SOLVED: Finally got it working. Thanks!

I run the game fine, all my friends run the game fine. My clan-mates run the game fine and i play dozens of games per day with people who the game runs fine for them.

For you people under the 5% flag who still cannot play 1, 2 or 3 games in a row without getting problems...need to fix your stuff. It might not be your ports...firewall or connection speed; but might be millions of other things.

Theres a problem with your computer and connection, if you cannot find what it is...and stardock cannot find what it is...then it should be both fault's. But as you are one of the minority i would say again: FIX YOUR STUFF. The game plays smoothly for most of us, as mentioned by stardock...as reiterated by all the people that actually plays decently all day.

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.

RegnorVex, have you contacted stardock about your specific configuration?   They may be able to help you.

And just to let you know, it only takes 1 player in a game to hose it up for everyone.  So even if most of the players were experienced and one had a bad setup/connection (as was likely the case given one person had problems connecting all day), it will ruin it for everyone.

Indeed there are still connection problems, but believe or not, most people can connect now.

Give us some more details about your connection or problems and maybe we can help.  If you don't want forum help, send a detailed e-mail to support@stardock.com and they will try to help you.

Hope you get it running soon.  Good luck!

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,

Yesterday I've played 3 custom games and everything was perfect.

I didn't have to many connection problems before but yesterday everything was great.

THX STARDOCK.

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.

POST YOUR HARDWARE CPOMPONENTS!! I cant help you otherwise...

When did you play the gmae (o´clock?)

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 find the game works fine if im onnecting to people in my own country with low ping.

Once I start trying to connect with pings in the 200-300+ I get frozen at people attempting to connect to me.

Yet this was working fine before the last patch.

Ive done all the things. Forwarded ports and checked them with the port checker program. No firewall.

Running ADSL with plenty of upload bandwidth for a 5v5 game.

My ISP doesnt filter/throttle/block p2p traffic.

Im happy to be told the problem is at my end if you can make a serious suggestion what Ive done wrong or some course of action, but its looking very much like the game still has some timing errors in the connecting.

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.

Regnor,

I'm assuming you've used the utility to change the port mapping on the second computer? Having both computers go through the same ports isnt going to work. Although since you're already in game its unlikely that's the issue. I use the same type of setup to play with my housemate and we haven't had issues since the direct connect patch. Of course, other people in the game who havent set up port forwarding have screwed things for us, but theres little we can do about that.

Was everyone in the game responding in chat? If not, those that werent talking may have dropped/frozen. I get pauses/freezes when another player drops out, it has nothing to do with connection issues on your end, you just need to hope they don't join your game.

I'm no expert in these matters, but I have noticed an increase in the number of games we've been able to play through to conclusion, so I am thinking a lot of the remaining issues are at the individual user level.

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.

Is the forwarding done for each or your PCs individually?

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.

Hot damn! That's what it was all along, apparently. Once I set up a wide enough port range on the router, and then reset the ports directed to each machine, and then reset them on each machine with the supplied uitility, it worked. We played several 3x3's without incident.

Thanks guys for the suggestion. I thought I'd tried everything, but obviously didn't know that port forwarding had to be done on an individual pc basis. Glad it's working, but omg I feel sorry for those folks who would never have figured this out on their own.

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

Quite simply...

When you forward traffic on a specified port, you are in fact telling the router to send ALL TRAFFIC arriving on said port to a single IP (single PC).

Therefore, each additional PC will require their own "dedicated port" (or in the case of DEMIGOD...a port-range) in order to take advantage of forwarding.  

  Isn't networking fun?    hehe

Glad you got things working btw RegnorVex.