Often I play with friends at a LAN party. We don't play Insurgency online, so our standard of play is much lower than average, making it completely unenjoyable for us to play on public servers. We'd like to play on a server with nobody else there, but we couldn't find a button in the GUI to start a LAN server, or anything related.
After some googling, we found some instructions for setting up a LAN server with console commands, but there are several disagreeing sets of instructions, and none of them worked for us.
I also asked the developers in their official livestream, but they just answered, "Just start a custom server," with no further specifics.
Obviously a LAN server is preferable, because there's less lag and no need to rely on the one internet connection we're all sharing, but if it's easier to set up a private server online, that's fine. How can we achieve this?
32 Answers
This works the same as it does on every source game, just make a dedicated server then set a password and join, then invite your friend and tell him the password.
Just google "insurgency server host" and pick a host.
Most paid hosting solutions are managed hosting, in which the host company has already made it that your game instance is managed by them, typically by giving you a web panel you can use to control (start/stop/send commands/etc.) your server. This is the easiest as most of the work has already been done for you, and if something is not right, you can always ask for help via whatever ticket/support system.
The alternative is unmanaged hosting, where you rent the whole machine and what you do is up to you (including setting up the servers, writing a (or buying/integrating an existing) control panel. You can skip the "rent the whole machine" by obviously using your own computer. It is more involved, and obviously not what you are looking for as if something breaks you have to figure out and fix it.
How do I make it private?
Just set a password. You do this by appending looking for sv_password in your data/server.cfg and change it from "" to "[YOUR PASSWORD HERE]" (with the quotes, without the square brackets
