Crash in Marla Singers

[Canaris]

HI all!

I looked around on the board but didnt see any thread about this. Am I the only one who crashes about 20 to 25 turns in to the game when playing Marla Singers World map?

I tried different Civ's and about 6 different games. Same thing happened every time. I messed around with the editor sometime before the last patch but reinstalled when 1.8 came out so I doubt it's a screw up on my end
I can submit a few saves if anyone would be willing to test it.

Canaris

[Ethelred]

I am willing.

I must be, this my second attempt at replying. The first one vanished when I hit the preview button.

Most likely it IS you or at least your PC. There would be five or six threads of whining if it was the map. Marla would be called an evil Minion of the Satanic parasites at Firaxis. Adololescents would be screaming in capital letters and loudly announcing they would never use a Marla mod again while praising CTP.

People would be vanishing to Mingapulco.

Yin would be gloating.

It would be a good idea if you posted your system specs as well as the save. Also some details as to when the disaster occurs. Ten or twenty turns is one thing. I am not playing to the Modern Age on a huge map. Not till I get a quad processor Pentium VI at 10 gigahertz and have four gigs of HyperRAM IV.

[GeneralTacticus]

Well, I no longer play Marla's world map due to the fact that with 1.17 I can no longer put Civ's in the right locations . Without that ability the map is not worth playing.

[Ethelred]

Whats the problem you are having. Just for the heck of it I decided to test it out.

I didn't even bother to shut down this instance of IE.

I uzipped Marlas map from

http://www.firaxis.com/civ3/

And dumped it into the scenario folder.

Started Civ III

Chose the scenario option

Launched Marla's scenario

Chose Rome and changed Ceasar to Ethelred

Disabled the Diplomatic victory cause I want nothing to do with as it is presently constituted

Set the dificulty level to Monarch was I was feeling lazy and thats what I have played most of my games on.

Looked at the neat bunch of food bonuses I had while sitting between two rivers. Looked like a good start.

Alt-Tabbed to Explorer

Hit start and launched Gramphos's post 1.17f save game editor that I had downloaded from CivFantics

Chose the marla.cpf to set the starting positions.

Told the editor that I did indeed want to overwrite the 4000BC autosave file.

Shut down the editor

Alt-tabbed back to the still open Civ III game

Loaded the now changed 4000BC .sav

Looked at something that looks suspiciously like it might be the middle section of Italy and definitaly wasn't the twin river postion I was in few minutes before.

Typed this and posted it. Without ever shutting this down or Civ.

Seems to work but this is just 4000bc. I have no idea where the other civs are. Perhaps those are out of place. Perhaps the thing will crash in twenty turns. Perhaps you just need the right tool.

I used 0.84.0001 but it is now up to .90

You can find it here

http://apolyton.net/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=31391

Funny I had allready downloaded the new version but I had unzipped it into the wrong place. Still the .84 version worked for me.

[Gramphos]

The map on civ3.com does not have the folder for the extra early ship added with Marla's map. If you download the file from the files forum you will get that folder.

[Ethelred]

Boy that file is WAY different from the one on the Firaxis site.

The one on Firaxis is just the map.

The one on Apolyton looks corrupted at the moment. I DID name it as a .zip. but the unzip tool that comes with XP says its corrupted.

The one on CivFanatics is not corrupted. Its a zip and in the zip is a program that install everything you need including instructions in HTML. Even put it in the right folders despite my XP installation being on my D: drive. It puts a folder in the start menu that will do the changes for the correct starting positions.

I think Firaxis should remove that file they have and get the right version.

Here is a link to the CivFanatics thread where the file is.

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?threadid=9829

Thank you for the information Gramphos and that nice editor you made as well.

[GeneralTacticus]

What I was referring to was that the game DOES crash in 20 turns or so.

[Gramphos]

Originally posted by GeneralTacticus
What I was referring to was that the game DOES crash in 20 turns or so.

Yes, that is most likely the missing unit graphics, fist time the unit shll be displayed (built by you or enters your area. threfore you need the files.

[Ethelred]

Well there is a way to play the map. Just edit the bic a tiny bit. Get rid of the offending unit. That pirogue is pretty worthless anyway. At least for Rome.

Last night it was Rome that I picked to test things. Only Rome, England and Japan get the special unit. Marla added that because those civs were haveing a very hard time getting started especially as builders. Well England hasn't a chance with or without that ship. France is blocking its growth. Romes as well. I don't know about Japan but from what I can see no European civ has a snowflakes chance in hell as a builder. So if I play that game out I will not be using that unit anyway. I will have to play my first early warmonger game.

Also with settlers costing a staggering 60 shields the best way to grow BY FAR in Europe is take the capitals of France and Germany and probably Greece as well. Making settlers so bloody expensive destroys the builder route in such a crowded area.

So getting rid of the special unit that is causing the crashes isn't going to have much of a change on the game. If nothing else it might even help the AI by forcing them to stop wasting time trying to expand with that turkey.

In any case if you use the version of the mod that I linked to on CivFanatics it will work. Firaxis really needs to take that version off their site because that will fail due to the ship. Well there is one other way to do it. Play with 13 civs and don't put Japan, England or Rome in the game. At least it would make Europe considerably less crowded.

For such a huge map a lot of the civs are cheek by jowl.

Oh one thing I just noticed is that pop-rushing is more usefull. The penalty is still at 20 turns instead of 40 as in the 1.17f default.