This seems like a long shot, since the mods are inactive and the last post was 6 months ago. But anyway, I'm trying to get AoE2 Definitive Edition to run on Proton, and I'm getting an error message 'Steam must be running' when I launch the game. Far as I can tell, it works just fine on Windows. Anybody have any advice?

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[–] 4 points 11 hours ago (3 children)

Sounds like the crack isnt being applied, my best guess is that there is a dll file that isnt being loaded. If you downloaded the rune release then there should be a rune.dll that you need to add as a WINEDLLOVERRIDE

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  • [–] [S] 1 point 11 hours ago (2 children)

    Hmm. Don't see a rune.dll file. Tried applying winedlloverrides to steam_api64 and steamclient, no luck

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  • [–] 2 points 8 hours ago (1 child)

    I had the exact same problem. In Lutris in the configure menu of the game, I was able to go to system options and add a new environment variable 'PROTON_DISABLE_LSTEAMCLIENT' and set the value to 1. Also under runner options add dll override 'winmm' and set the value to 'n,b'. After that it started no problem.

    Found this on the cs.rin.ru page for this game from november 2025, might be worth a shot

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