Hosting a multiplayer or can not!

Can someone explain to me way I can not host or get on to some of the multiplayer game on Rome Total War. I've noticed that if I host a game I will get some people on but some of my friends that I want to play on the same game, can not connect on to my game, this is a total pain up the A***. I've also noticed that I can't connect to a few games that i'm not hosting.

I have Norton as a firewall, (With it allowing me to connect to the game,) but I really don't want to take the firewall off while playing.

Is there anyway around this or is it just as simply as abc by clicking something?

I don't have this problem with other games on my pc, why is it just with the total war games? ~:confused: ~:confused: ~:confused:

It could be that the ping time to the host is too high, and the game stops you from connecting to those hosts. I suspect they put a relatively conservative restriction on this to minimize drops, and removing the check for out-of-sync battles may have been done for the same reason. In addition, the loss of 4v4 battles and the high lag when playing with several thousand men are all indications that the RTW multiplayer has not maintained the standard of performance that was achieved in MTW multiplayer. A lot was given up to have the nice graphics.

Ping has nothing to do with it, I know people in the same area as me that are having the same problem when we try to connect, this is big problem with Activision games. Why when i play other games like Battlefield 1942 or Call of duty, I never and I mean never have these problem with connecting with friends to play games?

I have the same problem and I live in California. I tried disableling my firewall and router but nothing worked.

If disabling the firewall doesn't let you connect, I don't think there is anything else you can do. What I'm saying is that I believe CA/Activision put some tight restrictions on the connection to minimize drops. It seems like they bent over backwards to minimize drops even to the extent of allowing battles to go out of sync. In this game, it isn't enough to maintian a good connection to your friend across the street. You also have to maintain a good connection to the GameSpy server throughout the battle. They didn't have to do it that way, but that's how they did it.

Now what makes it impossible to uncover the cause of the failed to connect is the lousy uninformative error message and the catch 22 on support which is that CA doesn't provide support and Activision Customer Support simply says it's not their responsibility to fix coding errors in the client software even if they are related to the software not working properly with GameSpy. The client software happens to be the game that they published. Activision regularly updates the GameSpy server software, and it's up to the client to maintain compatibility. So they pass the buck to CA who doesn't have to provide any support. You can't get anyware on the problem, and posts about the failed to connect problem in the unofficial support forums have gotten exactly zero response from anyone. There is no way to get any info about it.

Thank-you!