Networking issues in Creeper World 3/ParticleFleet from macOS

[antijava]

For a couple of months now, I have been running into problems downloading 3rd party maps in these games.  The network connections would just time out.  I finally tracked down the root cause.  If anyone else is hitting this problem, turn off iCloud Private Relay.  It appear to block outbound traffic on port 80 (insecure HTTP).  I see this in macOS Monterey (12.2).  I hear it may be fixed in 12.3, but I'm not running it yet.  Private Relay is still a beta feature, so I guess this is just growing pains.  An alternative is to run a proxy like Proxyman or Charles Proxy when you are running the game.  They seem to be able to get around the bug since they are network diagnostic utilities.

[Karsten75]

Thank you for sharing this information with the Apple/Mac community.