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

[Whistler]

Post game playing - movement problems

Well, I magically won my first full game in Civ 3. I played at Chieftan level until I get some experience with the new strategies in Civ 3 over Civ 2. At the end of a turn I magically won by cultural victory (will be turning that off in the future!). I went through the replay of the game, scoring, mutual praise party and final ranking (Lincoln the Cruel), and when the question came up to continue or stop, I chose to continue. I did that because I managed to play complete game with NOT ONE WAR among any of the Civ's. Now that the game was over I wanted to wreak some havoc among my neighbors.

Anyway, when the game resumed, all piece movement was horrible. The click-hold movement showed the path a piece would take, but it would not take it. All the movement buttons for the pieces were now on the right side of the screen instead of the bottom. When a piece was done moving, it still showed the white movement circle around it. I had to click on another piece to get to move it. I played about half a turn win this state. I then saved the game, exited the game, restarted and reloaded. Everything worked fine after that.

By the way, on another topic, I also noticed incredibly long delays from when I finished negotiations with another civ and the display updated, appearing to be locked up, but it was simply taking its good old time thinking about things before it had to update the screen. Once the screen was black for 30+ seconds...very disconcerting. But the game never locked up on me. This also happened in different points in the game, not just after negotiations.

Finally, a gripe. Why did they take out the "fast piece slide" option between Civ2 and Civ3? Turning off animation didn't help a lot as pieces still hesitate between moves. And turning off showing the piece movement makes me lose some pieces until they get done moving (transport ships moving to another island for example).

[MBloomIII]

Originally posted by jbrians


You may have a bad reputation for breaking deals, so that any deal that involves anything per turn (gold or resources) will be unacceptable.
-Brian

This all happened during one turn, the Chinese just happened to be last. Part of the trading process was communications with all the other Civ's. I hadn't had a chance to break a treaty yet.

[stend]

Re: Re: Re: Why can't I select to build a wonder?

Originally posted by Goonk Well I haven't disbanded any units, but I may have chopped down a forest or two. Maybe that is the problem?

That would do it as well - you can't benefit from any speedups on building wonders except GLs.

If that is the case then it really sucks, since you have to take in account whether you later want to build any wonder in that city when you control your workers (or worse if you automate them, you can get a nasty surprise).

Yeah. IMNSHO, the better thing to do would be for the game to keep track of normal and speedup shields, and give you a warning when you're about to switch to an improvement that can't use the speedup shields (like the warning you get with excess shields).

[Flight]

i've no idea if this was posted earlier cos i only read up to page 4 but the game crashes in some weird ways

firstly in 2 different games it has fatal errored when several cities go into civil unrest, but on one specific city it will crash. Reloading the turn and making sure the city doesnt go into disorder solves the problem entirely - although on one game another city in the many that went into unrest caused it to crash and i abandonned the game.

Also, occasionally (in teh same place repeatedly but in 2 different games) when i activate lots of units fortified in a city through the city menu it will completely hang if i accidentally click fortify on one of the units. So basically it hangs when i fortify a unit in a city using the menu.
I havent tested it much (not like i WANT my games ot crash ) but it has only done this when fortifying a unit in a big stack when activating others

its also displayed general weird crashes but only a couple and with no identifiable cause.

the patch fixed a lot of annoying things, thx firaxis, get the next one out quickly please

win2k on athlon 1.4 tbird gf2mx

[star mouse]

Optimisation Suggestion

When trade-related improvements such as Harbours and Airports are built, the game lags after each building is completed as it recomputes the trade network. This lag can be quite significant in the modern era as a bunch of airports are built in the same turn and the game lags for 10-20 seconds after every airport is complete.

To reduce the lag, the game should not recalculate the trade network until all the harbours and airports are complete. There is a problem if the recalculation of the trade network gives access to a strategic resource that was previously unavailable. Thus, we should change the code from:

for each city
* complete building
* recalculate trade network
* ask for next bulding
next city

to this:

for each city
* complete building
next city

recalculate trade network

for each city
* ask for next building
next city

This will also make the building and unit selections more accurate, because strategic resources that become available allow all cities to build units and improvements that use that resource, instead of just those cities that come after the city with the newly-finished trade link.

[MonsterMan]

My list of bugs in Civilization III

Sorry if I bring up bugs already mentioned by others, but I hope my view on them is still helpful.

Did you know that if I set my luxury rate at 0% (or anything else), I can hit F1 in the turn change inbetween city reports and crank it up again? This will give me a huge wad of cash while disorder is limited to the first few cities. If I'm in luck, my capital completes a project on that turn, and I hit F1 right after I OK the new project leaving me with just one city in disorder. It helps to have a slow computer, and I usually hit F1 several times to be sure. If I'm really nasty, I'll crank up luxury rate at the same time, and I get 'We love the President' über alles. This doesn't hurt science either, even if I'm at 100% luxuries. You might want to take a look at this problem.


JUMP SHIP!

I have a Caravel full of settlers, and move my three tiles. This brings my ship alongside another, empty caravel that hasn't moved yet this turn. So I activate the settlers and let them jump ship. Presto! Now I can get them where they should go twice as fast as the computer can. This is pretty silly when you think about it, because all units are supposed to start the turn at the same point in time - it's just their actions that are decided by the turn-based system. That's how I understand it to be. Doing what I'm doing is akin to travelling back in time.

THANKS FOR THE HELP.

During a war, I razed an enemy city and a few turns later built my own city on the same spot. Soon after I made peace with the enemy, but to my surprise a couple of workers wandered in and started irrigating around my new-found city. I didn't even have a right of passage agreement. The only reason I can think of is that they were ordered there before the city was raised.


ABOUT UPGRADING UNITS


After the player upgrades a unit, it should automatically fortify, particularly if the former unit started out fortified. I'm especially thinking of the time when I did a mass upgrade of my pikemen to musketeers - all 100 of them. If this had been in place I would have saved a lot of time. When doing individual upgrades it's just as bad because I get confused if this unit was supposed to go somewhere else or if it was recently upgraded.

[Master2000]

Automated Workers

I use CTRL+A on all my workers.

With the patch, when there is no more to do for the workers they go to a city and sleep. That's good. If a square gets polluted 2 workers will wake and start working on the polluting square. Well, that's good too but I must ask why only 2 workers will run out and work when I have 10 other lazy workers just sleeping in my cities. Shouldn't all non working workers run to this square? I think it takes 12 workers to clean a polluted square in 1 turn.

And I still miss the old sentry command...

[FNBrown]

I'm sure this has already been said... but it would have been nice if the patch took care of the "Refresh=60" requirement for CivIII to run under WindowsXP instead of forcing users to plow through this forum to find that fix.

I have two machines running XP, and that fix was required on both (not like hardware, either...)

Although I am glad the patch fixes the problem with the Civilization3.exe executable being left running after the game exits...

[The Rusty Gamer]

Negative culture bug!

Ok, not sure that anyone else would've found this one.
When I created a new scenario, I doubled the culture for all culture buildings but to offset this I set Barracks, Granary, and Walls each to -1 culture.

Bug: Any negative culture buildings that are listed before the first positive culture buildings on the city screen are not taken into account when calculating culture.

Examples of city building lists:

Palace +4
Barracks -1
Granary -1
Temple +4
Walls -1
Total is -5, which it calculates correctly.

Barracks -1
Granary -1
Temple +4
Walls -1
Total should be +1 but calculates as +3, having ignored the first two buildings.

It doesn't matter what order the buildings are built in as they are always shown on the city screen in a fixed order and that is the order they are calculated in.

[Willem]

Re: Negative culture bug!

Originally posted by The Rusty Gamer
Ok, not sure that anyone else would've found this one.
When I created a new scenario, I doubled the culture for all culture buildings but to offset this I set Barracks, Granary, and Walls each to -1 culture.

Bug: Any negative culture buildings that are listed before the first positive culture buildings on the city screen are not taken into account when calculating culture.

Examples of city building lists:

Palace +4
Barracks -1
Granary -1
Temple +4
Walls -1
Total is -5, which it calculates correctly.

Barracks -1
Granary -1
Temple +4
Walls -1
Total should be +1 but calculates as +3, having ignored the first two buildings.

It doesn't matter what order the buildings are built in as they are always shown on the city screen in a fixed order and that is the order they are calculated in.

Well of course, until you have a positive building, it's not going to be able to subtract anything. And the games not designed to go into the red on culture numbers.

[The Rusty Gamer]

Re: Negative culture bug!

Originally posted by Willem


Well of course, until you have a positive building, it's not going to be able to subtract anything. And the games not designed to go into the red on culture numbers.

It should add up the lot and only turn the culture value into zero if the total is negative, though it does lend to the possibility of, in certain situations (eg Your temple has been destroyed) of your culture shrinking! Why not? It would make more interesting gameplay!

[The Rusty Gamer]

Border culture exponential display problem

I changed the border culture exponential using the editor from 10 to 5, just to see what it would do. Sure enough, my borders expanded when it reached 5 culture but the display said 5/10 when it should've said 5/25.

[tomosaurus]

Pangaea option doesn't produce pangaea

I have tried many times to get a pangaea world map, but every time I choose that option I still get separated island continents. I also tried in the editor, which has an auto world creation feature, nad every "pangaea" map I generated had more than 1 land mass. This seems to me to be a bug.

[patarroyo]

Here is my email to and from Firaxis. I am running 1.16f, ed. 2. Very annoying error. I figured I'd just let the persians run around on their boat. Then I lost sight of them. I finally was able to make peace, and gave them 2 cities. neither one is a capital, so i am unable to establish an embassy or use spies to locate this runaway ship. if i destroy the gift cities, the persians are still alive. i cannot destroy them. this sucks.




ok, my hardware is not my issue. i am playing at chieftain level as babyl. I have destroyed all persian units except for one ship w/units on it. when i destroy this unit at the beginning of year 1852 AD, game crashes. game does this even if i go back and play the last few years or build a different naval unit to destroy the persian boat. this seems very software determined to me, not hardware. so what's up? am i the lucky finder of an easter egg? this error is, as stated, very repeatable. it would suck to have my game end this way.

It's got something to do with settlers on transports. In one case, Japan's last settler was on a galley that was destroyed. This caused another unit on the transport to be killed twice and the game thought Japan had -1 units. The bug doesn't occur everytime this situation happens and is actually quite rare.


Users with the newer (1400+) Ahtlon processors and Asus motherboards may be able to fix the problem by updating their motherboard BIOS. Some of the older BIOS versions do not fully support the faster processors, and the newer BIOS has fixed the problem for at least one customer.

[patarroyo]

Re: Automated Workers

Originally posted by Master2000
I use CTRL+A on all my workers.

With the patch, when there is no more to do for the workers they go to a city and sleep. That's good. If a square gets polluted 2 workers will wake and start working on the polluting square. Well, that's good too but I must ask why only 2 workers will run out and work when I have 10 other lazy workers just sleeping in my cities. Shouldn't all non working workers run to this square? I think it takes 12 workers to clean a polluted square in 1 turn.

And I still miss the old sentry command...

I agree. It is annoying that workers go to sleep when automated despite there being lots of work to do still. Especially pollution clean up. And if I keep CTRL-Ping my workers, after the 4 or 5th one in a turn, i am not allowed to do so anymore. Why is there a limit on the automated pollution cleaneruppers?