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Official Civ4 Patch 1.52 Readme
READMELast updated 22 - December - 2005
v152
v1.52 is a major upgrade to Civ IV and includes numerous optimizations for memory usage that should help performance on all machines but are tailored to especially improve performance on machines at or near the minimum specification.
Major changes include:
-Shared low-level graphics buffers
-Removed many unused fonts and reduced interface memory usgae
-Paged out units which are not visible
-Reduced terrain data size and overhead
-Reduced route data size
-Created a set of low-res movies for machines without dynamic texture support (this is a separate download)
These changes not only reduced the amount of system memory required, but lowered video memory usage extensively. Also, the rate at which the game consumes memory in the late-game has decreased, which is extremely important.
In addition, a new config file (ini) option called 'MemorySaver' has been added for further memory reduction, at the cost of alt-tabbing support. If you set MemorySaver=1 in the config file, you can lower your system memory usage by 70% of video memory. So if you have a 128MB video card, you can save an additional ~90MB of system memory. MemorySaver defaults to off, and is not officially recommended since it doesn't handle alt-tabbing and other cases of graphics device loss at this time. However, we recognize that some users may want to experiment with it.
Finally, the use of unofficial patches is not recommended and is largely redundant with the memory fixes in this patch. Unofficial patches may slow performance, cause graphical problems or conflict with Firaxis code resulting in crashes or other problems. It also makes it more difficult for us to respond to error reports and debug issues reported by users running unauthorized patches.
Suggestions for optimal performance:
Increase AGP memory size in your BIOS settings to 128 or 256 if necessary.
Go to www.windowsupdate.com and apply updates
Update graphics and sound drivers
Close other background applications
Turn graphics to low and use low-resolution textures in the options screen
Turn off Antialiasing in your display properties
Disable virus protection
-Mustafa Thamer
Civ IV Lead Programmer
Changes:
- Tech cost rebalancing
- Improved city attack AI
- Moved MaxAutosaves to ini file
- Slower Great People name generation
- Hide health bars during combat
- Increased late-game tech costs
- Waypoints now invisible when city screen is up
- AI more willing to trade cities for peace
- AI stays at war longer
- Cottages no longer grow durring anarchy
- Combat info now shows odds of success
- WBS's now contain unit damage
- Score from land doesn't count until you own land for 20 turns
- Better invasion AI
- Slavery: No Upkeep
- Emancipation: Low Upkeep
- Tweaked AI civic values
- Filled in missing diplo entries for Frederick
- Praetorians: 40->45 hammers
- Jaguars: 40->35 hammers
- AI turn optimizations
- Interface game messages are now flushed at end of turn
- Environmentalism moved to Medicine
- Increased industrial era tech costs
- Environmentalism is medium upkeep
- Free Speech is low upkeep
- Forests give 0.5 health
- Firepower in combat now based on max strength
- Lobby sorting improvements
- Clearing the table in the MP diplomacy screen resets the "They accept/They do not accept" text
- Dawn of man screen closes with ESCAPE just like all the other interface screens
- The hall of fame now shows only games that have been played with the currently-loaded mod
- When trying to build an item that it not allowed in a city, you will get a production popup asking for a build instead of leaving production empty
- Wonder Movies and other popups may appear in PBEM/Hotseat
- Incremented save version to 102
- Simplified city billboard placement. This should fix the weird billboard offsets and scaling.
Additions:
- Lobby chat and buddy lists from staging rooms
- Combat odds now shown in combat turn log
- ALT-S now allows you to place signs
- Added "Leave Forest" option for automated workers
- Added Marathon game speed (longer than Epic)
- Added NoTechSplash ini setting
- More communication about autopatch failures
- Domestic advisor remembers which cities you had selected last time screen was up.
- Added "no cheating" game option for single-player
- In addition to tradeable techs, techs that are not allowed to be traded to you are also shown, provided that you can research them yourself at the moment
- Added event and replay messages when a human founds a city. This got broken when we added city renaming
- Support for Logitech G15 Gaming Keyboard
- When you zoom to a city from the domestic advisor, you return to the domestic advisor after you exit the city screen
- Updated Info Screen with changes 'borrowed' from one of the forum modders
Fixes:
- Unit attack move bug
- Civ naming bug in sp
- No longer keep your gold and techs when regenerating a map
- Missing civic name from popup help
- Minimap now appears correctly after regenerating map
- Unit cycling bug
- Load game freeze bug
- Movement freeze bug in si-move
- Unit cycling bug in PitBoss and HotSeat
- Missing plot list buttons bug with large stacks
- Pathfinding bug involving defensive terrain and group movement
- Bug with AI attacking over rivers
- Can no longer see spies on caravels
- Group attack bug
- Group attack bug with gunships
- GS lobby ignoring game settings bug
- Disappearing popup help bug
- Diplo city trading bug
- Wonder movie/zoom to building crash
- No camera adjustment to city screen bug
- User profiles with build queues no longer crash
- No more negative gold in diplo screen
- Fixed gifting bad cities to AI exploit
- AI issues with Always War and Always Peace
- Units not moving into tiles after combat bug (graphical only)
- Pathfinding reuse fix
- Fixed pathfinding bug
- Fixed SHIFT-selecting multiple cities
- End score not matching up with timed winner bug
- Fixed bug allowing selection of disabled techs in tech chooser
- Fixed Sentry promotion visiblity bug
- Fixed AI city targeting bug
- Fixed AI healing bug
- AI city attack bug
- No more message lag in single-player
- Fixed bug with gunship stacks attacking cities
- Random seed bug (causing duplicate world maps...)
- Unit health bars no longer show up in city screen
- Two-palaces-from-culture-flipping-capital bug
- Foreign Advisor: Gold available for trade does not show up when there cannot be a trade for gold
- Diplomacy screen fix for gold popups not appearing properly
- Foreign advisor: Resources for active player are shown multiple times if you have more than one instance of a resource to trade.
- Fixed weird little bug with Unit Categories page in Civilopedia
- Diplomacy bug for PBEM/Hotsesat
- Removed some cheats from password-protected games that should not have been allowed in the first place
- Fix for competitive games: Password-protected saves can no longer be easily stripped of their passwords, and the assets checksum in the save can no longer be modified by external means
- Fixed vanishing yield symbols in multiplayer
- Fixed some PBEM/Hotseat issues when there is just one human player
- River and Wind sounds are now properly classified as ambience. This fixes inconsistent behavior in audio options
- Minimized or No Interface no longer reverts to normal after entering, then exiting city view
- You can no longer duplicate deals with the AI from the "Active deals" section of the diplomacy screen
- Out of memory message problem on machines that don't allocate small textures properly
- Assert error for software vertex processing only machines
- Bug where you could draw strategy lines and signs outside of globe view
- "globe view buildings disabled" option now hides buildings in globe view properly
v109
The installer splits up the Art PAK file into multiple 100MB PAKs. Please be patient as this will take some time.
Changes:
- increased cost of Apollo Program...
- increased SS parts cost...
- Animal Husbandry reveals Horses
- tweaked Rifling, Chemistry, Steel, and Railroad tech costs...
- increased late-game tech costs...
- can now add two specialists in size 1 city with Mercantilism...
- final score is now modified by difficulty level...
- Speed up load times
- Global performance enhancements
Added:
- Include WB map size in the description field
- Save login name
- Added password encryption
- Added regenerate Map Button to World builder Map Mode...
- checkbox for using low resolution textures
- more logging for init failure
- minspec / video memory checking
- Added ability to change to and from fullscreen while in-game
- holding
- improved bink playback, added ini options
Fixes:
- ATI issue Failed to Init Renderer Fixed
- Multiplayer Lobby list jump problem and lobby crash fixed
- fixed war weariness calculation bug...
- units maintain their name when upgraded
- fixed Gold-for-Gold diplo exploit...
- fixed no research choice overflow exploit...
- Fix for voice initialization crash
- Fix addressing takeover AI and retirement OOS.
- Fixed issue with diplomacy text being always used in its first form in the translator.
- Popups, screens, and diplomacy properly cleared when exiting from main menu.
- Games protected by admin passwords (only) cannot be loaded if the version is different from the one that created the save
- Fixed bug where player could not offer any deal to other human in PBEM/Hotseat
- Sorting by date on domestic advisor now works.
- fixed bug where settlers could not move if the strategy layer was selected
- fixed Ironworks...
- fixed AI units not obeying open borders rules on declaration of war...
- fixed bug that prevent placing of units in world-builder
- fixed bug that prevented gifting of units to a human player
- stack attack infinite loop fixed
- Civic screen update fix (wasn’t showing the right maintenance and anarchy values)
- ctrl-g crash fix, optimized city bar art
- fixed right-click menu crash
- Intro movie crashing problems
System & Operating System Requirements
Minimum System Requirements
Operating System: Windows® 2000/XP
Processor: 1.2 GHz Intel Pentium 4 or AMD Athlon processor or equivalent
Memory: 256 MB RAM (Windows 2000) / 512 MB RAM (Windows XP)
Hard Disk Space: 1.7 GB Free
CD-ROM Drive: 4X Speed
Video: DirectX 9.0c-compatible 64 MB video card with Hardware T&L support (GeForce 2/Radeon 7500 or better)
Sound: DirectX 9.0c-compatible sound card
DirectX®: Sid Meier's Civilization 4 DirectX® version
Recommended System Requirements
Operating System: Windows® 2000/XP
Processor: 1.8 GHz Intel Pentium 4 or AMD Athlon processor or equivalent
Memory: 512 MB RAM
Hard Disk Space: 1.7 GB Free
CD-ROM Drive: 4X Speed
Video: 128 MB Video Card w/ DirectX 8 support (pixel & vertex shaders)
Sound: DirectX 9.0c-compatible sound card
DirectX®: Sid Meier's Civilization 4 DirectX® version
Supported Operating Systems
Windows 2000 Service Pack 1 or higher WITH Internet Explorer 6.0 or higher
Windows XP Home or Professional w/ Service Pack 1 or higher
INSTALLATION & SETUP
Installing Civilization IV!
Prior to Installing the Game
Before attempting to install Sid Meier’s Civilization IV, please verify that your computer meets the minimum requirements listed above.
We also recommend that you preparing your hard drive for installation by running ScanDisk and Disk Defragmenter prior to installation. These utilities are part of Windows® and can identify and resolve problems with your disk drive which could hinder installation and/or playing of the game.
To launch these programs and optimize your hard disk drive:
1. Open "My Computer".
2. Right-click the disk drive you wish to install the game onto (usually C
.
3. Click on "Properties".
4. Select the "Tools" tab.
5. Click "Check Now" to launch Scandisk.
6. When Scandisk has completed, follow steps 1-3 and click "Defragment Now" to launch Disk Defragmenter.
Note that defragmenting your disk drive can take a long time. It's a good idea to start disk defragmenter and let it run overnight.
Installing the Game
To install Civilization IV,
1. Insert Disc One of Sid Meier’s Civilization IV (the "Install Disc") into your CD-ROM Drive.
2. If Autoplay is enabled on your system, a window will appear, giving you the option to Install the game. If nothing happens when you insert the CD into the drive, you will need to open "My Computer", double-click your CD-ROM drive letter, then double-click Setup.exe.
3. Once the setup process begins, follow the on-screen prompts to install the game.
Running the Game
After the installation process completes, re-insert Disc 1 into your CD-ROM drive and select Play from the autoplay menu. It is required that Disc 1 be in the drive in order to play the game.
User Permissions
You must have administrative privileges on your computer to install Civilization IV.
DirectX® Detection & Installation
During the installation of Civilization IV, your system will be scanned to determine whether you have installed the DirectX® version contained on the Sid Meier's Civilization 4 disk. If you have not, the installation will automatically update your version of DirectX®.
Starting the Game
There are a few ways to start the game.
1. Insert Disc One of Sid Meier’s Civilization IV into your CD-ROM Drive and click on the Play button.
2. If you answered yes when the installer asked you whether you wanted to create a desktop shortcut, you can double-click that shortcut.
3. Go to Start -> Programs -> Firaxis Games -> Sid Meier’s Civilization 4 and click on Launch Sid Meier’s Civilization 4.
General System Issues
Optimizing Gameplay on Slower Computers
If the game is running slowly on your machine, try turning the detail levels for all graphical options down to the minimum, and then adjusting them one by one until you achieve an acceptable balance between visual quality and game performance. You can modify the graphical options by pressing [Ctrl – 0] or via the Options selection in the main menu.
Video Issues
General Video Troubleshooting.
Outdated or incorrect video drivers are the cause of the majority of video issues. Before contacting support, ensure you have the latest production (release) drivers for your video card.
* ATI Technologies
* Intel
* Matrox
* NVIDIA
* S3 Graphics
* SiS
I get a message that says "Unable to initialize DirectX" when I try to launch the game.
This issue is typically seen on machines that have an ATI Graphics Card. Please follow this link for the complete walkthrough on how to solve this problem: http://www.2kgames.com/civ4/support.htm
Sound issues
If you are experiencing sound problems, including volume issues, missing audio channels (i.e., no sound comes through your center speaker channel), crashes, or any other audio issues, we recommend switching your sound driver to the default MILES Fast 2D Driver.
Multiplayer Issues
A broadband connection to the Internet is highly recommended.
If you are experiencing a problem with out of sync (OOS) errors in Internet games from players trying to hot join into AI controlled Civs or from players retiring, have the host save the game and re-launch from the main menu.
If a player inadvertently drops from an Internet game, it is better to have everyone wait at the Democracy screen than to have the player hot join while the game continues.
Though multiplayer games can have up to 18 players we only support and recommend a maximum of 12 players.
MANUAL ERRATA AND ADDENDUM
Hotkey / Interface Changes
* [ESC] will close every screen.
* Pillage hotkey was changed to [Shift – P]
* Improve Nearest City (Automated) is now [Shift - Ctrl - C]
* Intercept hotkey was changed to [I]
* Contact Civ Pop-up by pressing [Shift – D]
* To a activate Voice over IP in multiplayer, press the [Scroll Lock] key.
* You can declare war by pressing [Alt] and clicking on the name of the enemy leader in the score display.
* To change a units name just click on their name on the bottom left side of the screen.
Gameplay Changes
* Spy does not cost any gold per turn
* Calendar now centers the world map (instead of Astronomy)
* Border expansion occurs in a city when the city’s culture is 10, 100, 500, 5000, 50000 (Normal Game Speed)
Save Games
Saved games are stored in a special folder within the current user's "My Documents" folder. This folder can be located by navigating to "My Documents", then selecting "My Games", and finally selecting "Sid Meier’s Civilization IV".
Civilization IV saved games has the extension ".Civ4SaveGame" and Worldbuilder saves have the extension “.Civ4WorldbuilderSaves”. You may copy or delete these files as you would any other files. Renaming saved games is not recommended, as the game will only recognize specific filenames as valid for loading.
Double-clicking a saved game will launch the game and load that saved game.
INI File
Advanced users can change various Civilization IV settings and options by editing your INI file. To locate the INI files, navigate to "My Documents", "My Games", "Sid Meier’s Civilization IV" and open the “CivilizationIV.ini” file. This file is a standard text files that can be edited with Notepad (included with Windows®).
Civilization4.ini holds the values of all user-controllable options.
ScreenHeight
Height Resolution
ScreenWidth
Width Resolution
MouseScrolling
Allow Mouse Scrolling in Windowed Mode
QuickStart
Immediately launch in game
PlayMusic
Toggle Music
FullScreen
Toggle Window Mode
NoMovies
Toggle whether movies play
AutoSaveInterval
Set how often autosaves get created
AudioEnable
Toggle All Audio
Language
Set the game to a specific language
Mod
Set the game to load a specific mod
2K GAMES WEB SITES
To get the most out of your new game, visit us at: http://www.2kgames.com/
TECHNICAL SUPPORT (U.S. & Canada)
US Support
Phone: 1-866-219-9839
Email: usa@take2support.com
Canadian Support
Phone: 1-800-638-0127
Email: Canada@take2support.com