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by borellini 2897 days ago
And in 2018 with Internet connections a bit better than a 28.8k modem and hardware slightly more powerful than Pentium 90, the HD remake of AoE2 fails to deliver a reliable multiplayer gameplay, having lag of multiple seconds and at least as many out-of-sync bugs as the original game did 20 years ago. It should be closer to 150 than 1500 archers with the HD edition.
3 comments

This is one of the many reasons why I refuse to buy AoE2. The "new" version does not offer multi-platform support, it does not offer a stable multiplayer, it requires half a gigabyte of RAM instead of the previous 32MB, and it still costs as much as I pay these days for some of the smaller but brand new games (not one they made profit on for almost twenty years already without any maintenance).
if you play it on voobly versus steam, there is almost no lag and plays super smooth
the unreliable gameplay is mainly on steam. if you go play aoe2 on voobly, the lag basically disappears and feels smooth as butter.

If you own the hd version, there is a patch to freely convert it to voobly.

This might be a side-effect of CPUs being much less deterministic than the older hardware, leading to even harder to track down out-of-sync bugs.
CPU timing might be more non-deterministic, but the result should still be the same...