Game Keeps Booting Other Player Out

[steoc4]

I have a home LAN and have been playing a game with my mate which was going really well until the modern age when we got a problem.
See my second computer is pretty old and slow so it lags a lot, its fast enough for us to live with, but the game seems to disagree and keeps putting a 60 second count down on my screen whenever his machine is busy.
Once we got to a very packed modern age the computer just started taking too long and my machine kept booting him out of the game. I guess this feature is to deal with people who get disconnected from the net and stuff, but on my home network I know he's still there so is there any way to disable it? We ended up having to finish the game in hotseat mode which is a lot more awkward.

[BigFree]

I've never played by LAN but I would think that would be certain ports that you could designate for both computer so that they were never "busy" for one another. Check the 'readme' for more information. Sorry, I cannot be of more help than that.

[steoc4]

I had a look through the readme and the only thing about ports was as follows:

'With Multiplayer behind a Firewall, it is important that DirectPlay Port #2303 also be opened. This is a new port used with DirectX 9.0b and helps improve connectivity. Please see the manual for more information regarding the appropriate port addresses to open to allow game hosting. Please consult your routers manual to ensure that you are opening the ports correctly.'

I'm pretty sure that doesn't apply to me though because I don't have a firewall set up and we're only playing on a LAN not on the net. The game runs fine in general I'm pretty sure it's not a problem with the network connection, it's just that the second PC gets slowed down a lot processing and the first PC automatically boots it for taking too long.

[BigFree]

Do the PC's connect fine without the game? Can you tranfer and access files accross the network?

[steoc4]

Yea the networks fine, we share a modem, access files across the network all the time, play other games on it too.
Civ(it's conquests btw) works fine across the network too for the most part - it's just in the later stages of a game my second PC(it's 500mhz 128 meg ram) slows down a lot as its processing, just as it would in single player, except my fast PC keeps automatically kicking it off when this happens instead of waiting. A 60 second timer appears on the screen saying it's waiting for the other player and when it gets down to zero it kicks him out.
I'm thinking of making the slow PC the host which would probably stop this happening, but I read it's always better to have the fastest machine possible as host because it carries most of the workload.

[BigFree]

Yes, that would make sense. But in the case of a LAN game, if one is timinng out due to a very slow (comparably) computer, then it woiuld be best to host from the slow one if it's always the host who determines who is slow and sets the time outs. I'm not sure that's how it works though. You may still get timeouts from the other computer even though the slow one is the host. Testing will tell. Let us know

[EssexDJ]

I'm having the same problem! I play the game on a LAN at home with 2 identical computers both spec'd with P4 3.0Ghz, 1 GB DDR400 Ram, 256 MB Geforce 5700 and so forth. This setup should be more than capable of handling the game but when we get to modern times with 2 human players and x amount of AI's (I've tried decreasing and increasing the amount of AI's) on a variety of sized maps, the lag gets to the point (usually when 2 civs are at war) where the "drop player" window comes up and boots someone out. It's so frustrating when you put in double figure hours only for the game to boot someone out. They should make it possible to disable the drop player feature on a LAN game.

p.s. Have I heard correctly that Civ4 maybe in the pipeline?

[steoc4]

Making the slower computer host fixed things for me, the counter never got anywhere near to kicking a player out which is good. It does run very slow though so we got bored and did a game of alpha centauri which is a whole lot smoother