Save Empire Earth

So im trying to play this online again and i dont have the cds anymore. do i need them for this to work? also. i downloaded EE unlimited through your step by step instructions. and now i am on the neoee part of things and for some reason i cannot run neoee no matter what i do. im pretty sure my anti virus's are off. would anyone be able to help or update me if this is even worth trying to get working? does anyone even still play? Also. does EE unlimited work with neoee? unlimited is just a download of the game with no disk required. but i dont think it will let me do this neoee stuff. not sure. i still need help.

I don't know how EE Unlimited works, so i will detail the best ways to get into NeoEE server.

1. Take EE from either here : https://ee.theroyalchampions.in/downloads.html (Pick your desired language Download button.It is safe ( it's from google drive ) OR
you can take it from torrents (best version on torrents should be the GoG version) OR
buy it from GoG store ( it's really cheap, like 3 euros i think for both EEC and EE:AoC).
2.Having any of the above, install the NeoEE as administrator and watch at the end of the installer for this message ( CD-KEY succesfully intalled ).What this means, is that your game should now be able to enter the NeoEE server.
If you are not getting that message, try to run again the NeoEE and go into the options for repairing CD-KEYS. (This is common issue, but after several attempts it should work).

Looks like something went wrong when downloading your NeoEE-patcher.
Step 0. Delete the neoee.msi file you already have.
Step 1. Search for Windows defender on your computer and open it.
Step 3. Click on Virus and threat protection then make sure Real-time protection is set to off.
Step 4. Download NeoEE again and run the installation.
Step 5. If you get "CD-key was installed correctly" message in the end it means everything was successful.
Step 6. Go back and turn on Real-time protection again.

Everything should be fine now. Unfortunately Windows defender automatically deletes files from NeoEE-patcher because it flags it as a virus. This is a false positive, no virus in the file, and we've tried to contact Microsoft about it to get it fixed with no answer back.

EE unlimited, the royal champions download or directly from GoG all works with NeoEE. So neither one of these should be part of the problem.

hey guys thanks for helping. sadly still having the same issue. I already responded on discord but I'll repost here so more people can see:

- the option to run NeoEE.msi as administrator is greyed out. I am the administrator for this machine, other files are not greyed out, and moving the file to other folders does not change it

- from what I can tell everything that could be stopping the proccess because it thinks it's a virus is turned off

- when i run the msi, the progress bar gets to about 30% an then it just crashes / closes

- no indication that anything has happened and idk where to look for files that have been installed to confirm that it got like half way done or something

- also tried adding an exception in windows defender but for some reason it's not showing up when i try to pick its path in the file chooser window

- when i try to open the file in command prompt it says, "NeoEE.msi is not a valid Win32 application."

hopefully some of that looks familiar to someone

thanks again guys

*edit*

redownloaded and that didn't work. scanned it with my antivirus turned back on and it doesn't recognize it as a threat, so I don't think my security is blocking it when I try to install it.