Hi all.

I've been reading around a lot and haven't been able to find a solution to this (Although I've found plenty of people with the same problem).

I got Sins a while back, and have been playing purely SP. I've been able to handle a multistar large map with 100+ planets and 9 AI enemies and large fleets with all the visuals turned up, and my compuer runs fine with it.

A friend of mine also recently bought trinity, so I upgraded my vanilla sins to incorporate entrnchment and diplomacy, so that we were both playing the same version - the idea being we could do battle against the AI together (and maybe later down the line get stuck into some player vs player with some of you to learn how to get whooped!)

However, this is where the problem comes in. Whenever we connect to Ironclad Online, sometimes it can be really slow and unresponsive when trying to get the game set up - He will host a game and I'll try to connect only for the system to tell me that his game has already started and boot me back to the chatroom. Other times I'll manage to connect (or he'll manage to connect to me) but the buttons will be really slow and unresponsive - we can click once to change my race and it can take 20-30 seconds before the change goes thru. If we get past this and into the game, assuming it doesn't lag up completely upon loading, within 5 minutes we will both be freezing up every 2 seconds for about 10-15 seconds. It just gets worse from there, until after about 10 minutes, the game stops working, things stop going around the planets, everything stops turning / rotating, income stops, and the game just sits there, lagged out. We've waited upwards of 5-10 minutes for this to clear with no luck. When we check the Network tab of the options menu, the same thing always shows - My ping (always mine, never his - regardless of who is host) is always through the roof, like 9000 or more. Eventually we get sick of waiting and quit.

Now heres what I don't get. I've turned off everything in the background that could be causing the lag - Steam / Msn / Napster etc, I've even gone so far as to shut down my firewall just to see if that helps, but nothing seems to resolve it. I've turned all my details down in game to see if that works, but again, no such luck. I've definately got the latest patches of all the add ons and the original, and the version I'm running at the end is Diplomacy 1.0 (according to the bottom right of the screen) same as my friend.

My computer specs look like so: (from dxdiag)

AMD 9550 Phenom Quad Core MMX 3DNow (4 CPU's) ~ 2.2GHz

3072 MB RAM

Page file - Usually about 400mb out of 4GB

Graphics card: Geforce 9600GT 1024 MB Memory

So I'm pretty sure that my PC should be able to handle Sins no problem. It's worth pointing out at this stage that my friends PC is superior to mine, so he shouldn't have any performance issues either really (and doesn't with single player - just like me)

So what am I missing? Why do I spend all my time in Multiplayer watching a frozen screen waiting for my income to go up again ever so slowly? Is there something obvious I'm missing or will I be forever consigned to Single Player, rejected from the MP community because I lag so badly?

(Also I think were on 16Mb broadband, and I've played much newer / more system intensive games online with no issues whatsoever, lag or performancewise...)

Please if anyone can help - theres a cupcake in it for you!

Thanks in advance...