Multiplayer hosting bandwidth requirements

[sdupont73]

Has anyone been able to determine the upload bandwidth requirements for multi-player games with regards to both initial data transfer (for saved games) and general game play?

Some friends and I started a 6-human / 2 AI multi-player game, which worked fine the first night we played. We saved and attempted to continue the following week, but after initially connecting to the host, our host would then always and immediately lose his connection to the game.

He checked his upload use and he thought it was maxed out (he has 512kbps upload limit).

Has anyone else encountered such problems and if so, was it indeed a bandwidth problem or perhaps something else you discovered?

Does 512kbps seems like perhaps not enough to host a 6-human game? It seems slightly strange because I see many games in the internet gamespy lobby that have 10 or more players in them.

If anyone has an experience or insight into this problem, I'd greatly appreciate your feedback (haven't seen much in the forums on bandwidth issues).

Thanks in advance for your response.

 

[Rono_]

It seems very unlikely that this is an upload capability issue; 512kb/s will handle anything Civ4 can throw at it. Especially since he gets d/c'd as people join the game room, where the communication between players is minimal at most, 1 - 5kb/s if that.

Even if all 5 other people needed to download a large custom map the file size is no bigger than a few hundred kbs, it would probably up to each person 50kb/s at a time as most connections don't utilize the whole capacity, but that's not even the case here as everyone already has the current map.

In conclusion, I don't think it's to do with his upstream, but beyond that I cannot really say with any confidence what a possible remedy could be.

Have you tried having another host the game?