Official Civilization 4 Ports for Multiplayer

Hey, I have been chasing down an issue where only one person can be connected to me at a time. I ended up calling take2interactive and had a pleasent experience. Not to mention helpful, they all speak with a heavy french/european accent. Well they told me the ports needed to be opened.

Clients
2056, 2075-2079, 2081, 13139

Hosts (along with those above)
6500

Hopefully this will help everyone. If it does, perhaps a sticky is in order?

thanks for this. bit of a nub question tho - where do i alter these port settings in windows? and do i open all these ports? no idea about this stuff.

portforward.com is your friend.

alco75 said:

portforward.com is your friend.

Click to expand...

No, it is $24.99

In any case Candy, you set up port forwarding at your router setup - it is not a windows option. On most systems, you can access your router config via a browser going to http://192.168.1.1. The username/pwd was given to you from your internet provider when you received your router probably. If you feel overwhelmed, just google "port forwarding" and read a bit about it. As instructions vary over different router models, it´s not really possible to offer step by step tutorials for everyone, but if you get the idea you should be fine on your own.

My second intention with this reply is to bump this very useful information a bit. I find it noteworthy that while the civ4.ini only specifies one port (2056), technical support actually instructed you to forward a wider range. Is there any reason for this? I would assume one port for VoIP, but the rest? And what of the host-only port? Has anyone checked if any traffic actually goes through them?

Something has to go through them, game wouldn't allow more then one perons to join me at a time until we all opened them up. This was a contacting peer issue.

Apart from the fact that this info should probably be better placed in manual from the very beginning, I would like to add to this that for 'Direct IP' only port 2056 (UDP) is used. At least it was on my setup when I tested it.

I have however encountered another problem. After changing 'Port' variable in CivilizationIV.ini I observed that in outgoing UDP packet only source port was changed (dest. remained 2056). So the intended use that all my friends will change the port number and we will simply run the game this way on alternate port is no go.

Is it bug, or feature?

Are all of these ports TCP or are some UDP or all UDP, what's the deal?

Stickied port forwarding thread:
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=146735

Though this is an old thread, please see my post here:

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=8797610&postcount=101