Madhatter, I would guess that the problem is that you dont have enough ram. Age of time uses about 270 megs of ram on it's own, so you'll probably need at least 512 to play it.
tails, in your case the problem is probably that your cpu cant get the world loaded before your connection times out. Try turning off the grass by typing
$pref::Grass::replicationRatio = 0;
in the console before you connect.
