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[Zeyurn]

Been a long time since I posted here!

Anyway my wife, friend, and I got back into AI War again with the new Shadows expansion, and we started noticing a few things when we played.  We play on a LAN at my house, and we've noticed that since the expansion it takes a horrific amount of time to load a save game and get both players in it and running.

The full sync goes fine, but then it will stick at 'Waiting for Players'.  If you look at the stats page it says that both other players are at WAIT: 1000+ and are stuck on the last turn.  Every so often a turn will blip and then the WAIT will come back and tick down about ~100ish or so for both of them and then get stuck again.  It does this until both the WAITs actually hit 0, and then the game runs completely fine (until we end up with a 15k ship battle at an AI core world but that's not really anyone's fault but ours).  It takes anywhere from 1 minute to 10 minutes to get things going, and the longer the overall game time the worse it is (possibly the more ships that exist too, although that could be the same thing)

I thought it would just be a momentary bug because we'd never seen it before, but it's lasted through 3 games and several mini-patches so I thought I would come here and ask

1)  Does anyone even still play this co-op these days?
2)  If you do, have you noticed this happening when you load up a saved game?  Is there a way around it?

Beyond this problem though, really loving what's been done to the game since we last took up the war against those dastardly AIs.

[x4000]

Cheers!  Lots of folks still play co-op.  The problem is most likely the scale of the games you're playing, paired with a bug in your network drivers.  If you update your network drivers, there's a fair chance the problem will go away (the issue is generally a buffer overflow when the network card gets too much data and can't handle it).

That said, there's also a way built into the game to mitigate this.  In the settings screen on the host, play around with the Network Sync Size (there are instructions in there about what works best for various situations) and you should see the problem much abated.  Basically what that does is slow down the rate the game is giving the info to the network card, so that the network card doesn't freak out and go catatonic.

The other possible problem is that the MTU might be set too high, and that could be reduced on the client and host in the settings screens also.  That said, usually on a LAN I'd be super surprised if that was the issue.  Usually that's a case of ISPs or routers having funky settings.  But you could try reducing that to something like 1200 and see if that helps; that would also help in-game if so.

Hope that helps!

[Zeyurn]

Thanks Chris, I'll give all that a shot and see how it works!

Scale is almost certainly an issue since we've been playing on 120 planet maps at high (9/9 and then 10/10) difficulty and we're not as frugal with the AI progress as many, so late game we were getting 38k CPAs or sets of 11k waves, and there were all sorts of ships floating around.

Will let you know one way or the other, and if it doesn't solve it try to get some better info/screens for you.

[x4000]

Cheers!

In terms of the scale, that definitely sounds like the issue; that's basically the largest sorts of games you could play, and those come with exponentially larger costs in terms of CPU usage, network loading time, etc.  So that's probably the difference right there, rather than any particular expansion, if I had to guess.