Whats the concensus on HOI2 MP?

[unmerged(17563)]

Like what Bumblee Bee and Major have said here already. Our MP games are very stable, once everyone knows how to turn firewalls off, and aovid certain issues. Even with 7 players we can play on normal speed pre-war, above normal with a little lag, but normal is fast enough as there is plenty to do if yo play the game fully.

For instatance last night be played for 6 nearly 7 hours straight with only 1 reload. Thats is awesome in my books and extremely stable for any MP game. This is replicated in most of our games now with only a few reloads required. The only time we have found a number of crashes is when the Japan china war is raging and nationalist china annexes the minor chinas which casues some bugs with province the human Japan player is taking, reloads are required here. Note this does not happen if Japan is the host.

Playing MP and how stable it is depends on everyone connection, weo nly had real problems when people had less then 128kb upload speeds. We all have that as a min now and the host 256kb upload and a few other players. Also the host haveing large amounts of memory will also help smooth the game out.

I give MP 9/10 it is awesome when played with a dedicated group. It will get 10/10 with a few bugs resolved and a few game enhancements, probably with 1.2. Well done paradox.

I'm looking forward to next session, my tussle with the British navy should be coming soon.

I dunno why our games are so stable when everyone else complains about some pretty serious problems??? I do think maybe its cos we are all close together and on fast connections

 

[unmerged(22728)]

The only time we have found a number of crashes is when the Japan china war is raging and nationalist china annexes the minor chinas which casues some bugs with province the human Japan player is taking, reloads are required here. Note this does not happen if Japan is the host.

yes, we strucked some problems in Japan campaign in China also. Japan player (client) complained his troops just moon-walked into the last province needed to annex and had problem to annex it. Reload fixed it. Letting Japan be host makes sence if its related to lag in network. It logical annex and trigger-event cause client CTD becuase of critical data need to arive in time. Its a real-time game not turned-based game after all.

- But i'm a bit curious what happend if that China nation is played with another mp-player insteed of AI??! I say risk is much high you run to a serious crash.

Playing MP and how stable it is depends on everyone connection, weo nly had real problems when people had less then 128kb upload speeds. We all have that as a min now and the host 256kb upload and a few other players. Also the host haveing large amounts of memory will also help smooth the game out.

Thats intresting and new information for me, cause what been said before is:
1. Host have to have good upload speed (figures is rare mention here)
2. Host need to at least match recomended spec. meantion at back of CD folder.
3. Dial-up connection will work as clients if ya run game on slow speed and host full-fitt 1 & 2.

Ok, i'm not a network guru but latency/lag is not directly connected to bandwidth. Instead it's really connected to what TIME it takes for a package data to travel from client - host and vice versa. That could explain why your pure Assie group has less problem. The coloured dots in lobby is a try from developer to measure that. What colours of dots do your players have?

I dunno why our games are so stable when everyone else complains about some pretty serious problems??? I do think maybe its cos we are all close together and on fast connections

Well it could be another reason as well. Perhaps your group play more 'historical games' and follow a well tested game-path. And our group is playing less traditional /historical.

I hope for the later on since then it's a bug and then it's possible to fix.

 

[unmerged(22728)]

3. Dial-up connection will work as clients if ya run game on slow speed and host full-fitt 1 & 2.
I hope for the later on since then it's a bug and then it's possible to fix.

hmm.. that was really the case with HoI but not HoI 2. Victoria manual mention requirements for mp-games like " In order to play a multiplayer game you will require either a fast Internet connection of at least 512 kbit/s with TCP/IP protocol installed or connection to a LAN". I dont recall what HoI 2 manul sad but im sure none mention upload speed or spec for host.

Anyway, i begin to think problems connected to lag/latency in HoI 2 is dependent of response-time figures in conjuntion with bandwith betwen host-client, rather than bandwith explicit.

 

[unmerged(22728)]

Andrew, I'm in the games with Durruti and keeping it at slow from the moment war starts, whether much is happening or not, does appear to keep the death bug at bay. We cannot verify it for sure yet, but we were losing games in March 1940 trying to play on below normal, and we have one game now approaching December 1941 and still going strong. It does seem to work.

What else differ from the games that came dead after 'corrupt save'?

- differ game-path from previous? More according to history or so?
- differ number of players than before? less humans more AI-controlled?
- tried co-op in previous and turned that feature down this time?

 

[unmerged(31954)]

I agree with everything except naval bombers. They are fine as they are. They were extremely dangerous in WW2 and naval commanders were very worried about them.

Keep them as they are.


Ghis

I have two problems with them. One is that carriers get slaughtered as if they don't have several squadrons of fighters on board, and the other is that navs are very weak against submarines while in the real war, it was aircraft that primarily drove the subs from the ocean.

 

[unmerged(31954)]

Ok, i'm not a network guru but latency/lag is not directly connected to bandwidth. Instead it's really connected to what TIME it takes for a package data to travel from client - host and vice versa. That could explain why your pure Assie group has less problem.

Absolutely. If you envision the internet like a highway system, the analogy works. Once your data leaves the host, it has to get out on the highway with all the other traffic. If it can travel along relatively clear paths and avoid any bad bottlenecks, it will get to the client in good time, and then hopefully the return trip back will not be bad. But if the packet hits a congested route or a traffic jam, then it gets delayed. And as on the highway system, if data has to go through Washington, D.C. or New York City, it's going to be subject to massive traffic jams. Also, there aren't that many pipes across the oceans, so transoceanic routes will be subject to jams as well.

That means the Aussie group probably has less trouble with traffic. A group that has people on US west coast, US east coast and Europe is going to be more subject to lag problems. That's also why a LAN group is going to have so much greater performance. It doesn't even have as much to do with 100 mbps over 2 mbps as it does with not having to get shunted through hundreds of routers all over the globe.

 

[mike8472]

Just to clear up the issue of lag. When i had 128 upload speed and other players had that as well and also speeds of 64 upload. At this point the game was unplayable when at war. You could make it to war with 4 players but very unstable once fighting.

Since i upgraded to 256kb upload and everyone else made 128 there minium, it has been smooth sailing. Very few crashes and smooth game play. Its a whole new world now, and we have 7 players and im sure we could esily do 8-10 players if we wanted to. We normaly stay at normal speed pre-war as everyone as alot to do, there is always alot of diplomacy going on with so many human players, and getting enough reosurces is also very interesting.

So to make it clear even though we are all in the same country with less the 128 for any players makes the game unplayable for all. Min player must have 128 and the host must have 256 or more. I recommend you guys start up regular groups for your geographic areas. Eg East US, West US, Western Europe, Eastern Europe. Start threads on the forum and after a short time you will figure out who are the dedicated players.

For instance in our group we have Myself, munster, major and Nolan we play the most and currently have 3 games going. Our big game with 7 players played mostly on weekends when everyone is free. A 4 player game we play most weeknights, and also a 3 player game we play during the day when we are free. So most nights we have a HOI 2 game in MP, aint life grand, hehe.

To get all these players together was hard and sorting out connections but after a few months we were already and havnt looked back since. The Aussie group as been around since the early days of HOI so we do have alot of experience at MP and its problems. All it will take is for a few of yous so start groups out there and organise everything. Good luck.

 

[unmerged(17563)]

I see all players as having 5 dark green ping dots above the flags. I assume that means the connection couldnt be better

I spose thats why I find it so hard to understand people when they complain about how unstable the game is in MP, cos I havent seen any instablilty Now I think with patch 1.08 with EU2 Johan adjusted some stuff to make the game much less conn hungry, its possible that some further tweaking of the HOI2 code could lower the min conn speed cos as it stands dial up is definetly out for any games and 128 upload is min for 4 plyers or more games. Bear with it everyone the game is absoluty awesome in MP, so just be patient or move to Australia

 

[boromir]

For the record, the game can also be unstable on a LAN sometimes (this varies from game to game), and you can't get a better connection than that.

 

[unmerged(22728)]

For the record, the game can also be unstable on a LAN sometimes (this varies from game to game), and you can't get a better connection than that.

i don't know what u mean by 'unstable', ya mean CTD on host or client thing?

i tried to find some info about LAN problem in thread but only end up in.. player can't start new tech since host not finished desync story.. ya meand that one?

the search engine here to resricted not letting me do a "LAN and CTD"

well, i admit a bit lazy too.. i don't post all problems encountered in MP.. taking the effort would help.

 

[boromir]

i don't know what u mean by 'unstable', ya mean CTD on host or client thing?

i tried to find some info about LAN problem in thread but only end up in.. player can't start new tech since host not finished desync story.. ya meand that one?

the search engine here to resricted not letting me do a "LAN and CTD"

well, i admit a bit lazy too.. i don't post all problems encountered in MP.. taking the effort would help.

CTDs on LAN happen in some games. Some games run reasonably smooth - relatively long (3-4 hour) periods without crashes, some crash at a rate of 1 per hour. Desynches that manifest themselves through tech research discrepancies between client & hosts, resource stockpiles + units produced happen too, even at normal speed. Most of the crashes seem to be on the client side.

My main problem with the game remain the other bugs though, the lack of unit (planes vs ground units, tanks vs infantry) balance, numerous exploits, the way the sides of the conflict are unbalanced, the resource setup. These become apparent after you have played the game to later years > 40, something that I think is not very common currently on the Internet.

And I don't think "balance" is something that can be fixed by a mod. In theory yes, but in practice the answer seems to be "probably no". For one, many HOI2 parameters are a bit cryptic (also organization of game files has a sloppy feel to it - country events for instance are thrown all over the place) - this has thrown off even experienced modders it seems. Secondly, from what I have seen mods have never done very well and have hardly been universally accepted by the MP community as a standard - even CORE in HOI1 was not the MP game of choice with the vanilla game preferred ... So why should it be any different for HOI2?

Anyway, maybe 1.2 will offer something new in this regard.

 

[unmerged(22728)]

... some crash at a rate of 1 per hour. ...

sounds pretty serious to me, any idea why happend?

My main problem with the game remain the other bugs though, the lack of unit (planes vs ground units, tanks vs infantry) balance, numerous exploits, the way the sides of the conflict are unbalanced, the resource setup

compare to previous one i say this is minors, isn't it? ok, cheating then (guess u talk serie bug here) ..but still u got a fairly good chance to put game into track again.

 

[boromir]

sounds pretty serious to me, any idea why happend?

Nope, something broke and it just stayed that way. A game after that was relatively crash free.

compare to previous one i say this is minors, isn't it? ok, cheating then (guess u talk serie bug here) ..but still u got a fairly good chance to put game into track again.

That depends on what you mean by minor. It's ok for one or two games, but once it becomes apparent that the one side is in a hopeless position and investing in infantry is pretty much the best way to go unit wise, air is horrendously expensive for its effect (it doesn't seem to do much at all), that the Soviets have tons of cash, loads of IC due to a serial factory bug and the Axis is going to run of out resources quickly in 6 months etc then it becomes less fun. Then one starts with a lot of arbitrary decisions on what to mod and why - this "arbitrary" feeling is something that takes a lot out of the game and is also a reason I think why MP games have no mod as a standard. Then it turns out even the modding doesn't help (look at Mithel and Starfire for instance) ... and then you have had enough.

For HOI2 I look for playability right from the start. Paradox had 2 years to learn from HOI1. They didn't. Yes the above is fixable, Paradox can do it, but what worries me in the long run is the fanboy attitude of "it's a perfect game already", the initial denial of anything being wrong at all (betas claiming that they don't need any house rules to play etc) and the proclamation that 2 patches is basically all we need for the game.

Despite this I think HOI2 MP has a future, HOI2 is a much more in-depth game than HOI1.

 

[unmerged(22728)]

Ok, Boromir i understand your reasoning but still..

i fell like the fellow stuck on the high-way with a broken engine. Stucked with useless manual, and a useless #@$ telephone, and a pretty much useless insurance as well

and ya fellows just passing by in fancy cars and discussing colours of seats or include some air-condition..

can't u feel a bit petty for the ones with broken engine?

Herr General, in previous post complained MP is just a crap when it comes to stability now speaks sunshine and nav-planes is the only cloud on the sky.

well, if it's evedence for HoI differ from HoI 2 that ya need to have a certain up-load even as a client, reduce lag yourselfes by only arranging close area MP groups, reducing no of players, adjusting speed etc. i need tools for it.

one can't just kick out a player from group that has been a round since EU, HoI with only superspition and a bit arbitary colored dots in the lobby!!