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Outdated Windows systems that haven’t received recent root certificate updates.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