Setting up Pitboss game

OK, my friend and I are trying to set up a pitboss game and both of us are total noobs. The trouble is that neither of us are receiving notifications to begin our turn. If someone could please walk us through the process of setting it up that would be great.
A little bit of info: we both have gmail accounts for emails.

 

I'm wondering this as well - do you need to keep a computer on to host it at all times, or how exactly does this work?

 

At the moment neither of us are receiving notifications in our e-mail or receiving message invites from Steam. Does Pitboss even work on this game yet? I have showered this forum looking for any info and have found none. I contacted Fitaxis and they said check here lol.

 

they said they are going to release a standalone pitboss server, which will not require steam on to run, nor civ5 itself. You will be able to just run the pitboss server, then only have to run civ5 when u actually want to play. Will be able to keep a civ5 game going indefinitely, w/out having to actually run civ5 for the entire time. This info from 2kgames community manager on their 2kgames forums.

But they haven't done this yet, so pitboss is in kind of an unofficial beta I guess. Haven't seen anything about an ETA either. For now, you have to actually have civ5 running for others to be able to join the game. In my experiments it did appear that hosting the game passes to someone else if you leave while they are in the game, so you can share this burden of hosting w/other players and not have to do it 24/7 yourself.

I am glad, however, to see any movement at all on getting a pitboss for this game, even if we aren't quite there to something i want to use yet. => The standalone is what i'm waiting for.

as far as email notifications, notice in the pitboss setup options it has sections for you to put your smtp info and such (so you have to have an email account that pitboss can use for these emails it would seem, the emails are sent from you, though automatically, not steam). I think gmail lets ya do this, just google 'gmail smtp'.

 

On the multiplayer options there is a setting for Steam notifications. Does not work. I looked up the stmp for gmail but that didn't work either.

Has anyone used pitboss for civ v yet??

 

I'm running the dedicated server, and it's working ok - but neither steam nor email notifications are being sent. I'm confident the email setting are correct (I do this for a living ), and I can't even see how the steam notifications *could* be wrong, there's nothing to set!

Is there something obvious I'm missing?

 

I got the email notifications working on my test server but never tried the Steam ones. The instructions from Firaxis don't recommend using it although I assume that's because email is more accessible.

Reference the following if you haven't seen it yet:

http://forums.2k.com/showthread.php?272271-Pitboss-Instructions

I'm hosting a game as described at the following forum if anyone is interested. Be aware it is a 24 hr timer.

http://www.tacticalgamer.com/civili...n/197124-bnw-pitboss-back-future-signups.html

Bernout

 

Thanks, I had seen and followed that, yes.

Oddly, the email "just started working", a couple of sessions into the game, without us apparently changing anything further. Inexplicable, but I won't question it! No steam invites still, but we can live with that.