This is a new bug, started to happen a month before. I can confirm it.

You can't do anything except waiting the developers to fix it.

Can you provide any more information when this happens? Do you have recorded games?

Here's the basic info: I used to play AOE 2 years ago on other computers and never had troubles with it--probably Windows XP, perhaps Windows 7. My current computer is a Lenovo Thinkpad E555 running Windows 7 64 bit, Radeon R5 graphics card and 2.3 ghz AMD processor. I bought AOE2 HD in June during the sale but didn't install it until a couple nights ago. My interest at that moment was seeing how long it would take a single Celt Post-Imperial age villager to chop down all the trees on a giant map, starting from only one wood camp. Back in 2010 I had created a "Forest Nothing" map before I'd ever heard the term, and more recently Youtube videos got me interested in it again, so I just wanted to test it out.

Anyway, I created a giant map with all bamboo on it using the level editor, and put the wood camp and villager basically in the center and set him to work. After he finished chopping down the first bamboo tree and moving all its wood to the camp, he returned to the place where he'd chopped it down--and then went idle.

I've not done any other testing since then, but perhaps I'll also start a campaign mission/training mission and see if my wood cutters work there.

After some investigating I think I have some idea what might be going on.

I played a couple campaign missions and found that wood cutting worked fine. So I went back to the level editor and played around with it for a little while. What I did was generate a giant map filled with bamboo, then quickly cut out a space in the middle for a lumber camp. I didn't really pay attention to the exact number of bamboo trees I deleted, but it was probably two or three more than I needed to place the lumber camp. Then I place a villager in one of those empty spaces and tested the level, telling the villager to begin cutting one of the bamboo trees. After they finished gathering all the wood from that tree, they simply stood idle.

I tried a couple other things, and what I found that worked was to create a ring of empty tiles around the camp. The after gathering all the wood from one tree, the villager then moved onto the next. What I found though was that the villager would randomly select trees to start chopping wood from around the camp, once one tree was completely gone.

So what I think is going on is, when there's very few empty tiles around the lumber camp, the villager successfully chops down one tree and then gets told by the camp to chop down one of the other trees at random that is closest to the camp. But because there isn't a way to reach that tree, the villager goes idle instead. Of course, the obvious thing to do would be to randomly select one of the trees that the villager can actually reach. I'm guessing that that would fix this bug. It would also prevent the villagers from going off in all sorts of other random directions after chopping a tree down. After finishing gathering all the wood from some trees, I repeatedly saw the villagers drop off the wood, then walk all the way around the camp to chop down a tree on the other side. Very inefficient behavior, and in the scenario I was trying, I think it also prevented the villager from actually chopping further trees.

This just happened to me, today for the first time (Jan 20th 2020), I have several thousand hours of game play.
Win10 - AOE 2 HD - Civ Khmers.

I have noticed this issue with restored multiplayer game. Not sure if issue existed before game save and exit. AOE 2 HD Version 5.8.3062235. Win10. Civ Spanish.

i had never this issue before. i haven't toutch the game in 2 months now and find this issue in 2025 What is the way to Fix it ??