Civ4 direct connect. Can someone help me?

[jonp]

All,

I am having a very hard time getting this to work direct connect.

I have the following set up (all machines on roadrunner) :
Computer 1 is a pitboss server running at my house. Port 2056 is forwarded on my router
Computer 2 is at my girlfriends house and the machine I play on. It has a router with port 2056 forwarded. She also has vonage (not sure if that matters). Windows firewall is turned off. She does have Norton anti-virus running but no other firewall that I can see.
Computer 3 is another guy in another town. He told me all he has is a cable modem with Windows firewall (which he turned off)
Computer 4 is another guy in another town. He said all he has is a cable and Norton firewall

When we all try to log onto pitboss (computer 2, 3 and 4) we can't play. It says something about trying to connect to peer. If I kick myself from the game, 3 and 4 can play fine and played for almost 2 hrs last night.

Can anyone give suggestions or ideas why I can't play with these guys? Even when we all 3 log in, we can do a turn or two but then the timer stops moving and it says "Waiting to hear from player X" and when I log out everything seems to go back to normal.

Thx
jonpfl

[drsparnum]

2056

First off, I've never gotten a direct connection to work for this game, even though I never had a problem getting it to work in about a half dozen other games. I play with a group of RL friends, and we got frustrated by it, so we just play over gamespy but set a password on our game. Once you're in the game you won't notice any difference, so you could just use gamespy.

Second, I didn't have any luck just turning off the windows firewall, but I did improve things when I opened port 2056 in the firewall. I've heard that turning off the firewall doesn't do anything helpful.

Good luck.