Desync issues in MP

[rredding]

A friend and I have played a good bit of MP over the weekend. We are seeing him have multiple dysyncs over the course of the game. Sometimes one every 3-4 turns and sometimes every 20 turns. I host and have had no problems. He is running Win 7 and has a comp that meets the min game requirements. I am running Win 10 and meet the recommended sys requirements.

Has anyone had any issues like these? We are trying to figure out what is causing them. Thanks!

 

[PeasantLord]

I ran into a similar issue this weekend.. We played a 4 player game and everyone de-synced about every 5-7 turns. Did a lot of testing to try to figure out the cause and eventually determined that the host running the game in borderless windowed mode (myself on Windows 10) was the cause. Once I switched to Fullscreen mode we played the rest of the weekend without any desyncs. So if you are by any chance running in borderless windowed mode, give that a shot.

 

[anandus]

I ran into a similar issue this weekend.. We played a 4 player game and everyone de-synced about every 5-7 turns. Did a lot of testing to try to figure out the cause and eventually determined that the host running the game in borderless windowed mode (myself on Windows 10) was the cause. Once I switched to Fullscreen mode we played the rest of the weekend without any desyncs. So if you are by any chance running in borderless windowed mode, give that a shot.

Fascinating. How did you find out it was the borderless windowed mode?

 

[PeasantLord]

Honestly, just a hunch. After trying everything else I could think of I decided to try changing that. Set it to fullscreen and we played for 4+ hours without any issue, then the next day I swapped it back to borderless loaded up the game and we went out of sync 7 turns in again, so I went back to fullscreen and we were fine for another 3 hours.

 

[rredding]

Interesting. I will double check I am playing full screen. Is the default set to windowed? Thanks!

 

[PeasantLord]

The default is full screen, so if you havent changed it, then this probably isn't your issue. I much prefer borderless window mode because it lets me interact with my 2nd monitor while playing.

 

[Fluphen Azine]

I decided to mess about in MP all day today and its just like Civ V ... you get the game going pretty good and before turn 15 you get the everyone has DC'd message and your the only one left in the game. I think we all expected this would be the case anyway and that MP would not work well just like in Civ V. I have tried for about 4 hours in public MP rooms and haven't had one game get to turn 20 but that was the case in Civ V as well. NQ group probably is doing better. This MP game is like that though it takes hours upon hours of trying before you get that one epic game that lasts for 6 to 8 hrs!

 

[CanuckSoldier]

I decided to mess about in MP all day today and its just like Civ V ... you get the game going pretty good and before turn 15 you get the everyone has DC'd message and your the only one left in the game. I think we all expected this would be the case anyway and that MP would not work well just like in Civ V. I have tried for about 4 hours in public MP rooms and haven't had one game get to turn 20 but that was the case in Civ V as well. NQ group probably is doing better. This MP game is like that though it takes hours upon hours of trying before you get that one epic game that lasts for 6 to 8 hrs!

Well I don't know how you are getting this experience, because everyone I've talked too, and including myself have had a great MP experience, the code is much better than Civ5. I'd be looking at problems on your end, router etc, or if you are at the end of a really long internet pipe....

CS

 

[Fluphen Azine]

Well I don't know how you are getting this experience, because everyone I've talked too, and including myself have had a great MP experience, the code is much better than Civ5. I'd be looking at problems on your end, router etc, or if you are at the end of a really long internet pipe....

CS

I was thinking this too. It has been a long time since I have upgraded my router so that might be doing it. I used to have trouble in Civ V as well being on the West Coast. For some reason I knew a lot of players from LA and Vegas who had trouble and could never connect well with the players over the pond. I have the highest connection I can buy so maybe it is this old box or something else. I'll check into it but I have been getting dropped from games all day now so it must be me and not them or the servers.

 

[anandus]

Yesterday I played a 2-player 8+-hour LAN game and I also had lots of desyncs. It started about 80 turns in and then every few turns a desync.
Although the game holds up fine and reloads quite quickly, it is a bit annoying.

One thing I noticed was after each desync-reload I'd get the same message (Stonehenge was built in an unknown land). Really weird, as if that message wouldn't purge properly.

Saving the game, restarting the game and loading the game does help for another 30 turns or so, but then dthe desyncs came again.

Edit:
Civ6 was allowed in the firewalls and we'd put Civ in the Defender exclusion list.

 

[rredding]

As an update to the original post... We have played a few more times this past week and have not had any issues at all. Neither of us changed any settings. So apparently its more of a network issue than a local Civ 6 issue. As a person who played alot of Civ 4 and Civ 5 MP this release is the most stable by far. It took 2 patches to get Civ 5 to even be playable in MP. They did fix it up quite nicely in the end and I am pleased they have carried over that expertise to this version.

Happy Civing everyone!

 

[saboteur_]

Hi everyone! Last weekend I tried to play with two other ppl, in one instance myself hosting and in another attempt I had another friend host the game. Unfortunately both attempts were abandoned by turn 30ish due to the constant desyncs So there are definitely some issues - I can see from Twitch streams that some people can play just fine, but unfortunately in our playgroup the game is not playable.

Wanted to share because I do have a feeling we can't be the only ones and maybe there should be some attention on this. We are all Win10 players and should be above the minimum specs.

 

[rredding]

Would be great if there was some way to identify the problem. There has to be something... we played for 5 hours yesterday finishing up a large map sci victory with no problems. We did "one more turn" after and played with nukes which are freaking cool!

 

[viper_1986_1986]

My friend and i have had no issues up until around turn 250 in normal game speed.
Now i am getting a desync every turn....

:/

 

[anandus]

I found out the issue with us was something with the Aztec DLC not properly loading. We all disabled it and it all worked fine.
(It's weird, as a verification of the file integrity didn't fix it)

 

[rredding]

My friend and I had issues last night once again. We started a new game, huge, random, standard speed game, and about turn 50 we started having him desync every turn or every other turn. My current theory is that it is some type of memory leak issue or some type of network issue. We will try again tonight after both of us clean restart and see if that is an issue.

 

[anandus]

Try a game with the Aztec disabled (in Steam you can turn it off). See if that makes a difference?

 

[rredding]

Played again last night. We both have Aztecs enabled. No Desyncs... I am sure there would be a problem if one of us had it and the other did not. These issues are so random seeming.

 

[woc]

We've tested this a lot and it seems a performance issue of either the GPU, CPU or both.

playing a small map with low resources will start fine in the beginning but at some point desync every 20turns, then every 5 turns then every 2nd turn. Loading game, rebooting computer solves the issue for 10 or 15 turns and it comes back to every 2nd turn.

Copy paste the game to a more potent computer and the desync is gone. Can play all the way through.

Now loading a middle sized map. Desync comes much sooner in the game. copy paste to more potent computer and desync is gone until final stages of game. Here the desync now also comes on the more potent machine.

now we copy paste the file to an even more potent computer (Yes we have 20+ computers here on our network)
And 1 computer is always the i7-8700k the other one is always starting from an E4200 going up to faster CPU.
And suddenly can play the game through until the end.

Now on large or huge maps need even 2 i7-8700k but eventually the desync comes again.

Now we switch from windowed mode to full screen mode and we can continue the game.

Now we go to giga map (from mod) and for 400-450 turns without desync but eventually the desync comes again dispite 2 monster computers + full screen.

Now we lower all settings to a minimum (no leader head animation etc) et voila, we can continue the game
much further without desync up to turn 950!

But eventually, even here the desync every x-th turn comes back.


Since I won't mod for civ6 as I've done for civ4 and I won't hunt and debug code to find this one, I'm very amazed that the developers haven't caught the reason for the desync yet. It's obvious some performance lag causing this. Maybe even some memory out of bounds/allocation/issue triggering a desync.

It shouldn't take a good programmer more than a few days to hunt this one. Before they expand and add expansions, fix the damn multiplayer issue! If you sell a game with multi as a specific feature, it's like telling your customer:"yeah, this car got a roof so you won't get wet in the rain and can drive in winter" and than the roof has a hole in it and you're not fixing it. That's a no go! Imagine some car company doing that and telling their customers:"we won't fix what we promised would be a working feature!"

I'm pretty sure such a company would face bankruptcy for customers running away.

I'm always astonished how much Gamers accept from companies as bugs and not fixing them.

I would be ashamed such a persistent and repeatable bug for 2 years and not fixing it.

 

[viper_1986_1986]

We've tested this a lot and it seems a performance issue of either the GPU, CPU or both.

I have to disagree.
With civ5 i had this issue on a 980 with a friend who had a 760, both running high end i5s for the time

now i we have a 1080 and a 1070 both running high endi7s and we randomly will get desyncs. We have now played 2 full games without desyncs just by going to full screen.
So it may be the GPU, but not because they are low end. We have both always had flag ship top of the line GPUs when having desyn issues.

Actually even STILL playing civ4 and civ5 we get desync issues with our 1080s and 1070s...

edit:
and size of map doesn't seem to factor in one bit for us. We play on tiny - ultra huge (the modded map sizes) and the desyncwere just as random.
Also in 99% of our games, there are no mods, so not a modding issue.

And if anyone says it must be your internet, that is not true either. I have desync on LAN with 2 computers 5 feet apart on a nice little switch that gets desync.

edit2:
I have yet to try and turn down the gfx on all players. I have always just kept mine as low as possible since i am not a fan of gfx. I actually play in strategic view most of the time too

I would be ashamed such a persistent and repeatable bug for 2 years and not fixing it.

This has been a bug since civ3 PTW. Although back then the game would actually fully desync and NOT tell anyone. you would see the other humans acting all ******ed and their starting city would be like in the middle of the ocean....