The ports you will need to open on your firewall are: TCP 47264, TCP 2300-2400, UDP 2300-2400 in both incoming and outgoing directions.

In Vista/7, you might consider changing the Hamachi network interface over to Private/Home which will disable a lot of the security. If the network you join is only with your friend or is with trusted people, you could even consider disabling the firewall on the Hamachi network completely. The IP address you enter should be the other person’s Hamachi IP address which you can find by looking in the Hamachi window. Out of experience, I’ve found that selecting the LAN option in AOE2 doesn’t always show the game and instead you need to enter the IP address when prompted after selecting the TCP/IP option.

If you are using Hamachi, this problem is likely to appear for one of two reasons: either you do not have the correct ports open on your firewall or you are entering the wrong IP address to connect to.

This is usually less preferable to using Hamachi as it still means that you need to configure your router to allow traffic on this port.

Another alternative is to use GameRanger which is a program that routes all the game traffic through a single port to your friends.

Hamachi makes the whole process a lot easier. Hamachi creates a virtual network between you and your friends with the intention of it being the same as both being on the same LAN.

Rather than delving into your router configuration pages, most people prefer to use a VPN solution like Hamachi.

Get the latest update for Age of Empires 2 here.

Make sure that the game versions match between players.

If you check Windows Update to make sure that there are no available updates, it’s another thing to strike off the list. There’s no excuse not to keep your copy of Windows up to date, especially since you can enable Automatic Updates to do it for you. You can download it direct from Microsoft, here. If you don’t have the latest version of DirectX, it’ll download and install it for you.

You can verify this by downloading the DirectX web installer. You should really consider making sure that you have the latest version of DirectX installed.

The game relies on DirectX, albeit a very old version.

This also applies to The Conquerors expansion pack (AOE:C). This guide might be quite useful to work through as a checklist if you’re having problems connecting in Age of Empires II. After having spent an incredibly long time trying to get Age of Empires II – Age of Kings (AOK) to work with my friend, and stumbling along many web pages with tips and tricks to get the game working, I thought I would construct a collection of all the methods we tried.

Failed to join game age of empires 3