🩹 Battle Realms - Fixing Your Issues!

This guide will help you troubleshoot and report technical issues you may encounter while playing Battle Realms: Zen Edition.

☯ Introduction

Last update of the guide: January 28, 2025

You can easily navigate around the guide by using the bookmarks found on the right panel! ↘️

Please, seek solutions for you issues and report everything over at Bugs & Troubleshooting - Megathread.

When it comes to reporting issues, please, give as much information as you can. Detailed descriptions and steps to reproduce are vital, as well as your GPU manufacturer and other system specifications (best to do via a DxDiag report[support.microsoft.com]). Screenshots, save files & videos help out a ton as well!

☯ Known Persistent Issues

The most notorious issues in the game at the moment:

• The global material bug resulting in units having black textures, ground textures changing, UI/Mouse Cursor showing wrong texture etc.
  
  
• Sync Errors in Multiplayer. Please, see the dedicated section for this.
  
  
• The game does not support ultra-widescreen resolutions.
  
  
• The global sound/memory buffer issues of sounds looping after the game has been running for a while (mostly fire and water sounds). PC hangs in this case if you try to exit the game. If that happens, DO NOT try to exit the game. Instead, please follow this instruction[www.c-sharpcorner.com].
  
  

  In order to prevent the sound and other memory leak issues. Consider restarting the game after running it for around 40 minutes. This is the best antidote at the moment.

🩹[1] Startup / Launch Issues

Steam reports that the game can't update.

Solution:

Make sure that your antivirus (such asAvast/AVG) doesn't interfere with the game's executable (battle_realms_f.exe).

Game crashes on launch:

Solution 1 - Intel GPUs:

Battle Realms seems to not like Intel's Conservative Morphological Anti-Aliasing (CMAA), which is enabled by default. You need to make sure it's disabled in order to play BR, for that:

• Right-click the Windows desktop and select “Graphics Properties.” You can also launch the “Intel HD Graphics Control Panel” tool from your Start menu.[www.howtogeek.com]
  
  
• Click the “3D” icon when the control panel window appears to access 3D graphics settings.
  
  
• Set Conservative Morphological Anti-Aliasing to “Turn Off”.[www.howtogeek.com]

Solution 2 - Manually Change Resolution via INI

One more thing that wouldn't hurt to try:

Change the resolution for the game in the `.ini` file.

Change:

[VideoState]
Width =1024
Height =768

To your NATIVE/USED screen resolution (no custom resolutions).
Please, see the supported list of resolutions in section [4] of this guide ([4]Resolutions).

Example:

[VideoState]
Width =2560
Height =1440

Solution 3:

Reinstall the game to a different disk (create a new steam library folder if needed)[www.technipages.com].

- Startup Crash

If your game launches but immediately crashes (or doesn't seem to launch at all)

Please, follow this instruction[imgur.com].

Use the -dump launch parameter for the game to have it collect startup crashes.

Steam Support - Setting Game Launch Options

- Could not initialize display mode / Could not rasterize API

This means that the game, for whatever reason, is unable to render itself on your screen. Usually it has to do with screen resolutions, aspect ratios and the finnicky Direct3D BR has to use.

Note:

"Zen Edition" works fine with multiple monitors.

Note 2:

Every new update or integrity verification will result in the .ini file being reset, always dropping the resolution to 1024x768. Check your .ini file and make sure the correct resolution is set.

Note 3:

Make sure you're using one of the native resolutions supported by your monitor. Best to use the one marked with (Recommended).

Instruction: How to find out the resolution of the screen on my monitor.[www.computerhope.com]

🩹[2] Game Crashes

Notes:

• We won't be able to help you fix a crash if we can't reproduce it. We need as much information on that as possible: circumstances, steps to reproduce, videos, save files.
  
  
• The most effective way to have the crash resolved is to send us a dump file as per the instruction below.

- Reporting A Crash 101

Any user can voluntarily help us find and fix the exact cause of the crash. It is a sure-shot method that allows us to fix any crashes in a relatively timely manner.

We've simplified this process by integrating the crash dump autosave and autodelete features straight into the game's options, as well as providing a parameter that can be added to the launch options from the Steam Library.

Please, follow this instruction[imgur.com].

- Intel Integrated / Hybrid GPUs

See: Battle Realms Crashing for Windows 11 Users

Update as of 2025: This does not depend on Windows but on the GPUs integrated within Intel CPUs

We've noticed a pattern in crash reports based on user feedback. Here are some examples:

Campaign runs for a few minutes then the game crashes without warning. It is not like getting stuck then closes but rather, you blink and it is gone.

The game suffers a large stutter and freezes, the freezes continue until eventually a crash happens. Can occur anywhere between the first 8 minutes to the latter 24.

The game closes when I open the story mode, both kenji and winter, just 5-10sec then it closes automatically.

Let us quickly sum this up:

• We are looking into it, but it is a complicated matter that will take some time for us to solve.
  
  
• This does not happen to every user (we have tried many times to reproduce this).
  
  
• Some users provided crash reports in accordance with our instruction,[imgur.com] which helped us get some ideas as to why this happens. Please, keep doing this if you're experiencing the same issue.

This issue seems to have come out of nowhere and may or may not be related to one of the Windows 11 updates. It's challenging to pinpoint the exact cause because the game works fine on all other OS (even Linux via Steam Proton), and it works for us (BR dev team members) on Windows 11 as well.

If we can't reproduce it, we will definitely have a tough time fixing it. We're closing in on the target; however, and let's be honest, nothing will ever be as hard as getting this game on Steam was.

Thanks to everybody who sends the crash dumps; that is very much appreciated. If you are struggling with crashes as well, please leave a comment here answering this short form and maybe provide a bit of background details:

• Does your Battle Realms: Zen Edition crash?
  
• When does it crash?
  
• Version of your Windows (Name + Build)
  
• Do you have a stationary PC or a laptop? If it's a laptop, does it have a hybrid GPU layout (multiple GPUs)?
  
• What GPU does the game run on?

Thanks in advance, and rest assured, we will have this solved soon. ːlunar2020halodragonː

🩹[3] Multiplayer issues

Always make sure you run the latest version of the game.

Playing with friends:

Solution: Tick the "Invite Only" checkbox when creating a room.

Invite friends from your Steam friendlist after having set up the room using the "Invite Only" option. That will prevent other users from joining you.

Regarding Lobby Joining Issues:

There are still minor issues with joining, but you should be able to easily solve them. If you're unable to join a lobby, quit to the main menu and try again. If that doesn't help - quit the game and try to join the lobby again. If anything else fails- change the host if possible.

There is some P2P side which can be capricious with connectivity, but we're trying to smoothen everything out.

- Steamworks P2P Overview

Steam Maintenance every Tuesday, and sometimes Steam goes down. During these times, BR Multiplayer will not function.

Check Steam's Uptime State - Steam Status · Is Steam Down?[steamstat.us]

⚠️ The Multiplayer in Battle Realms: Zen Edition relies on P2P Networking ran via Steamworks. The game DOES NOT use any dedicated servers.

Stable and unrestricted networks should not have issues with P2P in general.

TL;DR - P2P Multiplayer:

• All players connect to each other.
  
• All players must have stable connections, especially the host.
  
• NAT restricted[www.cbtnuggets.com] routers might cause issues for players when joining games.
  
• 1 slow/unstable/lagging player will "grief" the game for everyone in the lobby.

TL;DR - Optimizing P2P (Do this only if you experience desyncs):

• Play with people who have 100-150 ping. Ideally you want ping less than 100 for the "natural" experience.
  
• Cap the game FPS to 60.
  
• It's best to port-forward[www.noip.com] the game's UDP ports in both directions: 7174, 7175, and 7177
  
• Make sure firewall does not restrict the game.
  
• Minimize background processes running (overlays, messengers, antivirus). Anything that injects into the game, ideally.

P2P via Steamworks, while having its own limitations, ensures the game remains playable as long as Steam exists. It was the only right solution to do for BR:ZE as it already previously relied on GameSpy, P2P is fundamental to BR architecture, it's how the game was built from the ground up.

This means connection quality, besides the Steam layer, majorly depends on players' internet speeds / stability and the route between them. Generally, you would want to take some extra steps and precautions, but wait, there is more...

P2P requires significantly more connections than a client-server architecture, which can create more networking complexity, potential points of failure, and higher latency for some players.

- Sync Errors

If you haven't, please read the P2P Overview above.

P2P means that when you play with others, one player's computer acts as both the player and the server. Everyone connects to that player-server and everything that happens in the game has to be synchronized between all players' computers directly, which is generally trickier than having a dedicated server managing everything.

When the game fails to synchronize the state between all players, desynchronization error puts an end to the fun.

What Sync Errors Are:

• In synchronous multiplayer games, every player's computer must perform identical calculations in the exact same order
  
• Each action and game event must produce the same result on all machines
  
• When calculations diverge between players, the game states become different
  
• Once game states differ, they cause a desync

Main Reasons for Sync Errors:

The three most common reasons for this are dev changes (AI behavior for example), modified game files and unstable player networks. If the first one is self-explanatory and gets fixed as top priority, and the issue with modded files is rather simple to solve by just verifying the integrity of the game's files via Steam, the network ones are a more difficult topic....

To put it short, if your network is unstable, you're a walking (or sitting) desync trigger. You can test your network stability[www.practicallynetworked.com] to see if that might be the case. If you got a 100% clean game, but desync all the time in MP, chances are this is the case here.

Desync Prevention Methods:

• Change the host - have a different player do it, ideally the one with the best connection/pc (or both).
  
  
• Use wired internet connection (not wireless/wifi)
  
• Ensure stable ping to other players
  
  
• Lock frame rate to a fixed value of 60
  
• Disable variable refresh rate features of your monitor if enabled
  
• Disable antivirus real-time scanning while playing
  
  
• Avoid downloading/uploading during gameplay
  
• Close bandwidth-heavy applications
  
• Close most background applications
  
• Disable non-essential system services
  
• Close system tray applications and messengers
  
• Avoid alt-tabbing during gameplay

These preventive measures minimize the chances of calculations diverging between players, maintaining game synchronization.

Fun Fact: It's worth noting that this behavior was common across many RTS games using peer-to-peer networking in the early 2000s, including Age of Empires, Age of Mythology, Command & Conquer, Total Annihilation etc. The synchronous lockstep architecture was the standard approach for ensuring fair gameplay over slower internet connections of that era.

Games from this period needed to ensure that every player's computer processed each game tick identically - a challenging task that made them particularly sensitive to system interruptions. Modern RTS games often use different networking models to handle these challenges, but titles from this era share similar sensitivities to background processes.

- Reporting Sync Errors

As has been mentioned, some changes from update to update might introduce various desync triggers, which understandably affect Multiplayer experience. We always try to resolve them as soon as possible, but if you've noticed a pattern that you strongly believe is causing desyncs, you should report it to us.

Do not report just any desync, only those that seem to happen in a pattern, as otherwise this convolutes the process. If it's a network desync, we won't be able to help even as much as we would want to.

Reporting Desyncs:

• Ideally record 1-2 minutes of gameplay leading to a desync.
  
  
• Send the clip and information with as much detail as you can to our Discord[discord.gg], our support mail - [e-mail], or leave it on Steam Forums

Thanks for helping make Battle Realms better!

🩹[4] Resolutions & Video

You're wondering why you can't use a resolution native to your monitor. Here's the answer:

At the moment, the game is unable to adjust to and pick any resolution. We have to add those resolutions manually.

As per version 1.59.1, the game natively supports these 4:3 and 16:9 aspect ratio resolutions.

• 4:3 - 640x480, 800x600, 1024x768, 1280x1024, 1600x1200.
  
• 16:9 - 1152x864, 1280x720, 1280x800, 1280x960, 1366x768, 1600x900, 1920x1080.
  
• 2K, QHD, 4K - 2048x1080, 2560x1440, 3840x2160.

- No Fullscreen / Black Bars

Your game is not fullscreen and has black bars all around the game window.
Solution:

• Make sure the configuration file (Battle Realms.ini in the core folder) has Fullscreen set to 1.
  
  
• Go to your videocard control panel and make sure the game scales to "Full-Screen" if you want the blackbars gone.

Here's a list of instructions for each GPU manufacturer:

• NVIDIA[www.nvidia.com]
  
• AMD[www.amd.com]
  
• Intel[www.intel.com]

- Multiple Monitors

As of 1.59.1, the game has limited support for multimonitor functionality:

• The game will launch and work fine with multiple monitors connected.
  
• The game will only show on the primary monitor. This can't be changed at the moment.

- Windowed Mode

If you want to run the game in a window, select the Windowed option in the Options Menu, then restart the game.

- Extremely Low FPS or Stutters

You should normally be able to maintain 60 FPS and above even on low-end hardware.

Solution 1:

Make sure you don't have other programs like MSI afterburner running and capping the framerate. Any overlays may or may not interfere with the game depending on your setup.

Solution 2:

Disable Adaptive Sync, NVIDIA G-Sync or AMD Freesync features.

General rule: anything that affects the screen state / resolution may or might cause issues in the game.

- Visual glitches

You're encountering this:

Confirmed to be a global materials issue dating back to the original release of the game. We're on it, but it will take us some time to fix.

🩹[5] Sound Issues

Sounds start looping after some time, the game doesn't quit properly and hangs the PC in the process.

In order to prevent the sound issue from ever happening. Please, consider restarting the game if it's running for 40 minutes or more.

This is a global sound/memory buffer issue we're currently looking into. If that happens, DO NOT try to exit the game. Instead, please follow this instruction[www.c-sharpcorner.com].

Sound Initialization Failed

This error pops up if the game fails to recognize your audio-output device.

Solution:

Try to (re)connect your audio output device.

🩹[6] Languages?

• As of the Update 1.59.1 the game supports a total of 7 languages.
  
  
• You can select them from the Options Menu.

• Currently Spanish, Russian, Italian and Polish don't have campaign translations for Grayback's Journey (Wolf Campaign).
  
  
• Korean is not included in the game. Other than that, this pretty much means that ZE now has all the languages BR has ever been localized into (officially), and all of that in one easily available place.

• German 🇩🇪
  

  - You can now play the game in German with the original dubbing. However, WOTW dub remains in English, for now.
  - The text has been updated to reflect the ZE changes excluding some nuanced hardcoded elements (we're on it).

• French 🇫🇷
  

  - You can now play the game in French with the original dubbing. However, WOTW dub remains in English, for now.
  - The text has been updated to reflect the ZE changes excluding some nuanced hardcoded elements.

• Spanish 🇪🇸
  

  - You can now play the game in Spanish with the original dubbing. However, WOTW dub remains in English, for now.
  - WOTW Campaign remains in English, for now.
  - The text has been updated to reflect the ZE changes excluding some nuanced hardcoded elements.

• Russian 🇷🇺 (Cyrillic Limitations)
  

  - Any player text written in Russian will only be seen by the people who also play the game with the Russian Text. It's the original limitation of the game.
  - You can now play the game in Russian with the original dubbing. However, WOTW dub remains in English, for now.
  - The text has been updated to reflect the ZE changes excluding some nuanced hardcoded elements.

• Italian 🇮🇹 (Text Only)
  

  - WOTW menu, tooltips and miscellaneous information has been translated
  - WOTW Campaign remains in English, for now.
  - The text has been updated to reflect the ZE changes excluding some nuanced hardcoded elements.

• Polish 🇵🇱 (Text Only)
  

  - WOTW menu, tooltips and miscellaneous information has been translated
  - WOTW Campaign remains in English, for now.
  - The text has been updated to reflect the ZE changes excluding some nuanced hardcoded elements.

🩹[8] Unit models

As of Update 1.57.4 the game has improved the high-poly Wolf models on the HIGHEST LoD setting.

You've probably wondered why certain units look different from how you remembered them.
This new LoD now replaces the previous "Highest" setting.

Solution: Change "Level Of Detail" from "Highest" to "High" in order to return the old look of the units.

🩹[9] Saveload Error: BAD LEVEL

Why is this happening?

This error means that you don't have the map from the save file you're trying to load. It may've been changed by the game since the last time you saved, or you changed it yourself.

[󠀡󠀡]

The guide has been updated to reflect the state of things as of Version 1.59.1.

A lot of information added, especially on desyncs in Multiplayer.

[󠀡󠀡]

Regarding Sync Drops: Try to cap your FPS for the game at 60 (using software like MSI Afterburner). That's the only suggestion we can provide at the moment.

[hrmcastro23]

Why we keep have a Sync Error? we are doing 4v4 with 4 AI's please help to resolve the issue

[Limitless]

Hi, when alt tabbing on steamseck desktop mode and switching back to game the cursor disappears and you cannot click on anything.

[♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥]

How about the Sync drop issue?ruin our time keep restart because this issue never solved

[adamaire]

Always having a Sync Drop Error. We can't finish the game. What a waste of time to always restart and then Sync Drop again.

[JSmoke]

How about the Sync drop issue?

[Rikardofication]

SYNC drop issue?

[fabrycenny]

Hi;
I got a bug in the Swan's Pool mission, Dragon clan side, where mission doesnt trigger anything after several waves of enemy.
My sanctuary is still alive.

[sovernut]

Hi does anyone got randomly sync drop while playing multiplayer ?
How to solve it