How to: Play Age of Empires III over Hamachi/LAN

I ran into a problem a while back where me and my friend wanted to play AOE III over Hamachi.

If you don’t know, Hamachi is a virtual private network program but it’s real easy to use. It creates a LAN between you and anyone in your server (in my case, some of my friends). You can password protect your server and invite only people you trust.

Naturally, this means you can easily LAN with people when they aren’t on your home network. Sometimes this can be tricky but the first method I’m going to show you should work for almost all the games.

Method 1: The Windows XP/Vista Route

Windows XP

There is a little known feature in Windows that lets you specify what network adapters are most important. Many games like Age of Empires will use the network card with the highest priority.

Click Start and go to Control Panel
Go to Network Connections
In the menu at the top, click Advanced and then Advanced Settings.
You’ll see your Wireless or Local Area Connection in the list and Hamachi under “Connections.��?
Click Hamachi and click the Green Up Arrow to move it to the top.
Click OK to close the dialog.
Now Hamachi should be configured as a higher priority connection.

Windows Vista

Click Start and go to Control Panel
Click Network and Sharing Center
On the left side, click Manage Network Connections
Press the ‘Alt’ key and click Advanced then Advanced Settings at the top.
You’ll see your Wireless or Local Area Connection in the list and Hamachi under “Connections.��?
Click Hamachi and click the Green Up Arrow to move it to the top.
Click OK to close the dialog.
Run Age of Empires 3 and try to host a LAN game. In the top corner should be your Hamachi IP address.

If it’s not the right one, then you’ll have to set it manually for the game…

Method 2: Set AOE 3 Manually

Before using this method, update to AOE 3 1.04 or above! You can find the patches here.

Here’s a way to force AOE 3 to use a specific IP address:

Go to your My Documents/Documents folder.
Go to your My Games folder.
Go to the Age of Empires III folder.
Go to the Startup folder.
If there is not a user.cfg file, open Notepad. Do File > Save As… and save it as user.cfg (make sure to use “All Files *.*��? not “Text Documents *.txt��?) in that folder.
In user.cfg (right-click, Open With Notepad) add the following line:

OverrideAddress="5.x.x.x"
Change “5.x.x.x��? to your Hamachi address. This can be found by opening up Hamachi and seeing what the big numbers at the top say.
This will force AOE 3 to use the Hamachi address instead of your LAN IP address.
Now start AOE 3 and host a LAN game. You should see your Hamachi address now, for sure!

[View the Hamachi AOE 3-specific wiki entry for details and also the general Gaming wiki entry for more than what I’ve covered]

Troubleshooting Network Problems

If the address shows up but your friend still can’t connect, first make sure their IP address is showing correctly.

Use the same version. All users wanting to play AOE 3 over network need to have the same version. To see what version you have, browse to where you installed AOE 3 and open up “patch.rtf.��? At the top it should tell you what version you have.
Make sure your EXE is the same. If you’re like me and buy games but don’t want to keep putting in the CD for them when you want to play, you’ve “cracked��? your Age3.exe file. Make sure your friends all have the same one, otherwise it probably won’t work