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I'm hosting a game with 5 players, and we're having a bit of trouble with lag at speeds above "Below Normal" (Normal is still playable, but above that people will be lagged by several days!). All players are in the same city, one is on my home LAN, the other three have ADSL, while I'm on cable.

Basically there should be no shortage of bandwidth!

I guess I'm the weak link, with a 384/128 line, but that's still 15k/sec upstream and 40k/sec downstream. Is the lag really due to bandwidth? A different host is out of the question.

I'd like to add another 3 players to the game, but my co-players are reluctant as they feel lag increases greatly as you add players. Is this the case?
 
Originally posted by Anew
I'd like to add another 3 players to the game, but my co-players are reluctant as they feel lag increases greatly as you add players. Is this the case?
Click to expand...

It depends on where the original bottleneck is. If everyone is lagging, it is probably with your connection. If the data chokepoint is your upstream capabilities, then adding more players would certainly lag the game more. fpolli talked about lag in a thread somewhere nearby, you should check that out.
 
Everybody lags, even the guy on the LAN, though probably not as much as the guys on the remote side. That can't be bandwidth!? Unless there's some sync problem that for some reason doesn't affect the server, that is...

Might it be related to my meager 600MHz CPU? (I have 512MB of RAM, so the game runs just fine). As I noted, the game runs just fine on the server side, so I kind of doubt it's processor related.

I couldn't find the thread by fpoli. Any idea what it was called?

Thanks.
 
We talked about it here...

http://www.europa-universalis.com/forum/showthread.php?s=&threadid=69850

That was the thread.

When you say the guy on the LAN gets lag also, do you mean that his game drops behind yours in date then has to catch up, or does he have a lot of pauses in the game? Because I believe that if some other player has lag, all the players will be affected, because when that player gets far enough behind, everybody else has to wait for him to catch up. I'm not totally sure how it all works, but I doubt your LAN player is having lag. It's more likely he's having to wait for others to catch up.
 
Remember that your connection's14k upstream must be shared between your computer and the computer on a local LAN. That means each of your PCs has an effective 7k bandwidth presuming that it is used evenly.

May I suggest that someone else try hosting it? It may have no impact but if HOI works by sending all information to the host which must then distribute it (which it could well do, I don't know), then this task should go to the machine with the most upstream bandwidth because that machine is capable of sending the most data out at once.
 
Re: We talked about it here...

Originally posted by fpolli
When you say the guy on the LAN gets lag also, do you mean that his game drops behind yours in date then has to catch up, or does he have a lot of pauses in the game? Because I believe that if some other player has lag, all the players will be affected, because when that player gets far enough behind, everybody else has to wait for him to catch up. I'm not totally sure how it all works, but I doubt your LAN player is having lag. It's more likely he's having to wait for others to catch up.
Click to expand...

The guy on the LAN has what I think is lag. Time stands still, then jumps half a day to catch up with me. It's just the same as I've seen in games where I'm not serving. That's what is most confusing to me. It seems improbable that he would have lag.

The players most affected seem to experience the lag in a somewhat different way, in the they get lagged far more than the player on the LAN.

Occasionaly I will get a "high latency" warning to one of the remote players. I then pause. The time will then keep running in the remote, lagged players' (not on the LAN) games for several days catching up to me. The LAN player will at most be half a day behind. Chat still works perfectly. I'll sit in a paused game with the clock standing still, chatting with the other players, whose clocks will be ticking away for quite a while (at least 30 seconds), catching up to the server. It (unsurprisingly) gets progressively worse as we increase game speed.

I seriously doubt the theory put forth by Mazza, that my upstream bandwidth is being split between my server and the client on the LAN. It seems most likely that there is no direct communication between the clients, and that it all goes through the server. Apparently no one knows for sure. Trouble is we had lag even when the host had 3 times the upstream bandwidth that I have, and we were only 4 players in the game.

I did a traceroute to one of the guys who complains most about lag (he's got 768/384 ADSL). 10 hops (12 including our GWs), 0% packet loss and ping times of a little over 50ms. This guy used to be the host (until we added the 5th guy on my LAN - now I'm stuck hosting because of that), and I then had the same kind of lag the LAN player is experiencing now. (that was 1.02).

See... This is thre reason my post count is <15 after 2 years. I can't keep it brief. :)
 
One of the two players on your LAN could try to get in through dial-up, that way the other host can try again. I also beleive that some ISP's allow you to get separate IP's for an extra fee.

In my experience though, any game played at above normal speeds will lag at least a little. Most MP games I play end up being at normal speed until war breaks out, when the speed is set lower.
 
I'm going to break this down into one straight forward question:

Should a 384/128 cable connection, with ping times in the area of 50 ms to the clients, be capable of hosting a 5 player game?

How about an 8 player game?

Thanks.
 
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