Noob questions

[Diadem]

I've played quite a bit of singleplayer civ4, and now I want try multiplayer a bit.

But I'm at a total loss. The lobby is totally chaotic, a long list of games where the window keeps making jumps so you can never read the description of any game...

When you try to join a game 7/8 times the host just won't reply ...

When I'm finally in... I'm suddenly playing with a large obviously computer-built empire. Huh?

So I accidently joined an already existing game. Whoops. So I quickly part and join another... same result.

How do you actually join a new game, instead of stealing a game from someone who forgot to put a password on his game?

[Fosse]

Download and patch to 1.09 to fix the lobby. Games that have a little pillar icon next to them have already started, those without are still being set up.

[Diadem]

Yeah, I found out about the pillar icon by myself. But what a totally unlogical icon to describe a game in progress...

And I have patch 1.09 but the lobby still jumps around everywhere.

[Diadem]

Ok another question.

I was in the middle of the game when suddenly something started flashing in the middle of my screen. Every 5 or so seconds a text appearing for 1 second. Way to program an error message. The programmer who put that in must have been braindead.

Anyway, after some difficulty I figured out it said something about a being out of sync, and I should reconnect. how the hell it got out of sync I don't know. I have the 1.09 patch without any custom mods.

But when I tried to reconnect I stumbled upon an unexpected problem. There's hundreds of games being played... How do I find mine?

There's no way to see the name of your game ingame. If you didn't pay close attention while joining, your chances of rejoining seem to be zero. Or did I miss something?

[Diadem]

noone?

[Snotty]

My trick to stop the lobby jumping and find a new game. Click the 'pillar (telephone? who knows?)' icon at the top so the games are sorted by starting/in progress. I then hit 'page up key' to scroll the selected game box up to where the new games are sorted.

If you get stuck connecting to a host or one of the peers in the game then you are stuffed by that player as far as I can tell. It might be your computer + firewall etc but I know I can play and host but I still get stuck behind the same players that other people do. Just find a different game with different players.

With the Out Of Sync red error message you need to check the red flashing numbers on the right. if your number is different to the other players then you need to log back into the game. I have no idea how to find your game name ingame. When I am back in the lobby I just click on the name column to sort by name and hope I can rememeber the name of the game and hope the host has named the game distinctively. If I cant remeber that then I might remember what map type we were playing on, so I can sort the games by game type instead

[Diadem]

In short, it's all amateuristic ....

But why won't that out of sync error stay on the screen so you can read it? What idiot makes an error message flash so you can't read it...

[Snotty]

The message stays on my screen, but Ive never been the one who was OOS.

The seems to be that some peope will play on even though they have a massive red error message across the centre of their screen. I guess it makes it even harder to ignore the message if it is flashing