On-line play works, but off-line does not

On-line play works, but off-line does not

Description

Playing multiplayer games on-line works, but trying to play AI Skirmish or Galactic War results in "Failed to connect". The PA logs shows

INFO Could not resolve server hostname "localhost"
INFO client::ClientGame::connection_ConnectionFailed

Solution

The network configuration is broken as localhost should always be resolvable. The first step is to check the hosts file. The full path of the file is C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts. It should look like this:

# Copyright (c) 1993-2009 Microsoft Corp.
#
# This is a sample HOSTS file used by Microsoft TCP/IP for Windows.
#
# This file contains the mappings of IP addresses to host names. Each
# entry should be kept on an individual line. The IP address should
# be placed in the first column followed by the corresponding host name.
# The IP address and the host name should be separated by at least one
# space.
#
# Additionally, comments (such as these) may be inserted on individual
# lines or following the machine name denoted by a '#' symbol.
#
# For example:
#
#      102.54.94.97     rhino.acme.com          # source server
#       38.25.63.10     x.acme.com              # x client host

# localhost name resolution is handled within DNS itself.
#	127.0.0.1       localhost
#	::1             localhost

If that looks fine, then another thing to try is to reset the network configuration. To do so, we need a command prompt with Administrator rights. So press Start and type "cmd" in the search field. It should show an entry called "Command Prompt". Right-click on that and choose "Run as Administrator". Then execute the following commands:

ipconfig /flushdns
ipconfig /registerdns
net stop dnscache
net start dnscache
netsh winsock reset catalog
netsh int ip reset reset.log