The patch will come the next week

[sidnitz]

Re: Re: Bah!

Originally posted by Boris Godunov


So how come I've been able to log over 40 hours of game time without any significant problems so far?

Because you're incredibly lucky, or we're incredibly unlucky...

Either way, there seems to be plenty of people out there who are having quite serious issues with the game, making it unplayable.

Just because you haven't run into them doesn't mean they don't exist.

[sidnitz]

Originally posted by baboon


I find it shocking when people blame their own problems to Firaxis.

Except that I've run easily 20 other games on this system a hell of alot more graphically complex and than Civ 4 w/ pretty much no issues (definitely zero bluescreen or crash to desktop issues). I've tried every "workaround" suggested in these and other forums, and the game still crashes constantly. I've installed 4 different versions of graphics drivers, reinstalled the game 4 times, reinstalled DirectX 4 times, and reloaded Windows XP once, and the game still crashes. This says to me that the problem is in Civ 4, not my machine.

I find it shocking when people discount huge bugs in games just because they are lucky enough not to experience them.

[Squid Meier]

I squirt ink in your eyes

[Argos65987]

Originally posted by Muddeh
...Start a new game, and the screen updates are like seconds per frame, instead of frames per second. Im running a p4 HT 3ghz, 2gb ram, GeFX 5950GT 256mb and the performance is chronic. My system is hardly a slouch bu the game decides its running on like a spectrum 48k and chuggs along accordingly.

The game bombs to desktop every few turns

Sound is often stuttering, ingame movies break up and lag. Map is corrupted with colour lines, clicking on the mini map is an instant crash, clicking one of the advisor buttons, especially the science advisor = 3 minutes before the screen actually comes up.

...

Muddeh

I originally had these problems too. I updated my sound and video driver, but that didn't seem to help. I read somewhere on this forum that someone said to not play on worlds larger than standard. I have been playing standard world maps and have not had a single crash since and no performance issues. Don't know if this will help you in your situation, but it might be worth a shot. If I can find the orginal thread I'll post it.

[gregules]

still no patch

[LzPrst]

isnt next week this week?

[SKIPICUS]

As for the patch that we are all so eagerly awaiting, it should be in this week, I'm guessing and deffinately hoping by this Friday at the latest. Nov. 11th Veterans day of which we are to games like this

[Brutus66]

I have been doing PC tech support for a living for at least ten years now, so I may be qualified to comment on this thread.

Let me state for the record that I am not a fanboy (civ is not my favorite game), so I think I am pretty objective and impartial concerning Firaxis.

Now, I don't have the hottest pc around (it's only a 2.8 Ghz with an ATI 9700 pro video card, running Win2k; a system I put together myself), but I haven’t had any problems running Civ IV.
I have had more hours of play over the last week or so than I care to admit, and it crashed to desktop exactly once. That was it- no slowdowns or any other issues.

This indicates to me that, on a basic, clean, low-cost system, the game is stable.
According to some reports here, there are compatibility issues with certain video cards, but some things I have picked up on in these forums lead me to be suspicious if this is really the case. For example, some folks have howled publicly that they had an ATI 9800, but later admitted it was a laptop system that did not support T&L (the gamebox says, under minimum requirements, you need a video card supporting T&L).

Over the years, I have learned that the causes of most computer problems are user-related.
Next on the list would be the occasional cases of defective hardware like defective RAM or bad sectors on a disk.
I ordinarily don’t suspect that poorly designed software is the culprit unless A) it was developed in-house, B) developed by an off-brand company, or C) something is present on the system that has a known reputation for being crapware, in which case A or B often apply as well).

I have hundreds of users to support in a large industrial setting, which includes workers on the factory floor, secretaries, and executives.
I have learned three things:
1) More often than not, the problem I am fixing was caused, either knowingly or unwittingly, by the user.
2) The description of the problem provided by the help desk on the trouble ticket and what’s really wrong are completely different
3) Users lie.

By now I have seen it all, and I don’t know how many times I have encountered someone trying to use software that I know to be stable, on a system that I know should be able to handle it just fine (for example a user trying to run Access 2002 on a Pentium III), and they get blue-screens, crashes, and whatnot and proceed to scream bloody murder that the computer is a dud or the software is crap.
Yet I re-image that same machine with a clean OS and the problem, far more often than not, magically disappears.
I can’t tell them, of course, that the adware, spyware, malware and other miscellaneous junk they have managed to download and install may have had something to do with their issue, or that turning their pc off at the end of the day by simply flipping the power switch isn’t a good idea, or that deleting files in the winnt/system32 directory may lead to unexpected system behavior.
Now, I’m not inferring that my esteemed colleagues on this forum would mistreat their systems in such a way, but like I said, I have seen it all by now…

[SKIPICUS]

Brutus66, thats some very good stuff and very interesting and I am deffinately taking great care and making a solid note of it.
Thankyou so much for your input.

[Brutus66]

Thanks for saying so skip, but I expect to be flamed here shortly...

[zapperio]

Originally posted by Brutus66

Next on the list would be the occasional cases of defective hardware like defective RAM or bad sectors on a disk.
�

I can attest to this. I´ve worked as a professional graphic designer and often created and used huge graphic files. It came as a shock to me to discover how often there are minor defects in the ram. Minor defects that usually cause no problem as there aren´t many programs that use upp all of your ram. However when you write a huge continous file to a defective ram and then save it to the disk that file will at best have glitches that show up at the worst possible time (at the printers) or be completely unusable. At work, I once went through 3 brand new 512mb kingstons before finding a clean stick. that´s 3 out of 4 with a small error on them. I may have been just unlucky but before it meant hours of lost work I´d never had a reason to check.

Considering how much of a ram hog Civ is I´m not surprised a lot of people with 'perfectly fine' systems are accumulating errors while running the application.

Consider it as a stress test. It may be that your computer just isn´t handling a stress test. Happens to the best of us.

[SKIPICUS]

Thats pretty interesting stuff too zapperio.
This is all very interesting and also a great learning experience.
As I wait upon a patch cause I've just about done everything else.
But anymore inut is greatly recieved by me and others I'm sure.

[Effraides]

Play on a huge map up until modern times and swap maps. That is where the problem is, the game works wonderfully well on standard sized maps and below... but at least for me personally... those are boring. So I went with huge, game works great, hundreds of units dancing across the screen... then comes the slowdown, the memory clogs and the crashes. I see a lot of people posting on the stability of the programming, and then I see that they are also ignoring half the posts referring to when it happens. Huge maps are a killer.

And its not half the systems here... its got to be a programming flaw. The game will fill up a whole gig stick in a minute and then crash... reboot, the game runs great for 10 minutes, omg, gig stick filled up again , slow, slow... crash. Over and over. If the System is rebooted, everything is great again for 10 turns. It isnt my system and standard maps are too small. And playing half life 2 maxed out settings wise, it boggles my mind why this is filling up my memory so bad.

And as an extra bonus, if you shut the game down before it crashes... its like your system is coming down off of some bad trip... you have to give it a few minutes for the memory to empty and adjust. Or the computer runs like a hog.

[conmcb25]

Brutus

Now Im beginning to wonder if my not having problems on THREE systems (both laptop and desktops) and both kinds of cards (ATI and nvidea) are the result of recent reimage and installation of all new drivers on my machine, Hmmmmmmmmmm

[Navyman]

The rumor mill has it that part of the problem with the crash to desktop and other crashes deal with the copy protection system and it needing to check for the cd.