hi! ive been playing in a LAN game with a friend, and there are two minor things im (only slightly) irritated about. firstly, since it was my firneds first game, we enabled the Fireaxians. strangely, they defaulted to the Gaian Base-icon, and Lady Deidre's portrait. second, after a few hours, during my turn, i got stuck selecting a small stack of navel units, with the game refusing to allow me to take any action, with it claiming something about the other computer, and the only way out was for e to kill the game Via task manager. i hadn't changed anything ( other then enabling Sid as a factionleader), we were playing Alien Crossfire, and had NO unofficial patches installed.

Have your friend play Yang. Yang is arguably the easiest faction to play with.

I've never played via LAN, but it almost sounds like you had a network disconnect of some sort, or maybe you ran against a bug. Were either of the machines working over a wireless connection?