Multiplayer: Success hosting behind a firewall

[EatYerGreens]

Good news for would-be MP hosts.

I wanted to give MP a try for some time and finally set up an account last night. Advice from the player lobby was to turn my firewall off to make it work.

I wasn't happy about this and a few test attempts with VI granted 'Full Internet Access' in the basic Mcafee application settings proved this change was insufficient, resulting in 'out of synch' or crash to desktop problems just as deployment ended.

I asked if anyone knew about what port numbers to open in the firewall. This drew blanks from many but one player understood what I meant and directed me to totalwar.com for details. I had to create a user-ID, register, validate and so on, just to be able to read the multiplayer tech forum but I got what I wanted.

There is a sticky thread there with a title referring to port forwarding settings for hosting behind a router.

I tried setting up permissions for the same port numbers for both TCP/IP and UDP in Macafee (Personal Firewall Plus) advanced settings and am pleased to report that a 1 v 1 and a 2 v 1 match both worked without a hitch.

I am posting this here purely as a piece of good news. I will post the technical info and the port numbers in the Apothecary as soon as I can.

However, because somebody else did the leg-work in finding out what ports were in use and because they have posted in totalwar.com but, for whatever reason, have not also posted it here(*), I want to get them to confirm it's okay to simply copy their findings over to here first.

IMPORTANT
I disable XP SP2 firewall on my machine, to avoid conflicts with McAfee and general CPU/resource wastage from running both at once. Whilst it may be possible to tweak the XP firewall in a similar way, with knowledge of the port numbers, I can't vouch for the likelihood of success with it and am unfamiliar with its inner menus. I hope to post in Apothecary with step-by-step instructions and maybe screenshots, for McAfee.

XP firewall equivalents may follow but please bear with me. I need a patient amd willing volunteer in the MP lobby to actually test these things for real, before I post. That will have to wait for another session.


* I had done forum-searches in the Apothecary and Tech Library already but got 'sorry no matches found', for the word 'firewall'. This is very odd because I later chanced upon a thread with my exact search term in it. Someone else had asked the exact same question about firewall ports as I had but had also received no reply.