[UPDATED] Fixing the freeze/crash at the start of the match that came with the 44725 update

[Zoaklen]

Context

In January 26th the update 44725 came to the Age of Empires II: Definitive Edition and it brought some balance changes, two new civilizations, new campagins and hundreds of new bugs to deal with.
A fraction of the player base was affected by the worst of them: after some minutes into the game the window freezes and stops responding.
Some days ago I made some tests to check what exactly triggers it and even though I didn't come up to an answer I wanted to check if it was a software or a hardware thingy by reformatting my computer. The problem is I was reading the Age of Empires forums and someone tried it and it did not work so I just gave up on this.
Using older versions backup I had in my computer I managed to play the game again, the problem is I could not play multiplayer with my friends so I just got tired of it. But today I took some hours to come up to a solution that made me play over one hour games against players and AIs with no crashes/freezes, the problem is, my FPS was affected a lot. (Down from 60 to 15)

Tests

(03/02/2021) Some people said Vsync could fix it, clearing the %temp% folder, reinstalling dependencies, updating drivers, etc. None of them worked for me at all.
The problem does not seems to be algorithmical from the new update as the problem happens to some but not to others.
At first I thought it could be related to autosaving, cause if I keep saving the game I could close it, open again and load my save and it would not crash again at the same time, the problem of course is that this is not playable at all.
Then I started guessing it could be related to the new pathfinding "improvements" that came with this patch, cause If i didn't move anything the game don't crash, but this does not make any sense as the AI was moving their units.
Then but not last I could think this as a multithreading synchronization fail, and this solution actually worked and is shown in the old solution header.

(09/02/2021) Another test was made but sadly didn't work, I left its explanation in the end of this thread any way so you can have other ideas if you want to.

(24/02/2021) I retired some time from the game and just opened it today to check if the bug was already fixed but seems like not. Made some new random tests and I actually found one that worked for me. A friend of mine cans till play the game even with a pc worse than mine and the only difference is that he uses Windows 7. So I literally just tested running it on Windows 7 compatibility mode and it worked.

Solution

I managed to play the game again with no problems alongside considerably lower FPS by:

• Forcing Vsync in my video driver and enabling in the game
  
• Setting game priority to high
  
• Disabling unused services*
  
• Clearing unused RAM after launching*
  
• Lowering CPU affinity

* = I used external softwares to do it

After all, the most important of them was lowering CPU affinity in the Task Manager.
I have a dual-core CPU and by default any task running on my PC uses both of them. I disabled the first thread and my FPS fell from 60 to 15 but the game did not freeze at all.

To set the game CPU affinity:

Task Manager -> Details -> Right-click AoE2DE_s.exe -> Set affinity -> Disable all CPUs but the last. -> OK

If you have a quad-core or octa-core CPU you can try disabling just the first CPU and check if it still crashes.

Last but not less important I am using the following startup command line:

-USEALLAVAILABLECORES -high

If I reenable all my CPU cores in the process affinity it literally crashes again after some time so it is definitively related to it in some sense.

Alternative solutions

The above solution usually works but offers a high FPS drop while in-game, these other solutions may not be available for you or just may not work for your case.

• I tested this solution in 24/02/2021 and it actually worked for me with some downsides but nothing so devastating like the old solution lower fps, with this solution your FPS in-game will be higher than the CPU cores one but in the menus will be way lower.
  
  

  Steam Library -> Right-click Age of Empires II: Definitive Edition -> Manage -> Browse local files -> Right-click AoE2DE_s.exe -> Properties -> Compatibility -> Check "Run the program in compatibility mode for:" box -> In the dropdown menu select Windows 7 -> Apply
  

  
  I also checked "Execute as administrator" but not sure if it really makes a difference.
  
  

  Execute the game via the AoE2DE_s.exe icon.

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• Αναρτήθηκε αρχικά από Nawelson:

  Hey people, the problem was solved for me in one single player match. I was playing with this solution but now I could play with all de CPU. I activated AMD freesync option (not AMD optimazed) and enable Vertical Sync in in-game options and could play a hole game without crashing. In a few hours I´ll see if I can play multiplayer.

  
  My CPU does not support FreeSync but if you have an AMD CPU with FreeSync support you can try it.
  
  You can enable it by opening your video driver settings, enabling FreeSync in the monitor settings then changing your Age of Empires II: Definitive Edition game configuration to AMD FreeSync: On
  

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• If you don't want to play multiplayer games and just skimirshes against bots/campaigns or even if you have friends who would do an effort just to play custom games with you another solution is to roll back to patch 43210.

Conclusion

This solution is not definitive and playing at 1/4 of my FPS is not really playable against good oponents, I am making this post to make sure this solution worked for other people other than me.
Hope that helps for those who wants to play the game again and the Age of Empires developers.
If you did it and it worked or it didn't work comment this post, please.

An Age of Empires forum user called SouMexican[forums.ageofempires.com] also had a good theory about why this solution works:

Αναρτήθηκε αρχικά από SouMexican:

Sadly that ain’t a proper fix, if you set affinity for one core and then try to force to execute “useallavailablecores”, that is a big contradiction.

The engine was never meant to support multi threading, latest patch is demanding a lot of power, if i unlock the frame rate the cpu usage goes to 20%, which was always below 12% no matter what, that is a big change that could be explaining the crashes.

Setting affinity to one core or thread is the same like using vsync, you are capping the game performance.

In voobly or zone or whatever platform, they game would crash when hitting 100% usage in one core/thread, for aoe2 the engine was designed to use like 90% of load in one core/thread, whenever you maxed out that core to 100% the game would crash, so i been thinking that could be causing the crashes.

If his theory is true, then by fixing the GPU/CPU performance issues the crashes are automatically fixed too.

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@Edit (09/02/2021)
Today I tested a new solution based on the SouMexican's theory, and sadly it didn't work. I thought the following:

My solution was according to a possible multithreading issue, so disabling all the cores but one would solve as the parallel threads would be running on the same CPU core and there wouldn't be any kind of synchronization loss between the game threads. I took a step back as people said disabling just one of the CPU cores already fixes the problem cause that means my theory was not true.
When I saw SouMexican theory I had some insights and a new idea: disabling all threads but the last limits the game to use only 50% of the CPU, this way it does not reaches the 100% as his theory says. The same way by disabling just one out of 4 threads you are limiting the game to 75% of the CPU usage, this still works in his theory but not in mine.
My new solution was to find a software that can limit a process CPU usage to any value I want and limit it to like 90% or 95% of the CPU, this way I am losing only 5~10% of the CPU and not 50% by disabling an entire core. The program I used was BES (Battle Encoder Shirasé)[mion.faireal.net], it was originally created to avoid overheating and other similar CPU problems but is often used to games. You can try if you want but it didn't work for me after all.
It seems the software do not work like I thought though, it works more like a multiplier:

NOTE: This percentage is always relative. If the target originally used the CPU 80%, and if you set limiter −50%, then the CPU load by the target would be 40%. If the original CPU load increased to 90%, then the result by throttling would be 45%. You might want to set the maximum CPU load in the absolute percentage (e.g. “make it exactly 40% whenever possible”), but BES can't do that; because BES is not controlling the CPU directly in low level, but indirectly limits the “greediness” of the target application (i.e. how often it requests the system to give it a time slice) by forcing the targeted process to periodically sleep for a very short time. What you are actually controlling by setting % here is this “periodically how?” part.

This means I am not really limiting the CPU, but just sleeping it from time to time, a heavy algorithm will still reach the 100% CPU and make it crash. Also tried cpulimit for Windows[github.com] but as it work relatively similar to BES it didn't work too.
If you know how to set an upper limit to the CPU usage of a process apart from process affinity, you can try it and post or comment this thread so others can try too.

[johannes.scherzer]

Just wanted to let you guys know that I suffer from the same problems but the solution of Zoaklen also works for me. I also managed to run the benchmark this way although I only got a rating of eighthundredsomething...basically, the game is not worth playing under these circumstances

At least it's good to know that I'm not the only one :(

[Stubblebee]

sadly i'm to dump to understand what to do... and the thing i understand i dont know how to do it...
I hope they fix this soon... i want to play with friends....
to play alone i have AoE DE 1, but 2 is better to play with friends :(

[Sscral]

Αναρτήθηκε αρχικά από Stubblebee:

sadly i'm to dump to understand what to do... and the thing i understand i dont know how to do it...
I hope they fix this soon... i want to play with friends....
to play alone i have AoE DE 1, but 2 is better to play with friends :(

Open AoE2

Press Ctrl+alt+delete, click task manager in the list, find AoE2DE in the list of programs that are running after task manager opens, right click it, click details, right click it again on the details page it brings you to, in the drop down after you right click in details there is an option to 'set affinity', click this and it will show CPU cores in a list with check boxes next to them, uncheck just one of them and click ok, return to game

If unchecking one does not work, uncheck more until you stop crashing

You can do this in main menu before you start a match to prevent it crashing while you are trying to do it

Other steps listed in OP are not necessary to stop crashes and are more to limit the impact on FPS(steam launch options etc.)

[Arokhantos]

I see a patch released adressing most of this stuff having vsync off made game just run beyond a point that it over utilized cpu which what was probably causing issues altho vsync on for me i have 240hz display altho if not had issues with vsync on at all lately altho i usually run with 236 fps cap which i removed few days ago for this game.

[Sscral]

Αναρτήθηκε αρχικά από Franky:

I see a patch released adressing most of this stuff having vsync off made game just run beyond a point that it over utilized cpu which what was probably causing issues altho vsync on for me i have 240hz display altho if not had issues with vsync on at all lately altho i usually run with 236 fps cap which i removed few days ago for this game.

Most recent patch did not correct this specific issue for me and several others that have it unfortunately - the Vsynch issue that was corrected was separate from this

[Arokhantos]

Αναρτήθηκε αρχικά από Sscral:

Αναρτήθηκε αρχικά από Franky:

I see a patch released adressing most of this stuff having vsync off made game just run beyond a point that it over utilized cpu which what was probably causing issues altho vsync on for me i have 240hz display altho if not had issues with vsync on at all lately altho i usually run with 236 fps cap which i removed few days ago for this game.

Most recent patch did not correct this specific issue for me and several others that have it unfortunately - the Vsynch issue that was corrected was separate from this

For me it was hitching all over but last time i played i had no hitching anymore have to still test with more players maybe tommorow.

[Zoaklen]

I wrote another way to fix this same issue by rolling back your AOE2DE version.

[danimanzanota]

:´(

[SpoonOfDoom]

It got worse for me after the february 12 patch. Starting to hate the devs. I only play ranked. Has become pointless.

[Nawelson]

Solved for me, i didint tried in multiplayer matchs but i hope it still works. Thanks for this temporaly solution

[[SotC] Spirit]

Does anyone have updates of what's going on with this issue? Are devs ever going to fix this? Last time I talked with the support team via e-mail, their answer brought me here again, lol. I hope they're not taking what's stated along this thread as their actual solution for the problem, even though it looked like it.

[Zoaklen]

Αναρτήθηκε αρχικά από SotC Spiritoftheday:

Does anyone have updates of what's going on with this issue? Are devs ever going to fix this? Last time I talked with the support team via e-mail, their answer brought me here again, lol. I hope they're not taking what's stated along this thread as their actual solution for the problem, even though it looked like it.

Oof

[King Caractacus]

I have not played for a while. Jumped on tonight and did an update and then started playing. Repeatedly freezing about 1 minute into game play. Very frustrating. I want to play not tinker with settings. :-(

They have got to fix this. We pay for these games and it is not good enough that they break them and then focus on other development. Fixing this should be a top priority for them.

[DMg Halt]

Even though I did not have much problems to the degree you were describing, I did enjoy reading your post and how you detailed it with dates, what tests you ran and ordered it chronologically. Good stuff bro

[Nawelson]

Hey people, the problem was solved for me in one single player match. I was playing with this solution but now I could play with all de CPU. I activated AMD freesync option (not AMD optimazed) and enable Vertical Sync in in-game options and could play a hole game without crashing. In a few hours I´ll see if I can play multiplayer.