Our team is aware that several players have had difficulty connecting to Company of Heroes 3 and we wanted to provide an update on our investigation, along with some troubleshooting steps in the meantime as we work on a solution. On September 10th, Relic’s service SSL certificate was renewed using AWS Certificate Manager (ACM). ACM recently changed the trust anchor for its certificates, transitioning from the “Starfield Class 2 Certification Authority” (GoDaddy) to the Amazon-owned “Starfield Services Root Certificate Authority - G2.”
Players may be experiencing connection issues because “Starfield Services Root Certificate Authority - G2” is not installed on their systems, which is causing the SSL certificate validation to fail.
We expected this root certificate to be available on up-to-date Windows systems or to be installed automatically via Windows’ Auto-Root Certificate Retrieval feature. However, some players are experiencing connection issues due to this certificate not being present.
Possible reasons include:
- Outdated Windows systems that haven’t received recent root certificate updates.
- Auto-root certificate retrieval is disabled in system settings or group policies.
- Network restrictions prevent Windows from fetching the missing root certificate.
It is possible to check if the "Starfield Services Root Certificate Authority - G2" is installed on your Windows system by doing the following:
- Press the Windows Key + R to open the Run dialog.
- Type certmgr.msc and press Enter.
- In the left panel, navigate to Trusted Root Certification Authorities → Certificates.
- Look for Starfield Services Root Certificate Authority - G2 in the list as shown in this image.
Players still not able to connect to Company of Heroes 3 can try the troubleshooting steps below while our team finalizes a fix we hope to include in Tuesday’s 1.8.0 update. We will keep you updated on our progress.
Please follow these troubleshooting steps in order:
- [MOST RELIABLE FIX] Open the command line (Command Prompt) and run the command
curl.exe https://coh3-api.reliclink.com/game/version/checkStatus - If you have Windows updates pending, in progress or available, please complete their installation and restart your PC.
- If that still does not resolve the issue, please open your browser and go to https://leaderboards.companyofheroes.com/. After that, try launching CoH3 again.
- If these options do not work, please open Windows Edge and navigate to https://coh3-api.reliclink.com/game/version/checkStatus. It should give the response ["ok"]. If it does, run the game again and it should be able to connect fine. If it does not give the ["ok"] response, ensure that Windows is up to date.
You may need to perform these steps, and restart your PC a few times. Thank you for your patience as we work to resolve this as quickly as possible.
-The Relic Programmer Team