Please test this with the network cable unplugged (and, if you have wireless, with the wireless radio disabled). If it still dies, contact support and point out that the game cannot be played offline. Push them for a patch to make it work offline (which will likely require them contacting the developer on your behalf). Expect it to take weeks or months to resolve.

Would also be interesting if you don't block it in the firewall but direct it to 127.0.0.1 via hosts file.

Uh, usually people just list their schools and the algorithms connect you based on that. They don't need access to "secret info" when people put it up willingly 99% of the time, which is the key to Facebook's success.

There's a reason I've never had a Facebook, LinkedIn, or other such account, and tell people not to post photos that have me in them on those sorts of sites, and so on.

I've been anti-Facebook for years, and these days I'm feeling pretty vindicated regarding all the people who've called me paranoid about it.

their real stance is simple:

"your mom has telemetry, go f*ck yourself and buy more gog games sucker!!"

Is this real? :(

Most everyone spies on everybody, yes that is real. Now the problem is what information the different companies collect about you and what they do with it. Facebook was just fined five milliard dollars for going too far but most get away with quite a lot.

Kingdoms & Castles recently tried to "phone home" and wouldn't work if it was blocked by a firewall, that was a recent-ish update, possibly not the latest as i havn't played it in a few months, but this shouldn't ever be a thing.

if you are about galaxy-related stuff PMing home - there is still no info if thats intended behavior, or certain developers misconfigured it. If you are about gog allowing games with third party telemetry to be sold - yes, sadly its very real.

Kingdoms & Castles is unity game. They ALL phone home by default and (at least based on knowledge I've got from a friend, who develops a game with it) there is no way to disable it, even for developer. So, if this bothers you - you should rather avoid all unity-powered games like a plague, or set up your firewall to "whitelist mode" (e.g deny all connections, that werent manually allowed) and hope there are no vulnerabilities in it

I don't mind it trying to, but when the game doesn't work if your firewall blocks the connection, it isn't what i would call DRM-Free.

Every software which is not made to connect to the Internet in the first place should ask the user for explicit permission when it wants to make an Internet connection and should allow the user to disable these connections permanently. That of course also should be the case for games in single player mode.

Edit: Oops, posted to the wrong thread. Sorry for reviving this thread!