Apparently TCP/IP is still broken in SE 5, just tried last night to get a game going between Blue Templar and myself. Wont work.

Works fine for me and my friend. We use Hamachi.

Well it works, it's free and it's secure. You can argue about it or you can just use this solution and play. I haven't tried it using straight TCP/IP, but who cares if you can do the same thing with Hamachi? Anyway, I think TCP/IP does work. The process of setting the game is exactly the same as TCP/IP. I agree that the instructions, UI and procedure for setting up TCP/IP is quite a mess and could use a lot of work. It took my friend and I hours to decipher the correct way to set up a game. My friend doesn't know much about how to configure his router and he lost his router password, so Hamachi let us bypass opening ports and such on his end (and mine.)

Hamachi is an excellent choice to circumvent otherwise troublesome connection issues.

However, if you want to continue to troubleshoot the issue, one last step to try is to put both of your computers into the DMZ of your respective routers or just connect directly to your cablemodem/dsl routers TEMPORARILY to see if removing your routers fixes the issue. many times I have found that a conflicting port rule (e.g. forwarding port xxx to computer A when it needs to be going to computer B) or just a flaky router in general can be the cause of the troubles.

Hamachi bypasses all of that hassle.

"Removing" my router didn't change anything.

Judging by your description of what is happening it is the player IP address or port that is offending. The system doesn't use that information when it first connects but does when it goes to send the file. So I don't know if possibly you left the local IP address in there if so it needs to be the outside IP Address and forwared to the local address otherwise the server has no idea where to send the file to (inefficiant I know but network programming isn't easy and I admire everything Aaron has done). Also I would recommend installing a seperate system to act as the server. One bug that hadn't been fixed as of the last time I played (I don't remember if I have tried it on 1.44 or not) is that when the server is taking a turn and someone sends their turn in it just throws the file away and lets the computer take the turn. We spent a lot of time getting TCP/IP to work here unfortunately one of us doesn't have any clue how to set up his router so we just do local Lan games (nobody wants to drive 35 minutes to his house to help him set it up when he is driving into town every day).

Hope this helps.

Starcrusade

TCP/IP is too much of a hassle IMHO. If you are not playing in LAN, better to use PBW anyway, and communicate via external chat or e-mail, since SEV doesn't have a chat room you could acess during your turn.

I have had trouble with my router and its firewall/IDS in the past with other stuff, filtering out packets and such, that might cause it, could try using a packet sniffer to see what data is actually making it to server/client.