Freeze in the lobby

[Fritz II]

Hello,
I bought CoG and really enjoys playing it in single player. then i tried to play multiplayer with someone and it worked for a while. Now our CoG get always freezed when he/me joined the game. Also our connection breaks (when the computers dont freeze in lobby) sometimes in the game and a message called "DPRR Connectionlost" appears.
We are really frustated [:@] and need help [&o] [:)]

Greetings Fritz II

[Russian Guard]

Unfortunately, problems with TCP/IP and detailed battles is a well-known issue.

A new patch is coming "fairly soon" (quoting Eric, the designer), which - as I understand it - is a final release of the current 1.2.18 beta patch, with these TCP/IP issues fixed (along with, I assume, some other fixes, such as the issue of some Nations not properly charged the $50 for beginning a new development which started at "0", instead receiving a bonus $50).

[ericbabe]

I don't know how much of the new TCP/IP stuff will be in the forthcoming patch.

The connection-lost message is a problem with the underlying routines we are using -- Microsoft Direct Play 4.0 -- which has some known stability issues.  Some people are able to play fine over TCP/IP with it, and our in-house LAN testing is very stable, but some people seem to have connection problems.  I would like to migrate to a better set of TCP/IP libraries, but it's been much more difficult to make this transition than I originally anticipated.