I bought NG specificly for the co-op multiplayer it supposedly offers. The store page states it requires Galaxy for online play, so I just installed it through Galaxy and run it from there. However, NG claims I'm "not connected", which definitely is not the case.

I tried (fruitlessly of course):

- downgrade Galaxy to 2.0.75.142 to stop GalaxyClient Helper.exe from crashing, was latest release (2.0.80.33) before
- allow all network access for Northgard, GOG Galaxy and Galaxy Communications
- change the server region (which was undeclared before) to international. Now the empty choice is gone
- change server region to mainland china - the game gets stuck in "trying to connect to server, please wait", greying out Conquest (which only led to solo local before) and Bifröst. Changing back to "international" did not help, only exiting and restarting brought it back to normal.
- add port forwarding of 60422 to this machine (I found this port in the firewall, NG apparently connects at this port)

This is on Windows 7 with the native windows firewall managed through Avast! Antivirus. Additionally, cloud synchronisation has been failing for some months by now with Galaxy claiming it's "due to too heavy load", which cannot be the true cause for this long. I don't care about cloud saves but maybe that's related. Needless to say, none of the above changed the cloud save issue, either.

I did NOT try disabling the firewall completely. It must not be required, and even if it works then, this is completely unacceptable. Why can't this thing just pop an error that says what it was trying to do and how it failed, instead of some generic and useless message?