Help me get this game to run smoothly on VMware Fusion

I played AOE2 as a kid and would love to play it again.

I have a mac. 16GB memory, 2 GHz Quad-core intel i5, 500GB SSD yada yada yada

I am running VMware Fusion professional 12.1.0 running Windows 10

Originally allocated 8GB memory and 2 processor cores to the VM and the game was running super slow, chopping audio (just trying to do the tutorial)

I tried allocated 16GB memory and 4 cores to the VM and it doesn't seem to have changed anything.

Anyone else running on a VM able to help?