Me and a friend usually play AI skirmishes (4 AIs against us), but the AI builds so many units on planets that they occupy that the sim speed quickly turns into 6+ seconds in real life per game second, rendering the game essentially unplayable. I tried the same scenario by myself with the local server and it ran fine for most of the round. Quite disappointing since the whole point of "cloud" is to reduce the load on a local machine and do more than you could without it, not less! I tried hosting the game locally and then inviting my friend to join but the connection to the server always failed. Is there any way for somebody online to join a locally hosted game through the normal interface or do I have to go through the trouble of dealing with PA Stats?
It's will only work if you setup some virtual LAN like Hamachi do. Otherwise one who host should have public IP and use PA Stats.
Does anybody know what ports PA uses for the local game discovery and communications? To preserve outgoing bandwidth I would want to set up the VPN in hybrid mode so need to know what port ranges to forward with the VPN and which to leave alone.
Do you have limited bandwidth or there some other reason? It's important because to host game in PA you need 2-4.5Mbps of outgoing bandwidth for each player that going connect to you.