Hosting - Thoughts on MP Games

[Koplin]

Hi Everyone!

For those of you who know me, I'm Kopin and I will be GMing a MP game over in the Stellaris MP Steam Group every Saturday night (It's gonna be fun )!

I was wondering if I could appeal to those of you who have more experience in PDS games. I know we need a solid upload speed in order to ensure a solid connection to host, but what do you think a good upload speed would be for a game of this nature? In the past, what type of speeds were EUIV hosts using to ensure the game speed stays consistent?

I'd love to host as well as GM (just for the sake of consistency) but I fear that my 20 down/8 up won't be enough to host properly. And one of our members in the group has an insane 20 Mb/s up...so I feel like he might be the best choice.

Thoughts? Your suggestions on this matter are greatly appreciated.

 

[mordocai]

As a programmer with networking experience, ping time probably matters more than raw bandwidth. Most MP games actually use pretty low bandwidth in my experience. Hopefully a dev/someone with paradox experience will chime in though.

 

[doomdude1]

Hope you/your server is situated in Europe, else ping will be a b*tch.

 

[Koplin]

Well my ping is 18 ms so that sounds fairly fast from what I understand. Would be nice to have someone chime in from PDS. But I trust you if you have networking experience lol.

And I don't think ended to be in Europe as the player who hosts legitimately hosts the entire game IIRC? And 95% of our players are in Canada or the US so I think that means we're good.

 

[mordocai]

Well my ping is 18 ms so that sounds fairly fast from what I understand. Would be nice to have someone chime in from PDS. But I trust you if you have networking experience lol.

And I don't think ended to be in Europe as the player who hosts legitimately hosts the entire game IIRC? And 95% of our players are in Canada or the US so I think that means we're good.

I haven't read up on how paradox does their multiplayer (does all traffic go through their server before reaching the host, or does their server just link everyone up and then traffic goes directly between host and client?) but with an 18ms ping out to the general internet you should be good probably. As long as that is stable anyway and doesn't suddenly go up to 500ms then back to 18ms a lot.

 

[Koplin]

I haven't read up on how paradox does their multiplayer (does all traffic go through their server before reaching the host, or does their server just link everyone up and then traffic goes directly between host and client?) but with an 18ms ping out to the general internet you should be good probably. As long as that is stable anyway and doesn't suddenly go up to 500ms then back to 18ms a lot.

My only concern is that I'm on a wireless receiver which craps out once or twice a week on me. Probably should figure out how to stop that from happening before I decide to host for sure.

 

[Eldoran]

Well for the wireless receiver problem there should be an easy solution: buy a long network cable and plug it in your router and your pc . And as far as my experience goes (with it admit isn't too far) the raw upload speed isn't overly important so you should be fine. You could easily test your configuration just set up a test game with one or two of your MP group and try to let the game run on speed 4. If you can handle that an actual game on speed 2-3 shouldn't be a problem

 

[marlek]

Its ping time between the host and the other players, however there is no way of seeing what your fellow players pings will be. Unlike CIV there is no ping indicator besides their names when they join a MP. So you kinda have ot make sure that your fellow players arent playing from half a world away as this will reduce the available game speed and cause desyncs

 

[Koplin]

Well for the wireless receiver problem there should be an easy solution: buy a long network cable and plug it in your router and your pc . And as far as my experience goes (with it admit isn't too far) the raw upload speed isn't overly important so you should be fine. You could easily test your configuration just set up a test game with one or two of your MP group and try to let the game run on speed 4. If you can handle that an actual game on speed 2-3 shouldn't be a problem

Haha, if only I could. Router is a few floors below me and it might be a bit of work going through all the drywall lol. But that's a good idea, I'll test it out a few days before we start

Its ping time between the host and the other players, however there is no way of seeing what your fellow players pings will be. Unlike CIV there is no ping indicator besides their names when they join a MP. So you kinda have ot make sure that your fellow players arent playing from half a world away as this will reduce the available game speed and cause desyncs

Yeah thankfully we're all on the same continent, so hopefully the pings aren't going to be all over the place.