Cannot open UDP ports no matter what

So I fiddled with DigitalOcean droplets last night to configure OpenVPN on CentOS 7. Got it, made it a script, tested it properly on a few new droplets etc and then went elsewhere, bought a cheaper VPS and did the same over there. Guess what, it doesn't work :-/
I am getting connection refused error

event_wait returned 1 us=566170 I/O WAIT status=0x0001 us=566210 UDPv4 read returned -1 us=566257 read UDPv4 [ECONNREFUSED]: Connection refused (code=111) 

and when I test UDP ports with nmap -sU they are all closed, with firewall on or off. I explicitly allowed 1194 and UDP connections in iptables but still port closed for UDP (open/filtered for TCP) and I have stopped firewalld yet still it is a process when I check ps auxw.
How is that? Could someone shed some light on this?