And some more info We ended up starting a new game and it died within the first few minutes. After this we did it again and I saved it 50 seconds into the game. it then died again a few seconds to a minute later. Then the next game wasn't a new game but one from the loaded save game file, we played this with no problem for another hour and saved the game and were done for the night.

Perhaps loading from the saved game makes the difference!?

Any devs watching this post?

Hi ThrakaAndy, sorry you are having issues playing multiplayer. Could you be more specific on how the game is dying? What exactly is happening? Is the game crashing? Does it just say "so and so has disconnected"?

As a loyal customer of Stardock for many years, and as one who has purchased a lot of its games, I feel that I must intervene :

I have a very reliable and stable high-speed cable connection (Videotron : Montreal, Canada).

I honestly certify that my download speed from Stardock's SDC service has always been 750 to 825 kb/sec. (during the past two years).

(I cannot certify what it was like before 2006 : I do not remember.)

I am sorry to say that if you experience a mere 25 to 50 kb/sec. when downloading from SDC, and then possible lag when you are trying to play Sins with your friend, one could suspect that something is wrong at your end.

I do not want to be nasty. I am simply speculating.

I just wanted to give out, as we say here in Quebec, un autre son de cloche.

Of course, I cannot generalize from my limited experience : my particular home-connection download interaction with SDC (at 750 kb to 825 kb/sec.) remains only a particular case. I have no idea whatsoever what the situation is with other StarDock Central users. In my case, what is fantastic is the consistently fast and stable quality of the SDC downloading process.

Mind you, I also get those high-speed numbers as a subscriber to GameSpot FTP downloading. (When I used their download manager, though, which was advertised as faster, my speeds were always below 100 kb/sec. -- so I stopped using it.)

Consequently, I cannot belittle the validity of your OP's problem. A weird dimension of Computer Technology is that some users experience no problems, while others are plagued with very frustrating issues -- and easy explanations and solutions do not always come around.

During the past three days, I have played 8 solid hours on ICO, with the same two (trustworthy) gamers : no problem launching the game (and twice reloading the saved game to continue), low pings between our three machines (even though we live far apart), no lag whatsoever, not one crash.

Go figure. I could not explain why your experience is so different from mine. I'm behind an old (2001) LinkSys router, and the only thing I did was forward ports 6000-6112 TCP to my IP address (an expert stated that UDP was not required) -- and that was my very first (amateur) configuration of a router, in 6½ years.

Good luck.

I think it's more frequent when the game is caching models textures etc. I have a 24-inch monitor and the game is running at 1900x1600 or so res. The graphics and effects are all pretty high as I have a great video card. But like most games, the first time you run into something you get a tiny little hickup so after not playing the game all day and loading it up the first game is a bit jumpy the first few minutes as my client is loading everything. My partner sees the hickups as pauses in his game.

We tried to play single player before starting multiplayer to see if it would make a difference. It definitly cached everything but alas it still didn't prevent it from loosing connection over and over. We finally went to the IronClad Online and played there with intermediant connection losses and we just kept reloading. Finally we hit a good patch where it didn't loose connection for a long time then it did again and was frequent again. We were able to finish a game though! Yahhh!!

So my testing in trying to track down the cause of the issue isn't getting me far But remember, it's not ingame lag, we don't notice really any lag at all, it's just BOOM the network screen appears and sits there forever. We left it up for 5 minutes yesterday it just never came back. I sent him a msg and he sent me a msg in chat, then I kicked him. I got his message right after he was kicked so it was like it was held somewhere, the packet made it and the game got the data.

Can any devs report if any bugs were discovered and if they were or weren't fixed for the upcoming patch regarding game connectivity?

Thanks!!