Age of Empires 2 keeps freezing

Hi Everyone

As you may or may not know, I like playing Age of Empires 2 with friends, and recently ive been playing alot of 2 vs 2 co-operative games, with the opposition being a computer player.

The trouble is, we spend a fair while building up and defending territory, but when it comes time to attack the opposition the game always seems to freeze, and then bring up an in-game screen "muliplayer status" with options to wait and continue etc. Usually, i can see my friends messages and changes, but he cannot see mine. During this time, the actual game action is frozen.

The only thing I can think of that might help is that when attacking, there is usually alot of information that needs to come into play (eg: revealing positions of the enemies and updating allies of your position and what you can see).

When we get to this screen I think its basically waiting for someone to join back in the game due to a partial connection problem or something... I tried disconnecting and re-connecting but it just caused me to be dropped... Besides, I dont think it would work becuase I do not have a staic IP.

Does anyone have any ideas what the problem could possibly be?

I've had AOE II freeze up or slow down alot but not just during online play. I always solved the problem by reducing some of the graphics intensive options.

Of course now that I have AOE III I haven't noticed that problem anymore.

I've had AOE II freeze up or slow down alot but not just during online play. I always solved the problem by reducing some of the graphics intensive options.

Of course now that I have AOE III I haven't noticed that problem anymore.
Hmm, I dont know that its a graphics related problem... The problem only occurs when alot of stuff has to be loaded etc. Throughout play, the graphics were fine and I'm talking about a 4 player map with about 300 units between us (not including buildings). All my specs are WAY above what is required of the game (2GhZ AMD64, 1GB RAM and 128MB Graphics memory).

If it were graphics, I cant see that the game would act as if we are disconnected and stop me seeing messages my friend sends etc (I can see my own).

Also, we can play versus games without any problem, its only when CPU players are being used there is a problem./

I assume you downloaded any patches that are available for the game right?

Maybe it some sort of time related problem, like it takes x ammount of time before this problem occurs or does it always happen when you attack the computer?

You could always try saving your multiplayer game before you attack and then exiting and reloading it. I believe AoE 2 has that feature and it works.

I think its just when we attack... we never usually spend 3 hours preparing, but it was working fine all that time. We have the latest patch yeah.

I think we will have to try the save feature.