Does your Civ work right out of the box?

[Tiberius]

Unfortunately I voted Bananas before buying the game, so now that I have it I'd like to change my vote to:

Just, everything fires up right away

Btw, my comp specs are not the best around: Pentium4 1,6 GHz, 512 MB RAM, GeForce 3 Ti200 128 MB, but the game runs just fine. Maybe a bit slow, but no problems.

[kaitanan]

worked 100% fine for me

[MrFun]

Originally posted by LaRusso
apparently, a tiny proportion of nvidia users also had some problems.

Hopefully this can be fixed too.

[Mao_Tse_Tongue]

Athlon 64 3400+
nVidia 6800 GT
Audigy
1GB RAM

No problems

[Provost Harrison]

Yeah, I am having a bit of bother. I was having crashes and extreme slowdowns and BSODs (and this is under XP) with my previous drivers. Updated the drivers and it made it even worse - it locked up every 10 minutes involving a hard reset...always seems to be a problem with nv4_disp.dll

Hmmm...

[sidnitz]

Mine worked great out of the box up until around 1965 AD on a large map and 1955 AD on a huge map. At this point, it appears I can't continue to play either game without either crashing to desktop or bluescreening after hitting <2.5 GB Commit Charge and pegging "both" CPUs.

System Specs
P4 3GHz HT
2 x 512MB PC3200
Geforce FX5900 Ultra
2 x 80GB SATA 150 in RAID 0
AC '97 audio

WinXP Pro SP2
NVidia Forceware 81.85
2GB static page file

[VetLegion]

You know what, this question is interesting enough that I would top it. It has potential to give good info to perspective buyers. The problem is that the number of voters is still too low to allow us to draw serious conclusions from it (margin of error still too high - sample not large enough). Anyway, on the site in my signature I have compiled several polls from ACS and CFC. It seems that the only one with a healthy sample is "Are you interested in starting a class action lawsuit against Firaxis?" on CFC.

[ChaotikVisions]

Game worked fine out of the box aside from stuttering movies, but its no big issue for me. I dropped most of the detail to low and turned movies off after my first full game and am now playing on a huge map with 14 civs just fine.

System Specs:
P4 1.6ghz
512mb of PC2100 DDR Ram
GF2MX200(64mb)
Soundblaster Live!

[Famine]

My 1st CD was bad, it took me 2 hours to figure that out but once I exchanged it everything worked fine

[notyoueither]

Does your Civ work right out of the box?

Yes, even on a new PC with ATI that I put the release version on.

[Zayxus]

civ 4 - Memory / RAM errors could cause crash

Test your Memory / RAM

Memtest86
Memtest86 is released under the terms of the Gnu Public License (GPL).

http://www.memtest86.com/

Runs from Boot-Disk.

[Raion]

The game worked out of the box, except for sound cutting in and out of movies, which needs a better processor, I guess.

Also if a slowdown occurs like mentioned before by others, Alt-Tab out to the Desktop for a minute or so, and then go back into the game.
The second time the Diplomacy Screen came up, the slowdown did not occur as it did the first time.

As for the map being entirely revealed where another slowdown may occur, I have not gotten that far.

Although some of the movies are not up to par on my machine, the game is still functioning well, as I said, playing a small map with 5 civilizations, as well as just turning on Animations again, but not Effects, using 'single unit' under the Graphics setting, and realizing that when zooming all the way in, the sound gets louder with the music, and when zooming out from the game, the sound gets softer, and far away.

So, now the graphics are big, and the game plays fine, and if I do not want music that loud, I zoom out a little bit, but when I want to see things up close and hear the sounds of my Civ Cities, I zoom in close.

FX5200 Geforce with 78.01 drivers.
Windows 2K Professional with 512mB of memory!
Regular Live! sound card -- on stereo setting.
Resolution 1024 x 768, and '0' antialiasing for the time being.

I have now noticed that it appears that the game has played better the more that I play it (do not ask me why but I do have another game -- that worked the same way a ways back -- and that game did need patches, but as to the why, I do not know, unless it really has something to do with the harddisk and the way that they are made nowadays whereas a low-level format is not really possible anymore, while I did re-format my harddisk logical partition and defrag before installing the game) and although the game is not perfect when it runs:

If I Alt-Tab out to Desktop the first time the Diplomacy Screen comes up, and wait a minute, then go back to the game, the lag or slowdown will be gone, and play as continued as normal even when the same Civ's Diplomacy Screen came up again, and even the Third Time with Cyrus of Persia, as the only Civ that I have met in the game, giving me glancing looks about denying him Open Borders.

If another slowdown occurs when the full map come into view, then I will try the same thing -- Alt-Tab out to desktop, wait for a minute or so, then return to the game to see if the slowdown and lagginess go away again, and play continues to be normal except for some of the Wonder movies being a little flaky and such.


As of now I am running at least 2gB of Virtual Memory, and the highest amount of Peak Memory I have seen as been around 557mB of memory, and with the game, all the memory Windows 2K can give the game which appeared to be at least 423mB of main memory -- so far!

It is widely assumed that I need a better computer to play the game, or put up with turning off some of the graphics, however at this time there does not appear to be a 6gHz computer sold, and:

Sid and Jeff have a sense of humor!

So while some modders are eagerly awaiting the SDK that comes out next year, and the modding begins, perhaps by the end of playing this game, most people will have a 10gHz computer to play it on with technology that --- flys!