Age of Empires II: The Age of Kings

Introduction

This page regards issues and fixes to Age of Empires II: The Age of Kings and Age of Empires II: The Conqueror's Expansion.

Save Games

Save Game Location

\Program Files\Microsoft Games\Age of Empires II\SaveGame\

\Program Files\Microsoft Games\Age of Empires II\Campaign\

\Program Files\Microsoft Games\Age of Empires II\Scenario\

\Program Files\Microsoft Games\Age of Empires II\Player.nfo

You will need to backup all of the above folders and the .nfo file to have all of your player data and progress.

Save Game Cloud Syncing

Dropbox: Yes
Windows Live Mesh 2011: Yes
GameSave Manager: No

Where to Buy

Can often still be found on store shelves as "Age of Empires Collector's Editon", which contains the following games on one DVD-disk:

Age of Empires
Age of Empires : Rise of Rome Expansion
Age of Empires II : Age of Kings
Age of Empires II : The Conquerors

The DVD re-release of these games do not feature the red-book audio stored as separate audio tracks on the original games' discs. As such, the game music will not be played while the DVD is in the drive.

Windows 7 Compatibility

Ingame color looks odd

See Also: Colors Fixes

Problem: The color within the game tends to look noisy, overly saturated, pixelated, and overall odd. Diagnosis: The Windows 7 explorer (explorer.exe) has a lot of new features for display, and particularly color display changes. Think of the new transparent windows aero, and the features for adjusting window theme colors. The new explorer has a conflict with the graphic display of the game. Solution:

Open Age of Empires II
Alt-Tab out of the game
Turn off explorer.exe
1. open task manager (ctrl+alt+del or ctrl+shift+esc)
2. go to "processes" tab
3. find "explorer.exe" in the "image name" column
4. select "explorer.exe" and hit "end process"
(Play Game without color issue)
(finish playing game)
Restore explorer.exe
1. open task manager (ctrl+alt+del or ctrl+shift+esc)
2. in the top left, on the menu bar, click "File" and "New Task (Run...)"
3. The "Create New Task" window will pop up
4. enter "explorer.exe" in the open:[textbox]
5. click "ok" button

This process can be automated with a batch file. Save this text into a file named "AgeFix.bat"

 REM -AgeFix.bat
 taskkill /F /IM Explorer.exe
 age2_x1.exe
 start explorer.exe

Store the batch file in C:\Program Files\Microsoft Games\Age of Empires II\age2_x1 . Run the bat file to run the game.

Dell laptop compatibility issues

On some older Dell laptop models (e.g. the M1530) an issue occurs where the OS crashes and a blue-screen of death is displayed. This issue occurs after a seemingly random amount of gameplay time (from <30 seconds to 10 or 20 minutes). Many things have been tried to fix the issue including changing graphics card drivers, limiting the framerate to mitigate overheating and running on virtual machines of different OSs (e.g. windows 98). As far as can be seen, this issue has never been resolved nor will it be, rendering AoE2 unplayable on the affected models of laptop.

Network Issues

--Lan connectivity with Windows 7-- Setting the IP address to Static and the Default Gateway to nothing allows 2 Windows 7 64 pcs to LAN. This can be done via Control Panel - View Network Status and Tasks (under Network and Internet) - click Local Arean connection next to "connections:" then Properties, highlight "Internet protocol version 4", click properties. Check "Use the following ip address". Use an address not in use on your network (such as 192.168.1.[1-253] eg 192.168.1.11 ) mask 255.255.255.0 and default gateway blank (important). You will lost internet until you switch back to "obtain address automatically", but LAN will function in game.

A much simplier method is to install "Gameranger" and use that as a lobby (thus no need to do all of the above).