Help!...Civ 3 keeps crashing on me!

[Joe911]

I have a problem with Civ 3 and wonder if anyone have a solution on some kind of explanations.
I started the game with a map I editted with the editor and played the game with 8 Civs until 1355 AD. I have lots of troops in most of my cities and a big navy in the seas, but now at the end of the 1355 AD. turn I get a message for Windows, quote " Civilazation 3 caused an invalid page fault in module Civilization3.exe at 017f:0046591a"
Now I can't play the game further. Is there a limit on the number of troops you can have in a game??

[Gramphos]

Have you tried to restart the computer and turned off as many apps as possible before loading Civ3?

[zippy]

I get invalid page faults alot in civ3 on one of my computers running Win98SE. On my other computer running XP it never crashes. Both are AMD Atlon machines. I can usually get it to work by rebooting the machine. If that fails try and load an earlier version in the auto save directory.

zippy

[simwiz2]

if it keeps crashing in the exact same spot, then i think your game is as good as gone. It happened to me once, I couldnt get it past 2900 BC. I went back several turns in autosaves, restarted, etc. and it still crashed. It was on Windows98. But unfortunately I think you are going to have to start over.

[Joe911]

Oh well.... sounds like it could be Win98SE that's causing me the problems.
Thanks for the inputs, friends.....Enjoy your Civ 3 and have a nice day.

[Travathian]

I've had the same thing happen in Win98SE and W2K. Best you can do is go back as far as you reasonably can in saves, and try doing things drastically different, cause something is happening that's tripping it up.

[marc420]

Civ 3 keeps crashing my Win XP os. Not just the game. The whole frigging OS goes down. Win XP has been very stable for me, so this is quite a feat for Civ 3 to be able to take out the entire os.

Yes, I've tried all the BS help advice things. I've tried compatablity modes, and I've tried running it with no other apps running. Even though the latter pretty much violates the whole concept of a windows-like os. You do can try to relive the wonderful days of DOS by trying to play a game that can't stand having any other apps running.

The crashes are not predictable. They don't always happen at the same spot. And they don't seem to happen on the same action. They do always seem to happen in my turn, but I can't predict the action that will kill the game.

When the game goes, the whole os goes. Quite a feat on Win XP. Usually the whole screen turns the same color....tan has been a favorite for a while. It sits there like this for maybe thirty seconds, then the computer reboots.

The one predictable thing about this is that it does seem to depend on how far into a game you've played. It never happens early in a game. And I almost never get into the modern era. My guess is that it has something to do with the number of cities and units in the game, but I can't tell if that's true.

Well, I gotten away from playing this game. Then started back up. Now I remember why I gave up. A game that you can't finish because it keeps crashing the whole os isn't much fun. So back to my Hockey Manager game. If they ever release a patch, I guess I'll give that a try.

Funny how one programmer working by himself can release a free hockey manager game which doesn't have these problems.

[Travathian]

Sounds like a memory issue. How many sticks of ram do you have? Have them tested yet? Or tried removing one temporaily to see if the problem persists?

The further into the game you get the more and more memory it chews up, and the longer you play a single session the more it chews up.

I dont see how this could be a Civ3 problem or an XP problem since I havent seen anyone with the same problem.