AoE: Castle Siege - Connection Error

[Warning! This blog post is nothing to do with Hyper-V or virtualization. It is Friday night and I am playing computer games!]

It has been a long busy week of working on Hyper-V – and now it is time for me to unwind.  After playing a couple of games I decided to try out the recently released “Age of Empires: Castle Siege” only to be presented with this:

What?  Well – that would be because I run an enterprise grade firewall in my house (I mean, who doesn’t?).  A quick journey through the firewall logs showed that it was trying to reach castlesrelease.cloudapp.net:8443-8444 – and my firewall was dutifully blocking this.

My immediate fix was to just allow access on these ports – but that did not actually work.  The reason was that my firewall was actually able to detect that this was actually SSL traffic running over an odd port – and was quite upset about that.

A moment later – I had my SSL definition updated to allow ports 8443 and 8444 (outbound only) and everything is good.  Now, off to build an empire…

Cheers,
Ben