Hi fellas,

we've been trying to host Stronghold Crusader matches on Gameranger, but haven't been able to. Everytime anyone attempted to start the game for the lobby, a Gameranger window popped up stating "Waiting for host" and a green pulsing progress bar. We couldn't get beyond that.

We were all having the issues no matter the localization (some clients were German, some English, OSes all German), except for the guy on the Steam version. So I pasted the files from the Steam version over the ones from my GoG install, but it didn't help.

Long story short: It works if you rename/move the Stronghold Crusader folder.

For example, original installation path: "D:\GOG Games\Stronghold Crusader Extreme HD" didn't work. What worked was: "D:\Stronghold". I didn't test other folder names after getting it to work. After making the configurations in Gameranger, so it's pointing to the new executable path under Edit -> Options, select the game Stronghold Crusader HD and direct it to the new folder name, it all worked.

Since I didn't find any solution to this online and found this out myself while pulling my hair out, I thought it was worth sharing. I hope it helps someone. I wonder why noone brought up this issue yet in the forums.

Obviously you should have DirectPlay installed and firewalls deactivated / configured properly for it to work.

Thanks for sharing but never turn the firewall completely off.

Opinions differ on that, although I think services that you don't want to be connected to shouldn't be active or configured accordingly, and not artificially "protected" by a firewall. If you're behind a NAT router (probably 99,9% of people playing this game) your personal firewall is completely redundant, at least in my opinion. Services that you want to provide need to have ports forwarded, or they won't work.

If you have malware on your system that isn't supposed to communicate to the outside world, you a) have different problems than your firewall and b) the malware will probably have something to bypass your software firewall anyway.


But that shouldn't be the topic of this thread, just don't assume that your firewall provides as much protection as you anticipate :) For testing purposes it's definitely OK to turn it off for a few minutes without having to be afraid of anyone hijacking your system instantly.