Game won't launch as non-admin

Interesting, do you have the game installed through Steam or the retail installer (C:\Program Files (x86)\Age of Empires Online\)?

 

Alright, so then the permission change with the launcher seems to be unlikely to be the case here. With Steam, the launcher doesn't need admin perms to modify the files when doing a game scan. I'm not entirely sure what to do with that error code, maybe @Kevsoft has any insights? Could be we have a log file somewhere that says what file or operation that the game attempts to do before it crashes.

 

Do you have direct play enabled?

 

According to Microsoft docs, this seems to be related to permissions:
0xC0000022 - STATUS_ACCESS_DENIED: {Access Denied} A process has requested access to an object but has not been granted those access rights.

The question then is what it is trying to access that it doesn't have access to. You said your local Windows account doesn't have admin rights. Maybe it can have something to do with this? I will try an test this out on a VM later to try and reproduce this issue.

 

I just managed to reproduce this:
1. Set up a clean W10 20H2 VM
2. Create two accounts: Admin (which has full admin rights), and User (standard user without admin rights)
3. On Admin: Installed AoEO through Steam and patched the game using the launcher
4. Switch to User, download the launcher on this account and try start offline mode

I'll try and investigate a bit more and see what I can find out.

 

With procmon I found out that xlive.dll does not automatically have execute permissions set. That causes some problems when Spartan.exe tries to load it. After granting it sufficient perms, there was another bottleneck where it said some game files are corrupt. I've also seen some other issues with the launcher that I will look into later.

For now I would recommend you to use a Windows account that has administrator rights on your system to start the game. It might even be the case that the game does not support being started with a non-admin Windows account. (Note that running the game as administrator/elevated rights and an account with admin perms are two different things)