Sudden shut down

[oriel94]

Hi everyone.

I'm now on my 5th Civ3 game. No technical problems until now. The problem is that on my current game I'm in AD 1992 and in the midst of a huge war with Germany (I'm France). I've got them massively on the run after nuking all their main cities (believe me, they had it coming).

Now, so close to wrapping up the game, it crashes whenever I either take their City of Hastings or, if I bypass Hastings, when the 1992 turn ends. This has now happened 6 times in a row. After either ofthese events occur, I get the windows message: "Civilization3 has caused an error in CIVILZATION3.EXE. Civilization3 will now close".

This is a bit frustrating after so many games with no similar technical problems, and so close to the end of this game.

Anyone got a clue what is the problem?

[Shaka II]

Strange, because I am also am playing a game as French and conquering the Germans on my continent (~1700AD). The English were wiped out by the Germans early on and when I retook Hastings from the Germans, the game crashed!

I think this may be coincidence and some sequence of key strokes that caused the crash (I hit the escape key alot). I tried reloading that saved game and it crashed at the same place, so I think it was corrupted. Reloaded a turn back and did things a bit differently and am continuing the game.

Anyway The Germans are gone now, but in the early game they scared the hell out of me as I saw them take the English in about 30 turns with swordsman. Bismark actually refused to accept one of my cities that had defected to his side and I got it back! He called me a bootlicker. In the end he licked my boots.

No clue as to what causes my occasional crash (athlon 850mhz, nvidia geforce).

[Shaka II]

Actually, it was Salzburg where my game crashed. Hastings I took earlier in 1066, or was that another game?

[Purple]

In my first game I got as far as the 1800s, when Civ3 shut down. I tried reloading from the autosave, even went back a couple of turns and tried again, but the shut down still occurred at the same point, during the "Please Wait" as the AI moved.

So I decided to try again, on a higher difficulty level, and around 100 AD the same behavior occurred. This time I noted the error message:

The instruction at "0x0054afe0" referenced memory at "0x0000008". The memory could not be "read". Click on OK to terminate the program.

In the first game I thought the problem was some interaction with the AI. But in the second, I was still in the Galley phase, alone on a large island, having not yet contacted anyone else. The first game was standard all the way, except for my having loaded some of the terrain mods. The second was on a large map with the same mods.

I'll give it another go with the default terrain, just to rule out the possibility that they have caused the problem, but I have a lurking suspicion that they have nothing to do with it.