I have not played PA for many months. I picked up the Titans expansion and tried to play offline. I set the Local Server to ON. It hangs at "Creating World Simulation". I did a search for "offline" but didn't find much on the topic. Any suggestions or solutions (or posts I didn't find) would be appreciated. Thank you.
The PC I am running Titans on has no internet access. I run the PA Launcher and click Play Offline. I set Local Server to ON under Settings. When I run single player the program displays "Creating World Simulation" then after a bit it displays "Unable to Access World Simulation". The reason I supported PA in the first place is that it didn't need internet connectivity to play (or a the time it was a goal). I was able to run PA in a non internet connected PC in the past. Did they change the rules or am I missing something. Thank you again.
Post your PC specs, please! As you might already imagine the local server calculations are pretty intensive, espacially Ram-wise! Anyways, if you select a very tiny system it should work on any PC, but don´t try running e.g. PAX on a system with less then twelve gigabytes of ram!
What you are seeing is that it somehow crashes the server. Check in "%LOCALAPPDATA%\Uber Entertainment\Planetary Annihilation\" for log files (or a log directory with them in it)
Wow you guys are faster than I am, appreciated. The computer has an Intel I7-3770K with 16 GB of RAM. For video I have a Nvidia 660Ti 2GB card.
I have no log files. I did a quick test on this PC where I ran Titan in offline mode single player, local server mode and it worked. I then blocked internet access to Titan and it failed as described above. I will run some more tests when I get back from work (at home on lunch break). Thanks for the suggestions, it is appreciated.
The game uses countless instances for better performance. If one of them gets Inet access (read as: You´d have to find and block all...) and the others don´t, it will cause issues!
I just tested Airplane Mode/WLAN off +PAX-System+10 AIs. (pure insanity, this is NOTHING I do recommend, you won´t be able to finish that game) It takes some time to load and it´s clearly RAM-intensive (I didn´t close my browser before trying it the first time---well, you can guess what happens: Crash after a minute or so and heavy problems on reconnect), BUT it starts. Note: I´m using local servers on Auto, course that´s the most comfortable option in my eyes, as I doesn´t have to turn it back each time I go online.
Not even the launcher will finish it´s work if you only block the launcher itself---similar things happen with PA, endless loading queues might happen!
By the way, there really ought to be log files at the location cola_colin mentioned. Every run of PA will create them. If you don't get them, then either you don't have write permission, which is bad, or your hard drive is full, which is bad. Can you copy-paste "%LOCALAPPDATA%\Uber Entertainment\Planetary Annihilation\" directly into the address bar of Explorer? There should be server-.....txt files there. There should also be a "log" directory there which contains PA-.....txt files. If you don't see those, then what files do you see there?
Thank you for all the replies. Everything is working due to radongog's and cola_colin's warning about blocking the launcher and that all the routines need to be blocked. The problem I was having was related to the software which I used to block internet access for programs that I don't want accessing the internet. I was using this program to test the condition I will be in when I am up at the cabin with no internet access. If I disconnected the Ethernet cable and didn't use the blocking program at all everything worked just fine. I guess my memory of it working with PA last year was incorrect. Thanks everyone for your replies, it is greatly appreciated