Game gets stuck during AI turn

[Nym]

Well, I am playing a personal scenario (new civ and new map only) with Civ 3 (no PTW yet). Until mid Industrial Age it was OK and suddenly the game gets stuck during the AI turn. Music is still playing and other programs are still available, but civ3.exe uses 99% of the CPU.
I tried to deactivate movements' and combats' animations but it does not change anything.

Has anyone any idea to solve this?

Configuration:
Civ3 1.29f
Athlon 1700+
1 GB RAM
Windows XP Pro
3D Prophet 9000 series 128 MB

[Spiffor]

How long does it last ?

If you are playing on a very huge map, the waiting time can become extremely long in late game every time an AI civ builds a new city, builds / destroys a port or an airport, pillages a road...

Wars create chaos in the trade network, and every time the trade network is disrupted, it is recalculated entirely. This is exponentially long when maps get bigger. On my P4 2GHz with 1024 Mb RAM, I have had waiting times of half an hour in late industrial times, on a 256 * 256 map

[Nym]

Originally posted by Spiffor
How long does it last ?

If you are playing on a very huge map, the waiting time can become extremely long in late game every time an AI civ builds a new city, builds / destroys a port or an airport, pillages a road...

Wars create chaos in the trade network, and every time the trade network is disrupted, it is recalculated entirely. This is exponentially long when maps get bigger. On my P4 2GHz with 1024 Mb RAM, I have had waiting times of half an hour in late industrial times, on a 256 * 256 map

I was playing on a huge map (as I usually do) with 16 civs (only 13 were still there due to China). The turns before the AI's turn was about 30 sec long. This time it was more than 2 hours! And there was no war.

[sabrewolf]

i had a scenario which crashed, whenever an enemy bombing mission got intercepted (my bombing runs worked fine). don't know what went wrong... but it sucked ;(

the symptoms were the same (all memory got used up, started swapping and CPU at 99%).... that was on a 120x120 map...

[kermit_the_frog]

The AI on my comp 2 uses very long turns on a 362x362 map. That sucks

[Cruddy]

Originally posted by sabrewolf
i had a scenario which crashed, whenever an enemy bombing mission got intercepted (my bombing runs worked fine). don't know what went wrong... but it sucked ;(

the symptoms were the same (all memory got used up, started swapping and CPU at 99%).... that was on a 120x120 map...

Yes, I've had that as well, even with the 1.29f patch. All I could do was ground my fighters and let the bombers go it - but I found a way around it.

1) Only put the fighters in 1 city (hopefully this will cover all the resources).

2) Put a unit on the target tile in a fortress - the bombs fall on the unit, not the resource.

It seems the bug happens when the AI has to reroute a strategic resource across the left and right edges of the map - it gets confused over the shortest path and sits there eternally swinging from one path to another.

Hope this helps. Yes I did report it to Firaxis.

[Nym]

I do not know it that is my problem as I see nothing (I am not involve within a war) and can not correct it if the problem is due to the path finder.

[sabrewolf]

nym, well maybe you'll have to abandon the game. i know it's annoying, but one wastes too much time killing the civ3-process, restarting, reloading and changing some things.. and mostly you can't find out why it didn't work.

fortunatly i've only had this problem once since my stated last time in a normal game. in ready-made scenarios it sometimes froze (or the scen took >24 hours to initialize).

[Nym]

Originally posted by sabrewolf
nym, well maybe you'll have to abandon the game.

Yes, it is exactly what I did. I just kept a save of this game, one turn before it crashes, in the case someone would have a solution.

[alva]

Try loading into Grompho's tool to see what's going on. (see the files forum).

It will uncover all fog etc., but it should enable you to spot a bug like the described above.
(or you could wait until the next patch and try again, never know.
It should be out rather soon(ish)...)

[rippk]

bump.

I have this problem as well the game crashes when it goes to AI turn. There is a enemy carrier within range of a continent-linking square that likely gets bombed, and the comptuer has to recalculate everything.

Anyone else found a work around or a fix. cruddy, you said you reported to Firaxis .. did you get a reply?

I've put 77 hours inot this game over 2 months in time. I want to end. but civ.exe keeps crashign in this situation. I've already given up on bombing ... whihc always causes an out-of-synch error. But htis is a game stopper, as the civ.exe crashes on the AI turn.

I tried putting units on the squares, that didn't seem to help. It's been months since this was reported, Firaxis should have fixd by now!

[aaronhallam_3]

rippk, I had that same problem. I loaded a saved game I had and on the next turn it crashes. I didn't want to give up on it since I had been playing it for about a month so I tried different things (disbanding units, trading, anything) but it always crashed no matter what. Looks like you're gonna have to start over. All that time into a game and it crashes !!