Is there a way to get Stellaris to do multi-player with a direct connection between machines, rather than bouncing off a (slow, high-latency) server somewhere? My friend and I play on the same LAN, in a house with a 1Gbps Internet connection. However, it's still painfully obvious that our connection is being routed not only externally, but externally through some extremely slow/distant servers and/or connections. This makes for extremely unpleasant gameplay, even aside from the encroaching late-game slowdown.
Evidence that we aren't directly connecting now:
What we've tried / done already:
Neither connecting using the game list, nor using the Direct Join button, seem to make any difference. I have fully allowed incoming connections to Stellaris at my machine firewall, and the router does not impose any firewall on same-subnet LAN. I prefer to not open all the relevant ports on the router's external firewall, since there's no way to restrict what they'd be talking to, but I'll try that if there's any reason to expect it'll fix things. It really shouldn't be needed, though; again, we're on the same LAN.
What I'm looking for, in descending order of value:
Evidence that we aren't directly connecting now:
- Transferring a few megabytes of save file takes a minute, rather than the second or so it should over the LAN.
- Some actions on my (hosts) part have weird brief delays, like pausing, but everything he does on his side is subject to massive, multi-second delays unless the game is paused.
What we've tried / done already:
Neither connecting using the game list, nor using the Direct Join button, seem to make any difference. I have fully allowed incoming connections to Stellaris at my machine firewall, and the router does not impose any firewall on same-subnet LAN. I prefer to not open all the relevant ports on the router's external firewall, since there's no way to restrict what they'd be talking to, but I'll try that if there's any reason to expect it'll fix things. It really shouldn't be needed, though; again, we're on the same LAN.
What I'm looking for, in descending order of value:
- Is there any way to scan the LAN for Stellaris games, and connect without using the Internet server?
- Is there any way to directly connect to a Stellaris game via an IP address or similar?
- Is there any way to convince Stellaris to not pointlessly bounce our game traffic a third of the way around the world to Sweden and back, or whatever else is causing multiple seconds of latency?
