Fixing Civ4 Problems: START HERE!

[Nikolai]

Originally posted by Nikolai
I'm having problems with crashing saves, and thought I'd try the tips here. But it all stops with the motherboard/BIOS part. My Pentium M is not listed...

Well...? I've found out that my BIOS is a PhoenixBIOS 4.0 Release 6.0, but the home page of that company gives me no updates anywhere as far as I can see. The motherboard thing still is where it was in the previous post. As for now, I can't continue any save, because of the crashes! Only a new game can be played, and while I use less time than some others as far as I can see, I don't use [ithat[/i] little time. I need the saves...

[swat-spas2]

Originally posted by Repairman_Jack
I'm not sure if this matters to anyone, or even if it's already been noted, but I've been playing this game since the day it came out with ZERO problems. But then I updated my video drivers (for my GeForce 6800) and now my map is garbage.

Maybe that information'll help someone.

I had only a food/resource display bug. Bought a newer card (just a 6200, but it has shader support to fix that problem), which did fix that problem. However, I now have game glitches; ie black terrain/cheshire cat, huge slowdowns/hangs immediately following diplo contacts (particularily late game) Presumably this is from updated drivers, but I have been unable even reverting to the older nvidia drivers i was using before to recover from this problem.

[Amicus]

Originally posted by Lord Diamond
. . . error I get half way through the installation before the second disk is requested:

Feature Transfer Error

Feature: Default Feature
Component: Civ4 Component
File: D;\data2.cab
Error: Data Error (cyclic redundancy check)

I too got this error at 80% installation of the first disc. I tried many fixes, which did not work. Eventually I was not even able to load the disc at all. I noticed a small scratch/defect in the back of the CD near the edge, which I suspected was causing the problem. I returned the game and got another. The new CD was clean, and the game installed perfectly.

I wondered if perhaps the scratch was caused by the packaging. The first game I bought was a "Special Edition", which tightly jammed the installation discs in a cardstock sleave. The second game was a normal edition, which packed the discs loosely in a soft-paper envelope.

[Illuminatus]

snoopy369, I also had trouble while attempting to run the game. The problem (besides getting the newest drivers)was in my antivirus software - when I turned it off I could see the game menu. Perhaps you should add this in your OP.

[Targonis]

During the initial checking of your hardware, where you have that bar that checks XML and sound and so forth before the main game loads, you may have the game suddenly drop to desktop. Turning on debug may indicate that crc.dat is missing as the reason.

Solution: have media player or another application play an audio file while this initial checking goes on. In many cases, the on-board sound drivers arn't working properly, but if sound is playing at the time you try to load the game, you will get past the checking XML stage and the game will load properly.


Problem: You have a laptop or integrated video and the latest video card drivers for your machine arn't compatable with the game.

Solution: You can find updated drivers over at http://www.omegadrivers.net. ATI for example has support for SOME laptops with a mobility Radeon, but not all. The Omega Drivers are tweaked versions of the original that will install for all machines. Note that these drivers may not support every feature of your video, but in most cases will support everything you want/need so it shouldn't be an issue. Make sure you have a copy of the official drivers for your video card available so you can install them again in case the Omega Drivers version doesn't work.

[Nikolai]

Do not install any Omega drivers, it made my computer, and some friends' too, totally unstable. But, I did a search, and found out that some drivers on the company page of ATi can be used on Mobility Radeon cards even though it stands on their pages they don't. I'm currently not near my own machine, so I can't find the link to the page where I read it, but try a search on google, that's what I did.

[marvinkosh]

With any drivers third-party or otherwise, your mileage may vary - if what you install doesn't work, well then you just go back to drivers which you know are good. This is why it's a good idea to have your old drivers handy on the hard disk, in case you can only boot into Safe mode.

By default most driver packages these days unpack onto hard disk so that isn't a worry.

[Ijuin]

I just installed CIV, and the first time I tried to run it, I got the error: "Error in file MSVCR71.DLL". What does this mean and how can I repair it?

[Another Poster]

Somebloke wrote:

When i select a settler as my active unit, its supposed to show what resources each tile produces on the map. Unfortunately it shows that almost every tile on the map produces 2 food, whether its a plain or hill (except mountains and desert) although when i pass my cursor over each tile, the tool tip will give me the correct resource ouput for the tile. This also happens when I'm in the city view and/or when I toggle yield dispaly. This is just a visual thing, my city still appears to be using the resources correctly.

I'm having the same problem as well? Anyone found out how this can be fixed yet?

[Moonbars]

Yes, me too - I havn't seen a solution posted anywhere yet.. I've tried unpacking with the unpak utilitiy, upgrading drivers on all manner of things, and playing with different graphics settings, full screen / windowed mode, etc... All I get is the food display.

I was wondering if my art was somehow corrupted, but I dont see how. I wonder if somebody could locate whatever file contains the art for the bread, hammers and coins and post it??

[Calm_Blue_Sea]

Well, If it's not a memory link then this program is certainly one hell of a resource hog! The game runs fine at first (large map, 10 civs), but by about halfway through the game it grinds to a total halt. If I check the task manager it tells me that the program is using nearly 700mb of memory, and this is while it is still playable! Now how can this not be a memory leak; the memory requirement is 256mb! I'm running it on the lowest possible graphics settings, anti-aliasing off, priority above normal, no other programs running, etc. If I keep trying to play it crashes...but not to desktop, it reboots my system! Sometimes the land will go completely black and then afterwards my desktop is screwed up. Last time it crashed/rebooted it removed my desktop wallpaper altogether (my screen is now black). I've played four games, but I'm never able to get more than halfway through.

My Specs:

Pentium4 2.8 GHz
ATI Radeon 9600XT 128mb
1012mb RAM
Windows XP (sp 2)
Creative Soundblaster 24-bit


all have the latest drivers

Love the game, but I'm rapidly losing interest. I actually saw infantry in the last game, it would be nice to finally see a tank!

[marvinkosh]

Try downgrading your (graphics) drivers rather than updating them to resolve crashing. I just visited the ATI site and with a bit of drilling into the menu at the side I found this page which has drivers from last year or so.

Of course this isn't an ideal solution since you may run into problems with other games by using older drivers, but *fingers crossed* haven't run into any trouble using the old 4.12 pack so far.

[Leepants]

ANOTHER closely related site to Firaxis and 2K and ANOTHER "no response" to CTD thread.

My specs are:-

3700+ Athlon 64 San Diego; 2GB matched pair Corsair CL3 RAM; 2 x 250Gb SATA HDDs (both about 80% empty); 1 x 80Gb IDE (?) HDD (about 60% empty); Nvidia 7800GTX graphics card and an AN8 SLi Mobo.

ALL drivers are up to date, as is my XP Pro.

The game gets VERY sluggish around 1950, played single player, Terran map, 6 opponents, 1900 x 1200 resolution (24" Dell TFTs optimum resolution), with a map that is 2nd from largest, then the game just crashes to desktop.

I don't understand much PC speak / tech stuff, so please be nice and keep it relativley simple. Also the virtual memory is as large as I can make it.

Can SOMEONE please help?

Yes, I know companies have to make money, so they WILL shout at all the great reviews the game gets, but PLEASE, its us, the games buying public that keep you in business, so can SOMEONE help us out, here?

Thanks.

[angel13]

Pentium 4 1.6 GHz 1Gbyte RAM NVidea graphics card (sorry don't recall the model).

I've experienced the sluggishness, the screen sometimes turning black and the crashes that everyone else has. I found that the game with the normal sized map was using almost immediately 1 GByte of RAM.

The only thing I found to work was to reduce the size of the world to "Tiny" and then I had no problem whatsoever.

[Calm_Blue_Sea]

I imagine I could get through a game if I set the world size to tiny and only had a few civs. However, I'm into playing epic games on large worlds (it annoyed me just to go from huge to large). I'm willing to endure slow load times, some sluggish play, and even having to downgrade my graphics to the bare minimum. However, I bought the game expecting to be able to play through a large map (or at least a normal sized map). I have a respectable system (see above); well above the requirements. I understand that a patch may take a little while to put together, I just hope it comes soon as the game definately needs one. I guess I'll try a game on a small map, but it's not really my cup of tea...and even then I'm not sure I will be able to finish it.

[Brad Mayer]

Yeah, I hear you, epic and large is my preferred scale too.

I'll just say that the fact that people with well above the recommended req, as well as people like myself (I have all the recommended reqs except the Video, where there is 32Mb - nvidia TL, etc - which is supposedly "sub-minimal" according to the box, although the online system checker says it is "minimal"), all are experiencing very similiar symptoms, tells me this is a performance bug, not a hardware issue, primarily.

[gadnium]

I've had soem serious issues running this game also and just want to tell how I got it somewhat playable. I've been plagued with BSOD's, lockups, and CTD's. My PC isn't the most stable thing first off... Every once in a while I get SATA Hard Drive corruption. But that's related to either my motherboard or power supply. This has been stopping me from playing Civ IV.

So I took my pc apart cleaned up everything from dust, downclocked my processor. So I was at about 42C with no load.

I'd get BSOD and then SATA corruption. But last night I changed my pagefile to min/max 1.5 gb. this stopped the SATA corruption. But I was still getting BSOD causing restarts. Then a couple hard crashes locking up my PC. Then I tried loading the game from the saves in "C:\Documents and Settings\gad\My Documents\My Games\Sid Meier's Civilization 4\Saves\single\auto".

I was still getting CTD's but that's alot better than BSOD or hard locks. I finally finished a game, very proud The last game went for about an hour until I exited it. No crash, but I know I was just lucky. So I figure I can just auto-save every turn and tolerate the CTD's which isn't bad for single player games.

System Specs:
Windows XP SP2
Forceware 78.01
CIV IV: Max Settings
1280x1024

Athlon XP Mobile @ 2GHz
1 GB Ram
Leadtech Nvidia 6800NU
-Pipelines/Vertex shader unclocked
-Not Overclocked
Abit NF-7S Rev. 2 (Junk)
Seagate 120mb SATA
PowMax 500W PS (junk)

[nathanebht]

The "Civ IV Movies" thread has fixes I didn't see in this thread.

An attachment that will turn off the intro movies. Works good.

Updating the Bink dll version. Did good things for me and other people reported it helped.

Updating the Miles Sound Driver Files. Didn't try this myself.

Updating Python from V2.4 to 2.4.2. Didn't try.

Civ IV Movies thread

[angel13]

Originally posted by Brad Mayer
I'll just say that the fact that people with well above the recommended req ... all are experiencing very similiar symptoms, tells me this is a performance bug, not a hardware issue, primarily.

or a requirment specification problem

[Leepants]

Apparantly increasing the page (swap) file to about 2Gb helps a lot too.

And trying to roll back drivers to a version thats over a year old, though???

NOT GOOD ENOUGH!

Again, my main issue is that NO-ONE from the development / sales / support team have shouted up ANYTHING!

They've got our money, so what do they care? Perhaps a bit cynical, but what else am I suppose to think?

[prosen]

I havent seen anyone mention this problem yet, the end result is that I start civ, and then it crashes with a generic "Civilization 4 has encountered a problem and needs to close" before it even gets past the loading screen.

First, let me state that I had the game running fairly stably originally and that I was only encountering crashes at end game.

(1) Installed game, it was running decently; crashed in end game so I tried to fix (oops)
(2) Installed latest catylist drivers for ati mobility cards
(3) Error starts occuring
(4) Uninstalled civ4 and all video drivers. Ran regclean,
(5) Reinstalled, error persists
(6) Rolled back drivers to current stable HP FireGL drivers (original ones that worked well enough)
(7) Problem persists
(8) Went to turn on loging in the config. I notice that half of the directories within the civ4 folder in program files are short cuts; THE TARGET file/folders are missing.
(7) No amount of uninstalling and reinstalling has resulted in civilization4.ini or any of the my_games/ subfolders reappearing.

I am fairly certain that the problem is a result of the missing Civilization4.ini file and other directories within the user folder trees. I cant manually restore them as they seem to be packed in Firraxis's non standard cab format. Any suggestions or usefull experiences with this or a similair problem would be much appreciated.

My computer is a HP nw8240. It is a "workstation replacement" laptop that contains the ISV certified FireGL 5000 video card. This is essentially a Mobility x700 with drivers certified for OpenGL and DirectX software/3D development. 1gig of ram; 2ghz Sonoma Core p5;

Considering that this laptop is ISV certified for OpenGL and DirectX, I wonder what the hell Firraxis is doing. This is an unheard of level of incompetence on their parts reminescent of the problems with CCTP's release.

Ignoring the fact that this laptop is ISV certified for opengl and directx, the mobility x700 chipset is EXACTLY the same as the desktop core; the only difference are (1) 128mb instead of 256 (2) PowerPlay featyures (disabled in performance modes). If anyone at firraxis ever tells you that Laptops with ATI x700s, x800s based cores arent supported, then they are lying dogs that are just trying to shut you up. The hardware is the same stuff as in desktops. (the x200s on the other hand are kinda sucky and I think are mobile only; they may in fact not be supported).

This sort of behavior is just so insulting. I understand the pressures to release software early and can even accept that some known bugs will make it into 1.0; but what they have done is just over the top. How do you release a game when any amount of runtime testing will reveal SEVERE problems on what constitutes 50% of target hardware. They dont deserve our money.

I am going to return the game for store credit and download the warez version when the 1.1 patch is out. If the game is PERFECT I MIGHT buy it again.

[entemedor]

Where are gone the programmers that twenty years ago were able to do EUROPE ABLAZE on a Commodore 64 (48K RAM!!!)?

Now my PC has one million times that RAM, with millions of hard-disk space, and games like CivIV still make me feel my computer has little memory, little speed, little power...

Perhaps to play Civ V (if it's ever released) I will need to borrow NASA's computers...

(Yes, I too get random, annoying CTDs...)

[Repairman_Jack]

Hah hah. Having worked with NASA, I can promise you that the last thing you want is their computers.

[entemedor]

And bet your first computer was a (space) Odissey...
(I just read one of your posts!)

Seriously, it's difficult to understand how NASA managed to put a man in the Moon in the 60s, with computers occupying a whole room to resolve the maths my PC does now with a hand tied behind its back. Or perhaps some revisionists are right and man has never stepped over the Moon...

[Repairman_Jack]

IRT entemedor:
I'm sure that, at the time, their computers were very advanced. The thing is, I don't think they've updated since they first GOT those computers. In my space job, we still used punch cards to enter information. Even keyboards are high tech to me.

[SpencerH]

Maybe that explains why the mars rovers had so little RAM onboard. Hundreds of millions of dollars and the thing has the computing capability of a calculator.

[terje439]

as so many others I too have some issues with Civ4.

1. On large+ maps the game will eventually be too slow to play, this seems to be due to the AI's actions. To check I ran a big game with continents, and did not explore anything, nor did I accept any world map trades, and as long as the AI nations were in the "black" portion of the world map, no problem, so I saved played another 50 or so turns, still no slow down. Then I reloaded, and traded all maps, and immediately I started to have a slow down on everything.

2. From time to time, if I move the cursor around, the game will freeze, remove all graphics except the very earth, showing only mountains/deserts/sea/lakes/grassland/forest etc, but no roads/resources/cities/units

3. Random CTD


My system is more than capable to cope (well it is supposed to), with 1 gig RAM, some 150Gig free HD space, 256Mb graphics card, no internal sound or such. And I had no problems running games like BF2/swg (on high detail)/wow etc. I have tried new drivers for everything, older drivers nothing helps, the problems are the same with CIV4 v1.00, v1.08 and v1.09

[Brad Mayer]

Gee, there's a 1.09 out too? I'm using 1.08 and it has made a difference in that now there is the prospect of finishing my first Large Epic game!

Basically, I am able to generally complete ~10 turns in the mid-late game before a CTD, and it CTDs in a more "orderly" manner, allowing the Win OS to put ip a Fatal Exception dialog. Your display is hosed and then reboot.

But I think that this persistent error is likely the reason they pulled the patch. What else could it possibly be?

I expect it to run slow on my "subminimal" 32Mb nvidia T&L card (but actually I am quite happy with the speed nevertheless, although I have to wait a bit the first time it needs to load a "tech discovery" or "build completed" dialog - swapping from HD? But it is only really noticable the first time the dialog is called in any given Civ4 session. Afterwards not really a problem. Maybe these dialogs get rendered the 1st time and then are cached?

Oh well, programming speculations are a professional habit of mine...I'm definitely happier with this intermediate patch.

[Donatelllo]

Originally posted by DocMWood
Let me see if I have this straight....

I have a computer that meets all the requirements on the box....

There's a list of 12 known problems.....

And now I'm going to have to go back to college to get a degree in computer technology so I can get the game to work? I'm a smart guy, and I'll grant that half the things listed are easy to do, but some of those seem a bit excessive to play a game I paid the company good money so I could, well, play it.

You've got to be kidding.

Why not patch the game?

I could not have said it better myself! $90 bucks I paid to become a guinea pig tester for Civ 4. Keep releasing great games in a rush and this is what you get. I hope all the marketing guys and the managers at 2K Games are enjoying their new cars and other luxuries paid for with money that we have thrown away on a game that should not have been released till it was 100% fixed.

No wonder so many people are going over to console gaming. *Checks out the price of a new XBox...

[WilliamEllis]

Originally posted by terje439
as so many others I too have some issues with Civ4.

1. On large+ maps the game will eventually be too slow to play, this seems to be due to the AI's actions. To check I ran a big game with continents, and did not explore anything, nor did I accept any world map trades, and as long as the AI nations were in the "black" portion of the world map, no problem, so I saved played another 50 or so turns, still no slow down. Then I reloaded, and traded all maps, and immediately I started to have a slow down on everything.

2. From time to time, if I move the cursor around, the game will freeze, remove all graphics except the very earth, showing only mountains/deserts/sea/lakes/grassland/forest etc, but no roads/resources/cities/units

3. Random CTD


My system is more than capable to cope (well it is supposed to), with 1 gig RAM, some 150Gig free HD space, 256Mb graphics card, no internal sound or such. And I had no problems running games like BF2/swg (on high detail)/wow etc. I have tried new drivers for everything, older drivers nothing helps, the problems are the same with CIV4 v1.00, v1.08 and v1.09

I have pretty much the same set up but with a 128 vid card and I play BF2 and SWG also-no issues.

I see a lot of people talking about clearing the cache but my game doesn't have one. WHen I foloowed the directionw posted, I find the Civ 4 folder but no directory folder.
Also, I have a Compaq 6310us and I went through the Compaq site for drivers. There hasn't been an update since '02 I'm not sure what drivers I need.
It has options for video issues for NVidia cards but model numbers a lot lower than what I have.
Then it has a ROM flash driver but I ahve no idea what that is.
If anyone could help because 10-25 minute load times, CTDs and Blue screens of death are getting annoying.