AoEII DE - The game crashes every time I try to play

Menu works OK, the intro to the campaigns too, but after that the screen goes black and the game crashes a few seconds later.

Any ideas why? I've tried low and high graphics settings, changing the resolution... nothing works. I'm on windows 10, all drivers updated, I have an Nvidia 1070 and 8Gb RAM.

It's so frustrating. :(

Thank you.