Fixing Civ4 Problems: START HERE!

[snoopy369]

Originally posted by Sabre2th
Finally, a comprehensive fix thread....good work


It takes up less than 1.5gb for me... Where'd you get 4?

Bad math.

(Or, writing a thread like this on ~2 hours sleep ...

[Lord Diamond]

Enough,

Thanks for the suggestion. I tried it, and it didn't fix anything. The fact that I was able to install it once really bugs me. I even used System Restore to roll back to an earlier image. I am prepared to start from scratch with a new OS if I have to. This game had better be worth all the trouble!

Thanks again. Have any other suggestions that I can try?

[Lord Diamond]

It Works!!!!

It turns out that the cd-rom drive on my laptop actually ruined the cd. I took it back to EB and they were kind enough to replace it for me. I installed a simple little NVIDIA GeForce4 MX 440 with 64 MB and everything seems to work perfectly now.

[Thud]

I used the fix for the ATI issue thats on this forum. It works fine, but now I have another problem.

Whenever I try to login to Gamespy on CivIV, either to enter a username or to create a new one, my machine locks up. Any ideas? Could the fix prevent me from logging in (since my game is now modded?)

[trancer72]

Well I got it to work yesterday for over an hour, I had to shut off all non windows processes to do so though. Civ was using over 600Mb of RAM and as the game went on it slowed way down, So I rebooted and tried again but it just did the same old black screen deal.

[Enigma_TL]

Is there a fix for the sputtering Wonder movies other than turing them off? Game runs fine for me its just the wondermovies sputter and slide show when they run. I have the newest Dirx, Newest NVIDA Drivers, SB Audigy 2 Drivrs, and way above the specs. Nomatter what res I play in (Down to 800X600) the game is fine but the movies are messed up.

[kactus]

I thought I might add some help for people experiencing slow down and uplayable framerates: (sorry just modified the post I made on games spot :/ )

I've got two near identical systems hear I play on with my wife, and I experienced lightning fast gamplay on one, and the same slow choppy play on the other, that several people here are complaining about. After a bit of messing around I've found something that helps more than you can imagine.

The priority of the civ iv process runs at "below normal" which means that if any other program on your computer is trying to get cpu time it will get it in preference to Civ IV. Setting the priority to "above normal" fixes all the slow down issues on an Athlon 2000xp 512MB ram and Geforce 4200Ti.

To do this (in xp) start a game and ALT+TAB back to windows desktop.
Now Right Click the task bar and select "Task Manager".
On the second tab labeled "Processes", click the column "Image Name" to sort the list of processes by name.
Find Civilization IV.exe in the list
Right click it and select "Set Priority" -> "AboveNormal" (you can probably get away with "High", but not "Real Time")
Windows will pop up a warning message, asking if you are sure, Select "Yes"
Alt+Tab back into the game and you're set =D

Hope that helps, I've still noticed though in multiplayer that it will drop to the desktop every couple of hours but auto saves make this less painful. You can also try closing all background programs, running spyware removal tools and cleaning up your system start up with msconfig, but the process trick has worked every time.

Cheers and good luck

-Kactus of the Purple

[CorwinRathe]

Problems

I'm having some issues but they don't seem to be the same ones everyon else is posting. Here's my system specs.

CPU AMD 64 X2 4800+
RAM 2 gigs
Windows XP SP2
Direct X 9.0c
Graphics Card ATI FireGL V7100 - 256 megs. With latest driver set.

Now Civ fires right up, however in the movie intro I get a blue screen on the monitor, however sound is playing fine. Then after it gets thru the movies the globe screen loads up. However, there is no menu on the screen even though I can click those areas. I just can't see where the hell they are. First type of problem like this I've seen with a newer game. Anyoen have any ideas?

[radgen]

Think the slowdowns CTD's may be related and it SEEMS to be a system resource management issue.

Graphics options don't seem to be the actual cause(though adjusting them nay have a secondary affect that appears to improve things) The game looks nice but it shouldn't be this slow on a maching that can run Half-Life2 without an issue.

Bigger maps and longer games (taking up more resources) bring out more of the issues. I though *** might just be an odd compatibilty issue, but now twice, I have had the game sponteneously start running perfectly and smoothly, even on huge maps. This would happen mid-play so was not realted to any actual changes I was attempted.

It may not be a outright memory leak, but I do think that on some systems this game is not optimized in its use of memory OR CPU clock time or both.

The stuttering movies I think is a completely seperate issue.

[CorwinRathe]

Ah ha. I've found the problem. I had my setting in the card set for a rendering program Lightwave 3D. Once I changed this to the default setting all problems with the game went away runs smoothly and looks good. Seeing no issues as of yet. I'll try some larger maps when I get the chance and see how it does. Curious to see if I get some of the same issues you all are having.

[HarvestTime]

When playing a custom game with a reduced number of ai opponents, i get a ctd after a couple of turns.

Normal game runs fine, though.

[radgen]

When checking drivers, don't forget to look at the motherboard chipsets(not just the BIOS)

My graphics crawl was fixed by updateingt eh drivers for the AGP chipset on my MB. It was a SiS chipset, not sure if it is a common denominator for some of the more common issues.

On a side note what a pain. I could easily find who made the chip set on my MB cause I self-built my PC and had access to the full MB specs, but some poor schlob who bought thier PC from Gateway or Dell might not even be able to find that info out.

[TenderBranson]

Well, I think I just managed to make Civ4 not suck on my computer. (Athlon XP 2800+, 1gig ram, ATI 9600XT) My problem was random f*@! it all up crashes that rebooted my computer, or just froze it up so that even ctrl-alt-del didnt work, and the wonders videos were all skipping.

Its sort of mentioned in the first post of this thread, but I found it even simpler. Just disable Anti-aliasing in the Civ4 options. No need to mess with my drivers, or edit any *.ini files, just a couple of little clicks. Its in the Advanced -> Options -> Graphics area. Just change the thing about anti-aliasing to 0. Sure 0 is the default, but I didn't think that this would possibly cause a problem so I had turned it on without even thinking of it.

And before someone jumps all over me and blames my stupidity for expecting it to work, it damn well should have! Its not like AA is a new feature on gfx cards, and its not as if ATI didn't allow Firaxis access on how to program it.

Before this, I was lucky if I could play for an hour at a time, now I just came out of a 5 hour session and I'm going back for more! Once you get the damn thing working, its magic!

[KiloAlpha4]

$uckers

firaxis you suck. Take 2 and sid you suck ! Why ?

Michaeld the game has a pretty bad MEMORY LEAK which is causing your crashes to desktop!

You A$$es made me go through hell only to find out it's your damn memory leak causing my crashes....thanks alot from a never buy your games again customer !

2 days installing, uninstalling, driver this, change that, do this all to hide your inability to provide solid code for a game application ! Atleast now I know it's your bad programming and not my system as your help files suggest. Where does it state the bad memory leak causeing crashes to desktop in any of the help files ?...exactly...no where. that is why civ4 is the ONLY game I have doing this ! die and burn in hell for causing my frustration to fix something that was unfixable to begin with. next time try beta testing and releasing something solid.

[KiloAlpha4]

lol

ok i feel better now...they deserved that . Please patch this game asap.