@Caliber said in Another Novax conversation:

@Salz Gives the UEF faction auto win late game.

Makes one arty as powerful as 3 or more.

I have now tested it with all shields.
Yes, double shield damage would be too much.

Nevertheless, I am sticking to my idea. If you want to change the Novax, you need to do something more radical than just adding some energy consumption or reducing the base damage.
"This makes the Novax a support unit (scouting / shield disabling / stall effect).
This means that a Novax only becomes dangerous if you also have a T3 Arty nearby, for example, and the investment costs for effective use of a Novax increase accordingly, as the Novax is not dangerous without regular damage units."

But the creator of the topic seems to have a general problem with the Novax and I don't think any suggestion will satisfy him except the complete removal of the unit.

And that brings us back to the question of whether we should just leave everything as it is. ¯_(ツ)_/¯

Double the current damage of Novax against shields and reduce the regular damage to 0 + as long as the beam is active and hits a target without shields stalls the unit (what the chrono bomb from the aeon T1 attack bomber does).

This makes the Novax a support unit (scouting / shield disabling / stall effect).
This means that a Novax only becomes dangerous if you also have a T3 Arty nearby, for example, and the investment costs for effective use of a Novax increase accordingly, as the Novax is not dangerous without regular damage units.

@Band228 As a quick workaround you could use a free VPN like Proton.

So I'm starting to think, if you read it like that, they jump through the lobbies, collect the IPs (logs / Wireshark) of the players and then DDoS them. And so you have a 12 player match destroyed quite quickly.

Players don't change their IPs that often, 24-hour forced disconnection hardly exists anymore, so the IP remains the same for most private connections until the router is restarted.

That's not so far-fetched. There was a time when they went through the lobbies and crashed them with a ?bug? (I don't know if they were the same ones).

@Brutus5000 Couldn't you force all connections to be established via relay (global) and prevent all P2P connections so that the private IPs don't appear anywhere (as with a VPN)? Might be worth a try.

@Aurahead

You could check your RAM for errors:

Windows: Open the start menu and type in “mdsched” and click on “Windows Memory Diagnostics”. Click on “Restart now and check for problems (recommended)”. Windows will restart to test the memory.

If no errors are found, you could also try reducing the clock rate of the RAM in the BIOS.

I have the same experience.
Sometimes it works without any problems and sometimes it doesn't work at all.
I would say that if it doesn't work, it's a DDoS.
Or it's just a coincidence because you don't always play with the same people.

What would be the problem with sending a few requests to freelancers with a description of the problem and where the journey should Go and negotiating a fixed price via sites such as fiverr?
If you have an offer for what it should cost, you could start a fundraising campaign to finance the whole thing.
Learning from 0 is honorable (Go), but time is a factor and the current connection problems are really bad.
You can then have this explained to you in the process and also have a much higher learning curve so that you can continue to work on it yourself if necessary.

@Doompants

Check your game files of Supreme Commander Forged Alliance via Steam.

https://support.rebellion.com/hc/en-gb/articles/5226744283549-How-do-I-verify-my-game-files

Thanks for the feedback.

"US East has the same problems as all other coturns. We tried a very long test set yesterday."

My idea behind this was to have only one coturn server running, so that all traffic goes through it and other factors such as faulty coturn servers can be excluded.
US East has (at least with AWS) the best connection worldwide to Asia (Australia) <-> xxxUS Eastxxx <-> Europe. A compromise, so to speak, if only one coturn server were online.

"Our self hosted coturns are less reliable than using 3rd party ones. But much worse: the ice adapter (more precise the underlying library) is much more often failing to provide the important self-reflexive and relay candidates than 3rd party browser Turn test apps."

Are they all self-hosted except for GLOBAL? So the servers at Hetzner like Germany 1 or Finland?

Or am I misunderstanding something here and it was an internal test where players had no access to it?

"The relay is not needed that often, but if you don't get s self reflexive candidate (aka your own public ip) no connection can be made at all."

During a test (as host -> lobby) I once tried to block all coturn server connections locally (firewall), so that players can only connect directly to me, to roughly understand how much delay / lag / connection problems coturn servers generate.
Couldn't do this though, as once I blocked all coturn servers, I couldn't create a lobby or join other lobbies (tried this several times and with very few players in them to exclude any existing coturn server connections).
I wonder if this is a bug in the software and it is never assumed here that there are simply no coturn servers?

Btw: No match worked yesterday. But since the coturn servers Finland is no longer in the list (off?), it works quite well.

Unless you have optimized it and that has made it better.

I cannot recommend Hetzner for DDoS protection.

I have personally had the best experience with OVH.
At OVH you can also write to the support if you get an attack, they look at it and have optimized the filters at that time (at least that was the case a few years ago).

https://www.ovhcloud.com

@Brutus5000

Btw: Practicing the weeks where “Global” didn't exist, I usually had very good connections and hardly any problems while playing.

Playing is currently not possible. Connections are not established or you get a timeout or players randomly lose the connection in the game.

I am aware of the DDoS problem, but could the person responsible deactivate all “coturn servers” except for “US East” to see if it gets better?

There were a lot of connection problems some time ago and the Germany 1 was probably crashed / out of memory error.

Would suggest a test without coturn servers, but after my tests some time ago, it seems to need at least one coturn server, otherwise no connections can be established in general.

It can't get any worse than it currently is.

Thanks.

It's frustrating when you build an SMD with Tele protection and the team wants to help load it, but then the team's Engies get in the way of the rest of the build.

Is it possible to add this so that engies from your own team automatically get out of the way when something is to be built here, as is the case with your own engies?
Engies only, no other units.

@obituarypizza

Sounds like corrupted game files.

Check your game files of Supreme Commander Forged Alliance via Steam.

https://support.rebellion.com/hc/en-gb/articles/5226744283549-How-do-I-verify-my-game-files

Try a ping network test via cmd.

Just search for cmd in Windows and ping google for 5 minutes:

ping www.google.com -t

Or check it via this page: https://ping.canbeuseful.com/#ping

If there are high pings or timeouts, your general connection is unstable.

If everything is stable, try using a VPN.

Note: In the FaF client, I have had the best results so far when I have selected “US East” as the only one under Preferred Coturns for ICE.

Apparently, automatically kicked observers keep trying to establish a connection.
This then continues for the entire match.
Bug?

If you block the faf coturn server selected in the settings, you cannot connect to other players.
So a coturn server is always used?

Germany 1 = Hetzner (Dedicated Server?) always same IP
Finland = Hetzner (Dedicated Server?) always same IP
US East = Hetzner (Cloud?) always same IP although cloud?
Global = xirsys / DigitalOcean (Cloud?) mostly always a different IP

As the only coturn server, what does Global actually want with port 80?

Example:

Germany 1:
INFO Using all viable ice servers: [94.130.225.99:3478/tcp, 94.130.225.99:3478/udp] (c.f.iceadapter.ice.PeerIceModule:177)
INFO Using all viable ice servers: [94.130.225.99:3478/tcp, 94.130.225.99:3478/udp] (c.f.iceadapter.ice.PeerIceModule:177)
INFO Using all viable ice servers: [94.130.225.99:3478/tcp, 94.130.225.99:3478/udp] (c.f.iceadapter.ice.PeerIceModule:177)
INFO Using all viable ice servers: [94.130.225.99:3478/tcp, 94.130.225.99:3478/udp] (c.f.iceadapter.ice.PeerIceModule:177)
INFO Using all viable ice servers: [94.130.225.99:3478/tcp, 94.130.225.99:3478/udp] (c.f.iceadapter.ice.PeerIceModule:177)
INFO Using all viable ice servers: [94.130.225.99:3478/tcp, 94.130.225.99:3478/udp] (c.f.iceadapter.ice.PeerIceModule:177)
INFO Using all viable ice servers: [94.130.225.99:3478/tcp, 94.130.225.99:3478/udp] (c.f.iceadapter.ice.PeerIceModule:177)
INFO Using all viable ice servers: [94.130.225.99:3478/tcp, 94.130.225.99:3478/udp] (c.f.iceadapter.ice.PeerIceModule:177)
INFO Using all viable ice servers: [94.130.225.99:3478/tcp, 94.130.225.99:3478/udp] (c.f.iceadapter.ice.PeerIceModule:177)
INFO Using all viable ice servers: [94.130.225.99:3478/tcp, 94.130.225.99:3478/udp] (c.f.iceadapter.ice.PeerIceModule:177)
INFO Using all viable ice servers: [94.130.225.99:3478/tcp, 94.130.225.99:3478/udp] (c.f.iceadapter.ice.PeerIceModule:177)
INFO Using all viable ice servers: [94.130.225.99:3478/tcp, 94.130.225.99:3478/udp] (c.f.iceadapter.ice.PeerIceModule:177)
INFO Using all viable ice servers: [94.130.225.99:3478/tcp, 94.130.225.99:3478/udp] (c.f.iceadapter.ice.PeerIceModule:177)

Global:
INFO Using all viable ice servers: [207.154.234.214:3478/tcp, 207.154.234.214:3478/udp, 207.154.234.214:80/udp, 207.154.234.214:80/tcp] (c.f.iceadapter.ice.PeerIceModule:177)
INFO Using all viable ice servers: [207.154.234.214:3478/tcp, 207.154.234.214:3478/udp, 207.154.234.214:80/udp, 207.154.234.214:80/tcp] (c.f.iceadapter.ice.PeerIceModule:177)
INFO Using all viable ice servers: [207.154.234.214:3478/tcp, 207.154.234.214:3478/udp, 207.154.234.214:80/udp, 207.154.234.214:80/tcp] (c.f.iceadapter.ice.PeerIceModule:177)
INFO Using all viable ice servers: [207.154.234.214:3478/tcp, 207.154.234.214:3478/udp, 207.154.234.214:80/udp, 207.154.234.214:80/tcp] (c.f.iceadapter.ice.PeerIceModule:177)
INFO Using all viable ice servers: [207.154.234.214:3478/tcp, 207.154.234.214:3478/udp, 207.154.234.214:80/udp, 207.154.234.214:80/tcp] (c.f.iceadapter.ice.PeerIceModule:177)
INFO Using all viable ice servers: [207.154.234.214:3478/tcp, 207.154.234.214:3478/udp, 207.154.234.214:80/udp, 207.154.234.214:80/tcp] (c.f.iceadapter.ice.PeerIceModule:177)
INFO Using all viable ice servers: [207.154.234.214:3478/tcp, 207.154.234.214:3478/udp, 207.154.234.214:80/udp, 207.154.234.214:80/tcp] (c.f.iceadapter.ice.PeerIceModule:177)
INFO Using all viable ice servers: [207.154.234.214:3478/tcp, 207.154.234.214:3478/udp, 207.154.234.214:80/udp, 207.154.234.214:80/tcp] (c.f.iceadapter.ice.PeerIceModule:177)
INFO Using all viable ice servers: [207.154.234.214:3478/tcp, 207.154.234.214:3478/udp, 207.154.234.214:80/udp, 207.154.234.214:80/tcp] (c.f.iceadapter.ice.PeerIceModule:177)
INFO Using all viable ice servers: [207.154.234.214:3478/tcp, 207.154.234.214:3478/udp, 207.154.234.214:80/udp, 207.154.234.214:80/tcp] (c.f.iceadapter.ice.PeerIceModule:177)
INFO Using all viable ice servers: [207.154.234.214:3478/tcp, 207.154.234.214:3478/udp, 207.154.234.214:80/udp, 207.154.234.214:80/tcp] (c.f.iceadapter.ice.PeerIceModule:177)
INFO Using all viable ice servers: [207.154.234.214:3478/tcp, 207.154.234.214:3478/udp, 207.154.234.214:80/udp, 207.154.234.214:80/tcp] (c.f.iceadapter.ice.PeerIceModule:177)
INFO Using all viable ice servers: [207.154.234.214:3478/tcp, 207.154.234.214:3478/udp, 207.154.234.214:80/udp, 207.154.234.214:80/tcp] (c.f.iceadapter.ice.PeerIceModule:177)

1. Can I see in the logs/debugger which player is in my lobby and has coturn server connections?
2. Can I prevent this by not allowing coturn server connections (so, I could have the IPs and block them as hosts in my firewall, then no more players can get into my lobby - there are only 4 Germany 1 / Finland / USA East / Global of them - or are there several and only the key regions are listed)?
3. When you switch from the lobby to the actual game, are all connections renegotiated, right or wrong? And what happens in the lobby is just a rudimentary check to see if it works at all with the connections?
4. What about the option “Allow the ICE adapter to use IPv6”? It says that it causes connection problems for some players, but what advantage does it have in general (more stable connections when a connection is established?)?
5. What actually causes the lag in a DDoS when players are in the game, if it's just P2P connections? If players are connected to coturn servers and these are then attacked (the coturn servers - are they attacked at all?), or are there other services that limit the game (live replay?)? Does the player still have connections to FaF service servers during the game, which can cause lag (in-game behind issues)?

Psychology plays a major role in the games industry.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mpTBYiUSidA

Minus ranks could demotivate new players and make them feel hopeless.

I imagine finding a match is also quite difficult, at least these players are kicked very often.

It doesn't affect me, but I keep seeing players with a minus rank.
What is the deeper meaning of minus ranks?
Wouldn't it make more sense to limit the lowest limit to 0?

This unit is not popular (my subjective perception).

I personally used this unit a few times and always came to the conclusion in combat that the lack of ability to build T1 Pgen (for T2 Arty) is a no go. Because at the stage of the game where this unit could be useful, this is important (every single shot counts).

I only use normal T2 Engis now and have done better against my opponent than with Field Engineers.

I would like to hear from others who actively use this unit, preferably with gameplay.