Right. Like all 6 of the players in my game tonight. I'm sure it was just a coincidence that the 5% of the player population who are having problems all wound up in the same game.

I posted my configuration in another message (in the "Connection Problem? Tell me" thread), including a description of my router brand and model, firmware version, OS, our network setup here, and the nature of our attempts to connect. Even theorized why the problem. I didn't get a response to that message. In fact, the only response I've ever had from Stardock is when I've posted this type of message out of frustration and started getting critical. It's the only time I've received a response from Stardock.

It's ok, I don't expect them to help me now. Frankly, it doesn't bother me anymore like it used to when my family and I all tried to play this every night. Boy that was disappointing. We've mostly moved on to other games. But I do check back here from time to time because I remember how fun this game was the first week or so when we first started playing, and I DL the patches to see if anything's changed.

I understand that it only takes one player to screw things up for the entire game, and although I don't see that as particularly redeeming since it appears from my experiences that there's an awfully good chance that one of those players is going to be in any given game, the fact of the matter is that most if not all of the players in our game tonight were complaining that they'd had trouble all night. Worse things were said, but no point in repeating them.

Look, I appreciate your offer of help, thanks. Frogboy asks in one thread "What would you have us do" and I realize that there's really nothing he or anyone else can do to make this work. The problem appears to be beyond their capability to fix and there's very little reason to believe that it's ever going to get any better, particularly since there appear to be enough players who are able to play or who are willing to overlook the problems, that there's less and less incentive to keep working on fixes for those of us who still can't play. I understand the economics. I don't understand the way they treat their problem customers, but I do understand why they aren't motivated to fix our problems. There is, after all, the next game, Elemental. This will be the first Stardock game that we don't buy, I don't care how good it is. There are enough other good games out there from companies who don't treat their problem customers like annoyances.

I'll check back in another week or so and try their next round of patches and see if things improve. I think the game's worth that (not to mention that we bought 3 copies and would like to see something come of the expense lol!)

Thanks,

I just give the facts, its your choice and yours alone to do something about it...or blame stardock about your problems and never enjoy this game.

When he played the game is mostly irrelevant as there were other people to play the game with, and given the Peer to Peer nature of this games setup well....

I posted my setup in Frogboy's thread that solicited input and got no response. I'll try again here with more detail. I have an Intel quad proc (not OC'd) with 6gb of ram, nVidia GTX 285 with most recent whql reference drivers, xfi with most recent drivers, Vista 64-bit fully patched and SP'd, speedtest here:  http://www.speedtest.net/result/489961135.png.

Router is a Linksys BEFSR81 with firmware version 2.51.3. Port forwarding is 6100-6200 both UDP and TCP, and 6073 and 6074 both UPD and TCP.

I've tried playing at all hours but typically I'm trying between 7pm and midnight Pacific time (currently GMT-7).

Now here's my theory as to why it's not working for us. My wife and I play on the same LAN and obviously are playing through the same IP address externally. NAT at the router handles the internal routing to map to our local IPs. I believe that the game has trouble handling that situation. I can set up a game alone and it's hit and miss, that is, if I am able to connect (maybe 50% of the time) there are still often game disconnects of other players and it's clear that others are still having trouble. But if my wife and I try and play together in the same game (i.e., we start a Custom Match together) it will *never* work. We inevitably fail at game start with an announcement that a player has left the game before we hit our first skill up.

Does that help?

Thanks.

I myself don't really have a lot of problems in custom games (except for people not being able to connect to each other sometimes), but Pantheon is a whole other story. It rarely works... tough my AI demigod does a great job at losing games for me.

Ah, I was not aware that the port forwarding had to be done individually per PC. So I take it this means that I have to go into my router and set up a *different* set of ports for each of the DHCP assigned local IPs? I'm not sure what port mapping utility you're referencing. Although as it was pointed out above, we are actually getting into the lobby, connecting, and starting the game, so if that's not possible using the same ports then how are we able to do this? Where can I get this port mapping utility and which ports should be used other than the ones that were already set up automatically?

Thanks for the help, guys.

Yeah, while a PC uses a port, it's pretty effectively 'blocked', so to speak. Hopefully more people will catch on to this in the near future