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I'm attempting to connect to me and my brother's computer to play our old Age of Empires II The conquerors through our LAN connection.

The thing is sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. Almost always it doesn't.

We are always able to see each others games, but when either one of us clicks "join" and the loading screen comes up, we wait 15 seconds and then see a pop-up sending us back to the main page saying "Unable to connect"

We have tried multiple things to fix this,

  1. Set the compatibility of the .exe file to Windows Vista (Service Pack III) even though we both have Windows 7

  2. Turned off our firewalls

  3. Direct Connect through Static IP addresses.

  4. Direct Connect through Hamatchi VPN tunnels.

None of these have changed anything. It still supposedly "times out" with the pop up message "Unable to Connect"

Any help would be greatly appreciated!! Sorry if it's a re-post, I've spent a lot of time looking for the solution and have been unsuccessful.

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related: gaming.stackexchange.com/questions/6610/… – tombull89 Dec 27 '11 at 11:32
Do you have the exact same version? – Matthew Read Dec 27 '11 at 21:35
@MatthewRead Yeah. We're just exchanging the disc. – B-Ballerl Dec 27 '11 at 23:25
@tombull89 although similar, it is a different issue and not related. Both of us have been able to see each others game consistently without a problem. – B-Ballerl Dec 27 '11 at 23:25

1 Answer

up vote 2 down vote

Try the community-made (non-official) AOE II: The Conquerors patch, UserPatch:
http://www.xomicron.com/software/userpatch/

This is a feature and bug-fix update for Age of Empires II: The Conquerors Expansion. Its primary focus is to correct several long existing issues with the AI system and related game elements.

Among many other fixes and improvements to AOE II: The Conquerors, one if its core features is:

Vote panel/serial sync bug has been fixed for multiplayer

Note that the UserPatch installer must be run with admin privileges in order for it to be able to install all of its fixes.

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Thanks, I'll give it a try – B-Ballerl Dec 29 '11 at 4:49
I installed it successfully and unfortunately I still have the same problem :( – B-Ballerl Dec 29 '11 at 5:10
@B-Ballerl make sure both copies of the game (your copy and your brother's computer's copy) have the UserPatch installed. – galacticninja Dec 30 '11 at 0:52
Yup. We both did it at the same time. Maybe a re-installation of the whole game? – B-Ballerl Dec 30 '11 at 2:51
@B-Ballerl I don't think reinstall would help. I think this has something to do with directplay 6-8 + vista's new TCP handling. Maybe not, but it still should be a "vista+ vs old directplay" incompatibility in my experience. I've never seen it fixed (didn't try the userpatch in LAN) but we were/are able to play with friends through GameRanger as a workaround. – naxa Jul 10 '12 at 20:41

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