Command & Conquer Red Alert 3 Will Not Start

[virtuosity]

Hi, hope you can help...

Treated myself to C&C Red Alert 3 - but I cannot for the life of me get the game to work. I have installed it (by copying the HUGE file to Applications) - I then installed the very latest patch from online, which again was HUGE... When I kicked off the game for the first time, I entered the serial number as per instructions...

However, I now get the following error:



I have checked the support forums (which are useless) from the EA website - which, as you can imagine, are very windows biased - there are trace apps you can load on the PC, but absolutely nothing on there for the Mac as far as I can see...

They state however, that you should have the following router configuration:



I have therefore configured my router as follows:



And, as I also have Little Snitch, I have configured this:



After all of that, I am still at a loss as to what to do... And, like I say, the EA forums are just simply useless. Can anyone offer any suggestion as to what I should do next please?

thanks for your help...

 

[masterofbuckets]

Wow, thats a nice post to ask a question

I think Little Snitch may be getting in the way somehow. Try disabling its use entirely ( or better, uninstall it ), then set your firewall settings to default and see if that works.

If it doesn't, reinstall the game and try again.

 

[virtuosity]

well, thanks - i did copy in the wrong screenshots of my router but never mind i try and give as much information as i can

i think that was a sensible suggestion - but alas! makes no difference...

I have spoken to the EA helpline, and all they've suggested so far is to send me links to Vista / XP instances of the same issue

they're obviously new to the Mac arena - the guy even said to me on the phone: "we don't usually get any issues with mac's at all - they just work - so we're a little bit thin on the ground for technical experts with mac knowledge!!"

I think I may have to resort to a full re-install of my mac - something i was thinking of doing anyway cos it's started to get a little sluggish - i have that much crap on it....

thanks for the reply

 

[gavriels]

The license server error is exactly that - the game couldn't contact the license server for initial activation. The game communicates with the license server over https (port 443), so you should make sure that you haven't blocked that at all. It would be pretty odd for your router to block it, however. You may want to try bypassing your router's firewall altogether, and just having the standard Mac firewall in place with your external services disabled, just to make sure that it's not being blocked by either Little Snitch or the Router somehow.

The EA activation servers have had the occasional outage in the past, but if you tried it again 24 hours later, that also seems unlikely. It's definitely worth trying again though.

Another thing worth trying is deleting your Red Alert 3 preferences folder. Again, it shouldn't be needed, but doing this should force the game to ask you to re-enter your serial number, and might initiate a slightly different connection to the license server then would take place otherwise.

If (1) Bypassing the Little Snitch and router firewalls, and (2) deleting the preferences folder doesn't work, you should certainly contact EA again and explicitly ask them if there have been other license server issues recently.