They do the formatting with magnets. And an incinerator.

This is exactly the kind of user experience that has made GFWL such a colossal failure.

About a month or so ago I wanted to try this same game and had my own little foray into getting the damned thing to finally work which lasted for two days of screwing around. After all that work to play, I felt too tired and annoyed to play it. I still haven't played it.

And now, if I did want to try it out and buy the stuff while it's cheap on Steam, the safest course of action would be to uninstall what I've got and install the Steam build which is not exactly the same as the "regular" build. They are functionally the same but DLC purchased via Steam will only work with the Steam edition of the game. So now you are not only tied to GFWL to play this but you are also tied to Steam as well.

I'm thinking maybe I should complete step one of the process which is to uninstall what I've got and then stop there for best results. I'll save money too that could be better spent on something from my GOG wishlist.

Should I buy into AoEO or get both Thief games for less money? Decisions, decisions...

oh man , same problems here , was finally able to get in, gfwl but now its downloading patches in such a way , i dont know if the program is stuck or what

I hate to be the bearer of bad news but if your experience is anything like mine was, the program may really be stuck. I wish I could remember how I fixed that now to share it with you but I think after the mental trauma of getting the game to work I blotted it out of mind. I'm sorry. :-(

Oh, wait! It came back to me, nightmare that it was! If the program fails to completely download everything you probably need to go to the official site, check the sticky there for solutions to problems, find the part that lists ALL of the firewall ports you need to open, I believe there are seven of them, and then go open all of them in your firewall. If you are just using the default Windows firewall you might think a Microsoft game would manage this for you but NO!!! I had the standard MS firewall in Win7 and yet I had to go to this site, find this info, try it even though I found it hard to believe I'd need to do this, and voila, the game could then FINALLY frigging install itself completely!

god dammit it , screw this crap . im sick of this game already , there is already a bunch of live crap running in the background as it is :X , its been an hour since im trying to get the game to work , the fcking client is so outdated it does not even connect to the market place

will try the firewall thing now :X X: ffff gfwl

.... lol removed the firewall and it patched itself ...cant they even at least do a notification for this shit ....well lets hope the game runs now

I wish you the best in seeking to eventually find some fun somewhere after all the work it takes to beat this bastard of a game into submission!

ya started to play it , not bad at all once you get past the lame gfwl stuff , too bad everything is dlc but the game is simple . lets hope we can have some multiplayer fun in this

Oh wow. When it first came out it was €20 per civilization and there were only three to chose. I'm glad that they realized it was terrible and lower their price accordingly. Still, that's €10 more than I'm willing to pay for it.

With all the DLC together it's around 50 euros, which if it's your cup of tea is not a bad deal at all. It's a bit too scaled down for my tastes though, and labelling it as free-to-play is a joke ("demo" would have been more appropriate).

That sounds awful, but you already have luck that it's even running.
On my Ubuntu system I can't even get the GFWL client to install >_<"
*sigh* At least SSF4AE is now on Origin, although I'm not sure if it makes it better...

here's a simple request i'd like to make. it's really a simple thing, easy to remember.

can we - please - not reduce every single game discussion to the topic of the game's DRM?

Thank you for your understanding and kind regards,

The management

I tried the beta, and was amazed they had the gall to call this AoE. It's horrible.

And I remember the nightmare of buying AoE3 through GFWL, if it wasn't 12 cents I would have just cancelled the whole transaction.

I kind of liked that game. Played for a while just to see if it's any good, but seeing how you need to pay for basically everything put me off. I mean they want money for such things as critters or bushes. That's simply ridiculous.

What?!? Weren't both Doom games piece of cakes to get to run, at least as far as I remember? I think their memory managers made everything quite easy, no worries about running out of conventional memory etc.

Try running it in DOS when you have very little knowledge at the time about config and autoexec files because there was no widespread internet access and this is your first very own computer game....