Civ 4 Train Wreck!

[CJB]

Whoops, my bad. Yes, I have the DVD: the error message refers to the CD although the DVD is in the (now unrecognisable) DVD player.

I did mention the glass of wine didn't I?

[Sabre2th]

Just checking

Are you trying to use autoplay to start the game? If you are, I recommend disabling autoplay, restarting, then running Civ4 from the desktop shortcut. I had issues with autoplay early on

[CJB]

Tried running from the desk top and directly from the .exe file on C:\program files\friaxs games\sid meier's civilizaion 4

[CJB]

Well theres a thing: hasn't installed the .ini file!

[Fidel]

keep us posted on that nailbiter

[CJB]

It would appear this is not uncommon in Britain at the moment.

My current options seem to be:

Borrowing a portable DVD drive from a friend and reinstalling from that.

Going round a friends hosue and seeing if it will install on his machine (i.e. check if its some sort of faulty disk)

Waiting for the Firxas people to sort it out... but I don't wanna wait that long!!!

[seebs]

Originally posted by Leeus
I've been involved with product launches. So yes. Things had to work before they went to the clients.

And you never got blindsided by a bug? Never had a client's machine which didn't quite meet the specs?

Did you do testing on products remotely comparable in dependency on drivers to a modern video game?

And did you actually do the testing, or were you just "involved with product launches"?

The assertion that someone "needs to be fired" is a very, very, strong assertion.

More importantly.... There are serious problems with this build. They should have tested this on many machines. This whole thing seems rushed.

Yes. And this is different from the rest of the PC software industry how? Civ 3 was totally unusable on my machine for the first week or so I had it. I eventually had to use a crack to get past the dysfunctional CD support.

Can you explain the problems that I am having?

Some of them, maybe.

How about the mini map in the right hand corner revealing a world that I�ve not explored? How about units just jumping about?

These are not even similar to actual bug reports. "Just jumping about" could mean anything from "automated unit movements are too fast to see" to "units are drawn in the wrong place" to "units appear to move from one tile to another without consuming movement points". As to the mini-map, that sounds sort of like you tried one of the worldbuilder workarounds for systems with dysfunctional T&L support.

Right now I�m trying to play it. I�m in 1962. The game is so slow that it�s almost unplayable. Look above to see my comps. stats.

Well, huh. My system's not that different, and I wouldn't describe it as "unusably" slow. I have a civ that's researching future tech, maybe 30+ cities, dozens of units running around doing automated stuff, and it's not bad at all.

[asleepathewheel]

Re: Civ 4 Train Wreck!

Originally posted by Leeus

Ok, all the other Civ games ran perfectly on my comp. Civ4 is temperamental.

[Leeus]

Re: Re: Civ 4 Train Wreck!

Originally posted by asleepathewheel

So what are you saying?

More problems...
At the year 2040 the games gets so slow that telling a worker to build a farm across the map takes about 4 minutes.

Small map in right hand side DOES NOT display explored areas upon loading up a saved game. It takes about 4 turns or so to snap to.

BROKEN: You can't ask for certain items in the diplo window. This is not right. You should be able to demand anything from anyone. What kind of junk is this?

[Imminence]

no more excuses

I did all and everything, which is recommended here, including BIOS-update, DirectX from CIV4-CD, uninstall, reinstall, cache delete.....everything.

What do I have now?

On my C-drive are about 2.5 GB fragmented files, which cannot be defragged. The defrag-program tells me, that they all belong to CIV 4.
Even a 12 hours clustertip cleaning did not help, nor did uninstall, clean registry, defrag again and reinstall.

I still have random crashes after about 4 or 5 rounds, stopping of the game for minutes, memory leaks even after quitting the game, load and save times beyond anything acceptable and so on and so on. Then it runs again smoothly and fine for 20 or 30 minutes and all the sudden it starts again with one of the numerous problems.

Again my system:
P 4 1.800
1024 MB RAM
4xAGP with 128 MB
GeF 4200 Ti with 128 MB
SB Audigy Player

I could (and can) run other games with huge grafics without ANY problem, never had crashes to reboot since 2002, when I installed WIN XP, did not have choppy scrolling the last 2 years, can run anything until now with all options "on" and highest quality.

I'm not to blame betatesters, Firaxis, Sid Meyer, George W. Bush or the Pope for all the problems this game causes.
I just see a product, which is certainly far away from being "ready".
In many other threads people post their problems, which are so different and so huge in numbers, that it is in my eyes royally arrogant (and / or ignorant) to post here excuses for Firaxis and blame gamers for being selfresponsible for all that crap.
If there would be something like a petition to the devs for fixing all that stuff NOW, I'd second it without hesitating a sec.

[Imran Siddiqui]

BROKEN: You can't ask for certain items in the diplo window.

Do you mean when options are redded out? That isn't broken, btw.

[Leeus]

It's only broken if you want to play the game the way it used to be played. It should be open for trade. Why is the computer making this decision for you?

[Sabre2th]

It's just a way to help you figure out what the AI is willing to trade. If it's red, nothing you can do will make them give it to you. If you still want it, you'll have to go to war...

If you want to play civ the way it used to be played, go play Civ1.

[Leeus]

Right.... Go play Civ 1... I have it, I wonder if it will work on XP...

More to the point....
I'm in the year 2044, and the game has slowed. So much so, that when you give an order to a unit it may or may not take.
I may tell a worker to run across the map. Once I release the mouse the dotted trail may stay for about 10 seconds, and then may or may not take the order and go to that point. I may have to redo the order a few times to get him to do the task.

Another thing…
All this uninstalling, reinstalling, drivers, and hardware issues are getting old. They need a patch out fast. Every game that I’ve bought has worked on my putter out of the box. The only weird one was Lucas’s Pod Racer. That one didn’t work so well.

I can run Doom3 flat out with the highest render levels without my putter doing anything amiss.

Speaking of product launches… Yes we made sure our products appeared as they should on different hardware. We weren’t making games, but they looked great everywhere. Maybe the play testers shouldn’t be fired, but someone should be disciplined. Someone has to be responsible for the messes that we’ve had.

It's all very frustrating.

[woolsery]

I wonder if anyone can help? I got the European version on Nov 4, the DVD version and I can't get the DirectX 9 to install. I get a message saying 'A cabinet file necessary for installation can not be trusted'. I can then load the game but of course it won't run. I already have the correct DirectX version 9.0c which I came with Brother in Arms on my hard drive. I have no problems installing any other games. I rang the take 2 tech support. they took my details, said my specs were fine and said they would e-mail me some solutions. They didn't. Has anyone else had this problem? Is there a solution?