Planetary Annihilation Alpha Information

I'm not sure that it is necessarily the distance that enters into it so much as the quality of the connection (much like you say jilpi. I am playing from NZ and connected to Europe and US games. Some have had no lag issues at all, whilst others became a slideshow quite quickly. Wish I could pin down the common factors in the lag filled games so I could report on it but so far there doesn't seem to be a pattern.

By experience, distance plays a strong role.
I used to play Spring:BA a lot, and the difference between a server in US/Europe and a local server was tremendous.

Probably because Longer distance --> higher latency --> lower bandwidth (TCP protocol)

Oh believe me I am well aware of that, living at the bottom of the South Pacific. All I meant to highlight is that there could be something else at play here besides distance. I say this because I have had PA games in Europe and US which were fine and unhindered by lag and others that were neigh unplayable on the same night.

Sincerely hope you're right! (so we can enjoy games with Europeans, Americans, Kiwis...)

Spring RTS is synchronous P2P engine, there is actually no real "server" for engine. There is host who have more privileges, but it's not change how real networking works.
Game is fully synchronize, so every player is connected to every other player. It's mean if you playing with 3 people (who live in central USA) with ping 30-70 and one with ping 230 (e.g non-usa person) overage ping will be 230.

PA is used client-server model, so it's only mater where server is. So if you live and Europe and join US server only you will notice the lag.

Do we know how steam keys are going out?

Copies purchased through steam will have access immediately; but uberstore copies must be explicitly exchanged for a steam key. There will probably be an option added to the uberstore account menu.

I'm more waiting on being able to upgrade gift keys at this stage :c