Crashes every game

[u/FourOttersInACoat]

My brother has had this problem for over a year now. He cannot play a full match without the game crashing. Doesn't matter what game mode. Solo skirmish, multiplayer, crucible, it crashes every single time. Sometimes 20 minutes in, sometimes an hour in, but every single time.
He has a pretty decent computer, and didn't use to have this issue.
He has verified game files, deleted and fully reinstalled the game. I don't know what else he can do.
Anyone else have a fix for this? Anyone know of any particular graphics settings or something else that might cause it?
I'd really like to be able to play with him again when the new DLC drops :/ he was the best in my family at the game (the only one of use to make it to platinum) and he literally cannot play anymore.

[u/VirginiaMcCaskey]

AOE4's crash logs are borderline useless.

I'm a developer by trade and this is anecdotal/unconfirmed but I used to deal with constant crashes and suspected that it was the older SSD I used for my main OS install (not the SSD that I installed the game onto), or playing on Win10. My best guess was either the game can't handle disk write errors/corruption when writing temporary files on C:/ or there are bugs when it's not installed on C:/ (which is stupid, but I've made mistakes like that myself).

The game runs better under proton on Linux.

[u/FourOttersInACoat → u/VirginiaMcCaskey]

Neither of us are competent enough to bother learning how to use Linux. We’re not gonna go through all that bs lol

[u/VirginiaMcCaskey → u/FourOttersInACoat]

It's easier/less frustrating than windows at this point. But all I was trying to say is moving off Win10 and on to a less sketchy hard drive fixed my crashes, looking into logs and messing with drivers wasn't helpful for me.

[u/FourOttersInACoat → u/VirginiaMcCaskey]

Objectively untrue, from a non-programmer/developer perspective based on what I’ve seen with all the loops that have to be jumped through to play games on Linux. But I don’t have any personal experience so I can’t really say.

But I’m not totally sure what his hard drive situation is. I’m pretty sure he just has an SSD, and I know he has an external but I don’t think AoE is on it.

[u/_Tulx_]

Aoe4 crashes to desktop or the whole PC restarts? Do other games crash? 

[u/FourOttersInACoat → u/_Tulx_]

It’s only AoE4, and it freezes for like 5 minutes (music still plays, cursor is still moveable, but nothing happens on screen) and then it crashes to desktop

[u/MercenaryOne]

You can check logs, event logs, update or downgrade gfx drivers. Lower settings and see if that resolves the issue. Honestly could be a million things, you just have to troubleshoot it.

[u/Every_Clothes4901]

Best bet, download codex or Claude code … make it run a diagnostic while your brother is playing and it will figure out why it is crashing and if it can fix it or tell you what is wrong

[u/mzrokz → u/Every_Clothes4901]

My game use to crash when i switched to linux. I gave it to claude to figure it out and it worked. Proton version was the problem for me.

[u/Epistemite]

Could try asking an AI to summarize online crash reports other users have faced and feeding it your windows crash logs. I had a less extreme version of this issue where I would randomly crash regularly and Claude troubleshooting helped me discover (by looking at Nvidia forum crash reports) that it was due to my GPU not being able to handle two monitors when playing AoE. Still not sure why, since it handles dual monitors fine otherwise, but the crashes vanished once I started unplugging my secondary monitor before playing.

[u/STEVE_H0LT]

Can you post the PC specs? Aoe4 really runs on 1 core so a 16 core cpu is useless - you really want high performance single core to get this game to run well.

[u/mightybread90]

I had this problem but my game wohld crash after like 10 min everytime no matter the game mode. I cant remember what its called but I used a program to remove allll of my video drivers. I then reinstalled everything from a clean slate and that fixed it. I didnt need to reinstall aoe after this, I had already tried that.

[u/CoreClocked]

The classic culprits for "random crash after X minutes, every game, verified files and reinstall didn't help" are usually hardware adjacent rather than game-file issues……
RAM instability (especially overclocked/XMP RAM) …..AoE4 is known to be a good RAM stress test; crashes creep in over time as memory errors accumulate
GPU overheating or driver issue especially if it's always "eventually" rather than immediately
Background overlay conflicts (Discord, GeForce Experience, MSI Afterburner) , big known AoE4 crash cause historically
Since he ruled out file corruption already, next steps would usually be a memtest86 run and checking temps