing required to verify true impacts)
In the case of low CPU/GPU, obviously you will have a lower upper limit than ideal… some threshold ceiling that you can’t really go over, technically speaking. I guess I’m recommending sandman plays around with that setting to see if it helps anything. Somewhat doubt it will, but just wanted to call it out. Maybe the default setting where “V-Sync” is enabled and FPS slider is grayed out is the best option for them, I really don’t know. But if I were them I would definitely try disabling “V-Sync” and experimenting with the FPS slider and all the other settings
I don’t recall ever really having issues with the Ludikris map on HD. But maybe we did and just didn’t realize that was the cause. Even with DE, I don’t think an average or casual player would know. The “Ludicrous” map entry in the lobby should probably come with a warning on how its technical performance will likely be pretty bad at some point, including out-of-syncs. And ‘Risky. Use at your own risk.’
This is the reason this game sucks !
I just posted a serious issue that this game has that IT IS UNPLAYBLE ONLINE if you want to play teams !
after numerous replay here this claim is true !! it doesnt matter what system you have or internet you have the game will lag at some time playing teams online, if not for you or some other player and it will ruin the experience !
IS THERE A FIX FOR THAT … NO !
the band-aid is just to do not play that kinda os game!
so instead of trying to fix the game experience I get community note !
so if you googled about the lagging, freezing, kick out, synch out. just GIVE UP… uninstall the game, ask for a reimburse and play a game that devs care about !!
I prefer 1v1s but occasionally play 2v2s, so yes, I tried Team Games.
Me being a moderator has nothing to do with it. The reason action against your post was taken was that a user (i.e. not a moderator) reported it to review.
Did you happen to try anything I mentioned to see if it helps at all? Would be curious to know
You’re welcome, for trying to help, by the way
Also, does anyone know if his anti virus or firewall (or other players in the game) could be wreaking havoc on his games?
Sandman look through support page too, if didn’t already:
Over the years I have had to wait and upgrade my computer to play certain games how I wanted, or how I wanted to see them. Even the old Age of Mythology once ran somewhat like a potato for me until I upgraded my RAM. Sad reality of PC gaming sometimes
Maybe there is a bug making the game not work well for you currently. Who knows. Takes tiime to diagnose and resolve, and it helps when players try and help troubleshoot and post about their tests and results. I dont think any dev would want their game running poorly on any machine that should be decent.
I don’t know if your machine is decent
There clearly is some room for improvement, I’m not denying that.
A suboptimal experience is not equal to an unplayable game though.
CPUs with 3D cache are actually significantly better at handling most CPU bottleneckes in games. So it is somewhat possible to compensate for it by throwing money at the problem.
Every change seems to ruin path finding.
Multithreading would make it very hard to keep the game in sync in multiplayer because you need to know exactly when every thread finishes it’s job.
An i9 won’t help you much because it mostly just has more cores. And also Intel current generation is far behind AMD. So much so that AMD can’t keep up with producing their 9800X3D CPUs because they didn’t anticipate that the new Intel CPUs were that bad.
Would be an interesting benchmark to watch the same replay on different CPUs and she how big the differences can actually get.
Sounds masochistic, lol
We can complain.
We do complain.
But most of us try to be civil and don’t make total exaggerations or even lie to get attention.
The core features of the game (Single Player campaigns, skirmish and 1v1 multiplayer) do work reliably with the recommended hardware.
I also think that 4v4 multiplayer should be playable, even with 500 population.
I even think the game should support 12 or more players. And I have said those things in the past and I will say those things again in the future.
Also the reality of Console game. Your PS3 wont run any PS5 titles, obviously.
And many PS4 games run a lot better on a PS5 (or even PS5 Pro).
Same is true for Xbox, of course, especially since there are 2 versions with different performance to choose from (Xbox Series S and Series X).
most yes, ones related to cache and memory access itself, but RTS simulations only get that boost on small scale, aka like 1v1s, in scenarios where other cpus listed hit the brick wall it’d be like if 3d cache wasn’t even present
Men, this thread is something to read, I can tell you that. I played pretty every main AoE2 Edition there was (CD-Version, Voobly, HD-Edition, DE-Edition) and online 4v4 even with 200 pop or more did always start to lag pretty bad at some point. The most stable experience is the DE-Edition, and I’m not sure why someone would think otherwise, how played other versions of the game online (not LAN).
It may still be unplayable for some people. In this day and age framerates of 240 Fps may be the minimum for some highly competitive players (CSGO2, LoL usw.), so the standards are shifting, but the starting arguments for this complaint thread is just beyond good and bad.
So I will share what I know. The AoE2 DE edition uses a server based multiplayer, which is very different from the other aoe2 versions. What exactly runs on the server or the client is unknown to me, but the server acts as the main source for information about the games you play online and is the glue between you and the other players. This design alone makes the online performance for every player better and is why DE is more stable than other versions.
Everything in an RTS game like AoE needs to be synced, and this makes it hard to run its workload parallel on more CPU cores. I’m pretty sure there are some parallel workloads in the DE Edition, but there is still the one thread how has the job to sync it all, and that is why AoE depends on single core performance so much.
I could go very deep on this topic (I’m a Software developer), but this would not accomplish much here, so I will give you just a final note to think about.
The current DE version runs way more Fps on the same settings even in multiplayer than older versions of AoE2 ever did. If you are not convinced, just go to the older versions and play it, they’re all still available and cheep as hell.
Maybe get HD while you can if you want flexibility to play it, for those who are interested. AoE3 (2007) got de-listed from Steam and elements of MP shut down…
And AoE2:HD got retired on Steam. Who knows what the next steps will be:
with these sorts of games the server usually runs the simulation and player just sees the projection of that, hence the input delay as it needs to go over the network to the server and back to give you feedback, typically
and in singleplayer or lan, you run everything yourself, lan server being ran on host’s computer while anyone else sees projection on their end
