So my friends and I just got our hands on Homeworld 2, an old-ish RTS/space sim game by relic. It's really neat so far, but when we try to play each other online using the "connect directly to a specific ip" option, we get a connection error message even when we supply the game with the ip address that is shown by the game to be the host's. What are we doing wrong/how do we fix it?

Most likely your router.

Try using Hamachi and then selecting the LAN option instead, if there is one that is.

Hamachi stopped working, remember?

NOPE. :O

Well then, I suggest you and/or your friends turn off their firewalls if applicable.

orly?!

When was the last time you used it, little buddy?

Make sure the host (and everyone else) set up their routers properly to eliminate firewall/NAT issues.

If they updated Hamachi to stop games, find an old version. Doubt it's HW2 that's been updated to stop games in this case.

Do you all own the game legally and have separate CD keys?

Nope, this has been a pirate's affair. Nowhere to get it legally here. We messed around with Hamachi a bit and it works fine. I could have sworn it stopped working for games a while ago though. I tried and tried to get DoW and CoH to work with it to no avail. Such a bummer. Oh well, this works flawlessly. Thanks!

So I've recently discovered the wonder that is third party PC game modding and I think I finally understand why you people are so infatuated with PC gaming. The mods for HW2 are great but I'm hesitant to install more than one at a time. Is it safe to have more than one mod installed at the same time or will everything be rendered unplayable?

Install as many as you want...just make sure that when you install one, play the game and see if it's stable/playable/you installed everything right.nothing worse than installing a bunch of mods and now you have a CtD or something isn't running right and you dunno which mod is causing that.

Right... See I've got two mods that are pretty big game updates that install with.exe's so I'm not entirely sure what all they're dumping into the game. I know that the one I've currently got installed plays like a separate game that uses the HW2 engine. It has it's own icon and the original game plays fine with it installed. I just don't know if installing another will result in the same level of compatability.

Well as aznface said, install one at a time. That way, if something goes wrong, you know it's the last mod you installed that's causing the problem and you can just remove it.

Depends on the mod and the game. With Relic games some can be tiny fixes, others can be total conversions. Obviously you can't run 2 total conversions at once.

THNXUVRYMCH