I just convinced a friend to buy Rebellion so we could play multiplayer, we're both in Victoria Australia and usually have a ping of around 80ms to each other. After starting our first game I quickly noticed there was an annoying level of lag, checking our pings showed they were around 350ms.

Anyways I decided to test playing an online game (rather than lan) with my GF in the same room, again pings were up over 300ms. We weren't downloading anything at the time and a quick test on speedtest/pingtest .net showed normal results. This got me thinking that games played online were hosted on an ironclad or stardock server overseas or something?

If this is the case it pretty much rules out our ability to play lag free multiplayer, is there anyway to direct connect over the internet? We tried connecting by entering my public IP address from the LAN/Direct connect menu but it failed, are there specific ports the game uses that need to be opened/connected to? Thanks in advance for any help