Emperor and internet connection sharing

[Friedfly]

My girlfriend and I have 2 computers behind the same Netgear MR814 router. We want to play Emperor: Battle for Dune with our friend who has a regular internet connection. We can set up an Internet game and hit 'play', but everyone gets stuck on the "Connecting" screen.

Has anyone had any success playing Emperor across the Internet with 2 PCs on one home network? Is there any special configuration I need to do? I see plenty of advice here for connection problems along the lines of 'disable the firewall', but obviously I can't remove the router or set up static routes since we both need to share one internet connection.

We are all running Windows 2000. All 3 of us can play together fine with the current setup in Red Alert 2: Yuri's Revenge, we're just having trouble with Emperor: Battle for Dune.

Nothing is configured specially on the Netgear router at the moment (no ports are forwarded, no static route, etc.)

Thanks for any help!!!

[SurlyPIG]

Well I don't know about port settings or anything, which would probably be the best way if you could find the right numbers, but I do know that if you're behind a router, you can almost never connect in four player games. It's like once in a blue moon. You can still do 2 player games though. In order to be able to connect properly, you would need to set one of the computers on your network as the DMZ host. You can do this by accessing the settings for your router (if it's like most, just enter 192.168.1.1 in your browser) and put in the network IP of the comp you want to be the DMZ host. It will remove the firewall protection from your router for that computer, making it open (so you might want to have a basic software firewall up on that computer). It's entirely possible you still might not be able to connect, as I never could connect to a four player game when I didn't have the DMZ host active, but maybe with only three players it would work.

If it could work, port settings would still be the best option. Maybe someone here knows the ones for emp?

[gryphon]

Can both computers play online with your friend on the other connection in a 2 player game ?

Ports used by Emperor battle for Dune are :

TCP ports:

3840

4000-4020

7000

If the 2 computers work seperately in a 2 player game, try to see if each of them works in a 4 - 6 player game.

You could set one of the PC's in a DMZ, if that doesn't do it place them both in a DMZ. [ I know, easy suggestion isn't it ;) ]

[SurlyPIG]

I didn't know you could set more than one computer as the DMZ. :O You can't on mine anyway. At least, I think you can't...

How did you find the port that emperor uses, gryphon?

[gryphon]

How did you find the port that emperor uses

hehe, guess that is why I am a mod here ;)

no, seriously. . . it's on the EA site. You can look it up at the tech support pages they have. :)

Besides that looking at your firewall [ and possibly it's log's ] for open connections at the time you play Emperor should also give you an indication. :)

My router can handle almost 10 using the HTTP configuring mode. And If you should have a UNIX based router to which you can telnet [ or something like that ] you could set up your own chains. So it's router dependant. Could be the Netgear MR814 can handle just one. Not shure as I never have used a Netgear router before. .. :-[

[gryphon]

Just stumbled upon this topic at EA tech support.