v1.16f: Issues? Bugs? This is the thread

[Libertarian]

Corruption was fixed in the latest patch. It was reduced from outrageous to absurd.

[Desert Dog]

How?

Just curious how far you played with the patch installed to determine the corruption levels were better or worse? I could not get past the industrial ages in 3 games and modern age in last game. I was using a mod the last game to fix the dumb ass problems with combat the patch causes.
I play on 230x230 maps with only 8 civs. The game after a while really labors to handle this too! Almost seems like it was written in "basic" programming language! I mean, comparing it to fast written code for 3D games that have no page flipping on the screen etc. I mean anyone who knows anything about how computer graphics are supposed to be done knows better. I LOVE the new units and animation, but why does it take up to 2-5 minutes a turn in late games when I am using a 1.0 ghz AMD - New Radeon Video card - 256 meg of ram PC? I was expecting and hoping for a totally different game then what we have. Oh well!

Desert Dog

[TheChief]

Corruption in late levels

I've come to learn that by the year 1900 I'd better know how I'm planning on winning the game. Too many times I've noticed that it's the late in the 20th Century and I'm just about 3/4 of the way through the Industrial ages and then I try to make the United Nations and hope for a good vote.

In this last particular game, I won the space race around 2020 I believe. I had to take out a large Russian area because they were a constant threat. In doing so I pushed so far down that no matter what the amount of production was from the city, corruption consumed it all with the exception of one shield each. In most instances I was scrapping artillery, tanks, bombers, and mech infantry just to build the requisite temple and walls. All of this and having democracy, courthouses and police stations. The corruption levels are just a joke.

I'm happy to say that I racked up my highest score since I got the game. Lincoln the Terrible with a score of 3903 on Regent level and I'm very happy. Maybe one day I'll graduate to the next level..

Johnny

[star mouse]

Game speed

The game has numerous slowdowns that need addressing. Here are several I have noticed:

Game takes between 3 and 5 minutes between turns.
Game takes 15 seconds between clicking on the "Will you accept this deal?" button and the AI's response.
When cultural borders expand, the game pauses for 10 seconds, often pausing this long for each city's border expansion.

There is a common task that takes ages to perform at each of these steps. I'm guessing it's the calculation of culture borders and trade routes. These could be optimised easily.

[barefootbadass]

Originally posted by solo
1. No more trading of cities? The AI never consider it after the patch.

It seems to me that it will no longer trade for cities that are likely to revert. It will deal for good cities, at least some of them.

[Mr. Socks]

Audio Preferences bug + Dr. K note

For some reason, I haven't seen anybody else mention this (seems unlikely that it would be just me). Changing the audio preferences doesn't have the desired effect re: music / sfx on/off check boxes:
- the on / off checkbox status very often doesn't match what the game is really doing, especially right after loading a game or starting a new one
- If I turn off the music, it restarts next turn (turning it off a second time works for good though)
- some ambient sounds, like the bird chirp, seem impossible to turn off.

To Dr. K: I'd really recommend giving Civ III a try. I have the same civ background as you (playing since Civ I, but never tried the CTP or AC games) and I have to say that for me, Civ III is the best in the series so far. Sure, there are a couple of things I would change if it were up to me, but that's unavoidable. If I didn't have the game, and I was reading these forums, I'd probably think the same thing as you -- that it's a buggy POS. But I only experienced a couple of the many bugs people have been reporting. IMHO, it's more polished and has fewer bugs than a good two thirds of the games released these days, and has *never* crashed on me after about a dozen games and maybe 80 hours of playing, even though I'm constantly messing around with drivers & swapping hardware in & out of my system, and always have tonnes of things like spreadsheets and pr0n MPEGs running in the background. This must make it one of the most stable pieces of software on my system. Maybe I'm just lucky, but clearly not everyboy has had problems with it. Too bad there's no easy legal way to try it out without buying it.

[sevensterre]

Originally posted by Colonel Kraken


I didn't have the game before the patch, but I think it's curious that when I'm allies with a civ and I liberate one of his cities and offer to give it back to him, he refuses! Sometimes if I offer it for nothing in return the AI will take it. If I ask them what they will give me in exchange for the city, I get the, "That cannot be done at this time" or some such response. Not even 1 gold? Come on. Why would the AI refuse taking a city back that he formerly had? This happens also, of course, when I offer an ally a city that, although not formerly his, it is a city that is next to his borders and would connect contiguously with his empire. Why would the AI refuse to accept such a gift?

Is this a design decision? Hmmm . . . . I like to play the nice, benevolent civ, but this makes it kind of difficult.



I had a similar problem. After discovering the French, they did not show up in the foreign advisor screen. After wiggling the mouse pointer over the area where Joan's mug should have been I got a green disk to show up. After goofing around for a while and left-clicking in the green disk, Joan's face finally showed up. Wierd.

If you hold down the shift key while you right click on a picture in the foreign adviser you can bring one of the powers not shown to the front. Also with the patch the A.I. will trade cities while making peace to end a war they are losing, if they are small cities.

[Junnila]

I was playing as Egyptians and Mahatma Gandhi contacted me and offered me a mutual protection pact. As the Russia was already devastating a few other civs and had an army of about 200 units at the ancient age or so I kindly agreed to his request.
It was already at the end of the turn, so after I had accepted to a mutual protection pact the game told me to press enter(I have "wait at the end of the turn" enabled).
So I went on and pressed the enter to end the turn... right after I did it, the Indians declared war on the Egyptians.
I guess it has to be a bug or its just plain stupidity. Why on earth would the peaceful Indians(least aggressive civ according to civ3 editor) who have weak military compared to me, declare a war right after we have sealed a mutual protection pact?
India was "polite" and their people were in awe of my culture.
Was Gandhi unsatisfied with the 1.16f patch and is showing his anger towards the Egyptians?

[hurdygurdy]

Destroying harbors causes the game to hang proportionally to the map size and the number of civs. In a huge map, 16 civs, it lasts about 2 minutes.

Trade route calculations are horrid.

Shift-P also causes a hang as if it has to search all tiles for pollution instead of having a list of pollutioned tiles to search through.

[typongtive]

Right now I am the babylonians and I am kicking butt...but the problem is now every time I go to a new turn the game crashes...geesh I am almost to the end of the amount of years I need...I am on a huge map with 8 civs..3 left besides my own..why is this game crashing so much..oh yeah I have the new patch and it did the same thing with the original install of the game...anyone help?..I did reinstall it all twice already..thinking of civ2 right now.

[typongtive]

Re: Small Setup Bug

I am on Windows Me and I to am having the same issues..I freaked at first and thought it was a virus

Originally posted by Biggles266
Has anyone else noticed this?

If I start my PC and then run Civ3, on the next boot or restart I get the message:

__________________________________
Please wait while Setup updates your configuration files. This may take a few minutes...


Completed updating files, contiunuing to load Windows...
__________________________________

To test, turn on your PC. Do not run anything. Restart. Watch for message while booting. Run Civ3. Quit. Restart PC. Watch for message while booting. I can reproduce this without fail.

Now I know this isn't much of a big deal but it takes my system boot time (from the Starting Windows 98... bit) from 13 seconds up to about 14 or 15 seconds so I don't like it.

Win98SE
Civ3 1.16f

I don't know if this really helps for this problem but here are the specs anyway:
Processor and Speed Intel Pentium III ~550MHz
Total System Memory 384Mb
DirectX Version DirectX 8.1 (4.08.01.0881)

Video Card Name NVIDIA RIVA TNT2 Model 64/Model 64 Pro
Manufacturer NVIDIA
Approx. Total Memory 31.5Mb

Sound Card Name Creative SBPCI Direct Sound Driver
Manufacturer Creative

Video Driver: 4.13.01.2183
Sound Driver: 4.12.01.2011

[Venger]

Originally posted by Libertarian
Corruption was fixed in the latest patch. It was reduced from outrageous to absurd.

I love seeing Libertarian turn on this game like a rabid dog. Go get em boy!

Venger

[Venger]

The updating system configuration is usually caused by the wininit.ini file being run. You indeed could have a virus - there are some that work via wininit.exe and wininit.ini.

Venger

[Martinus Magnificus]

I don't know if anyone has reported this before, but I noticed a bug when trying to load a saved game. I can't scroll down to the last saved game in the list. It only works correctly after I go to another folder and then return to the 'saves' folder. Maybe it has something to do with the number of saved games (I save a lot)?

Furthermore, I find it really hard to plant spies in foreign countries. In the 30 or so times I tried to do this, only once (!!!) I succeeded. Since every time you try to plant a spy it'll cost you a lot of money, I find this really annoying (here's one reason for my saved games list being so long!). Thus, I wonder if this was intended.

I too have the problem that others mentioned before in this thread: I get black rectangles and misplaced city borders for settlers on my screen when using higher resolutions (I have a Nvidia Geforce 2 video card and downloaded the latest Nvidia driver).

Speaking of which, adding the line "Video Mode=1792 / Video Mode=1600 / Video Mode=1280 / Video Mode=1152" in the civilization3.ini file (supposed to force the screen resolution to one of these settings, see the readme file that came with the patch), doesn't work for me. Instead, I have to set my desktop resolution to 1280x1024 and ad the line "KeepRes=1" in the civilization3.ini file to get the desired resolution.

Hopefully these and other issues (like no stacking option and rebelling foreign citizens killing all stationed cavalry/tanks when deposing) will be adressed in the next patch.

Martinus Magnificus (AKA Imperator)

[Grrr]

Re: Re: Small Setup Bug

I was also having the problems of constant update setup files, until I switch my computer OFF entirely. Since then it hasn't done it. It doesn't really matter for me because my Scanner and Flashrom drive fight eachother for 2 minutes during startup, so the couple of seconds aren't noticed.