BNW patch en route

As with several others, I pre-ordered but no 1GB download, just the patch. Maybe it's because I pre-ordered relatively late, only last Friday evening. Or maybe Steam messed up and these files should not have dropped yet, and the people who downloaded it immediately got a bonus to play with? No big deal, but come early Tuesday morning, I want that game!

As for the patch, my saved game survived, with far quicker turn times, but it has little glitches.

Here's the save file. I would have also included the save just after Esc-ing out of Augustus, but it seems it was too big to upload. Rome sent their terms about 1650 AD.

Gotta say, it's refreshing to see a gaming company still actively support a title this far down the road and just days before it launches an expansion. Well done Firaxis!

This patch seems to have broken my hot seat. I can save settings but it never allows me to actually LAUNCH the game...also broke my save game, skips to player 3's turn then fails to let the game progress (broken next turn button).

New forest and jungle graphics look sweet though.

dshirk said:

If you have a save that repro's this, could you make it available? We would love to take a look.

Click to expand...

I also have this problem, so here's my save. It is too big for the forum attachment, so it's on dropbox:

Save 1
Save 2

(see bottom of this message for details I found about this bug). Furthermore, in this save I encountered the following other (more minor, but still very annoying) bugs:

I encountered the following problems in save version 1:
- When a new turn starts it takes some time. It will still say 'next turn' even though everyone is finished (takes about 30-60 sec. to disappear). This seems to have to do with the citystates still taking their turn/moving of units by AI.
- The CPU becomes much more active. Before it would only start my fan when ending a turn (i.e. when calculating what the AI would do), now it is on all the time (I have the feeling the pc is already the calcullating the AI while I'm doing my move, hence the decreased loading time).
- The scoreboard is on top of the messages. This means with the scoreboard open you can't see what's happening (i.e. if a city state is taken over you can'tsee this because the scoreboard is over it, when you hover over the message with your mouse it won' display any popup). Because turns are so freaking fast now (which is good!) all messages appear at the same time. This means you don't get time to read them as soon as they appear.
- The scoreboard is now mainly grayed out. Before, my name was grey while the rest was easily readable, now it'sthe other way around (see also the screenshot): everyone's name is grey, besides mine.

But the most annoying one is the one in which the game always crashes. It has something to do with diplomacy, possibly in combination with research a technology at that same turn.
Let me go into detail:
When ending the turn in save-game 1, a new technology (ecology) is research. Furthermore, ethiopia wants to renew a trade in which I provide furs for gold. Also, Arabia is mad at me for coming to close to Antwerp and I get a 'top 12 of who produces the most food'. Ethiopia comes first: they ask me to renew the deal. Whether I say yes or no, the screen stays on ethiopia's diplomacy without allowing me to go back. only hitting escape works after 10 times. However, while still int he diplomacy screen I get the popup about food, which I click away. As soon as I get back to the map (with the help of the escape button) I see I researched ecology and than: BAM, game crashes to desktop, every single time.

However, when I change my research to another one which takes two turns to research instead of one which ecology does, the game doesn't crash. I get ethiopia (still have to use escape), than get arabia about antwerp, followed by the pop-up about food. 'Fixed' you would say? Not really. I now have only two possible options for research, which both take only 1 turn. This means I have no choice than research a new tech the next turn. This can be found in save nr. 2. And again, the game crashes to the desktop when I end the turn and click away another diplomacy screen.

cecilbturtle said:

Gotta say, it's refreshing to see a gaming company still actively support a title this far down the road and just days before it launches an expansion. Well done Firaxis!

Click to expand...

Yup, Firaxis is a great gaming company.

Yes, let's put the notifications back in *front* of the scoreboard, please. But once again the decreased downtime between turns is AWESOME!

For the first time since I bought vanilla Civ 5, I was able to play a smooth game with no disconnects with a friend. No buggy performance, no slow turns, no crashes, no disconnects. Saved games work perfectly.

Plus, the game works much, much faster for me now.

I have no idea why Civ 5 was always so problematic for me in MP, but now everything seems to work. I'm extremely happy with that =)

Wonders that can only be built by unlocking certain policy trees are already on their description. I started a new game and created the Statue of Zues and it says requires Honor - although it doesn't seem to make a difference.

Wow, turn times are amazing. I'm blown away. Might have to try playing a large / huge map again and see if I can make it to the end! Looking forward to BNW even more now that the performance is SO much better.

Also of note, it appears the lag from spreading religion is greatly reduced / and or it moves you to your next unit while some of the remaining delay is happening in the background.

Map scrolling seems faster, terrain loading when clicking around the map after loading a save seems faster (I didn't even have any grey tiles loading up slowly, clicked and boom the terrain was already there).

Great job!

Yeah, great job by the devs and testers.

The MP changes are sure to be of good worth!

Vandal Thorne said:

This patch seems to have broken my hot seat. I can save settings but it never allows me to actually LAUNCH the game...also broke my save game, skips to player 3's turn then fails to let the game progress (broken next turn button).

Click to expand...

I can confirm both of these problems with hot seat. For the first one, it's super confusing. The Host Game screen is all kinds of messed up, with some weird spacing. To start a game, you have to click the Ready check by Player 1. Also, once you're in-game, the screen that starts a player's turn has messed up spacing.

As for existing hot seat saves, they do seem to be broken. As far as I can tell, when you click "Continue" to start your turn, it immediately skips to the last human player. Then, that player can't end the turn because the other players haven't finished theirs.

I have attached a pre-patch save file that will result in this behavior in the new patch.

It broke the mods, but that is expected. There's got to be a few changes in a patch after all

The turn times do seem to be much better though.

I would just like to know if they are going to be able to fix saves for multiplayer and hotseat games or if we have to give up games that have been going on for months and years already.

Good question. I guess we'll have to wait until the 2K PR machinery gets around to checking it out. Such stuff can take some time.

Krovven said:

I would just like to know if they are going to be able to fix saves for multiplayer and hotseat games or if we have to give up games that have been going on for months and years already.

Click to expand...

It looks like there's an issue with existing hot-seat games because of some other multiplayer changes that were made. Our engineering lead would like to see if this fixes the issue for you with your current hot-seat games. Back-up the current file located within the Civ V folder (mine is located here):

C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\SteamApps\common\sid meier's civilization v\assets\UI\FrontEnd\LoadScreen.lua

And then unzip and copy in the attached replacement file.

Please let us know if this takes care of the issue for you.

One can always count on Dennis to be close by when a release is made.

dshirk said:

It looks like there's an issue with existing hot-seat games because of some other multiplayer changes that were made. Our engineering lead would like to see if this fixes the issue for you with your current hot-seat games. Back-up the current file located within the Civ V folder (mine is located here):

C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\SteamApps\common\sid meier's civilization v\assets\UI\FrontEnd\LoadScreen.lua

And then unzip and copy in the attached replacement file.

Please let us know if this takes care of the issue for you.

Click to expand...

I've tried it on my own HotSeat save, and it does seem to play correctly now!

dshirk said:

It looks like there's an issue with existing hot-seat games because of some other multiplayer changes that were made. Our engineering lead would like to see if this fixes the issue for you with your current hot-seat games. Back-up the current file located within the Civ V folder (mine is located here):

C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\SteamApps\common\sid meier's civilization v\assets\UI\FrontEnd\LoadScreen.lua

And then unzip and copy in the attached replacement file.

Please let us know if this takes care of the issue for you.

Click to expand...

Just finished testing this, and the Hotseat save does seem to be working!

I'll pass it on to the others in my PBEM games. I hope you guys are able to get another patch out soon that addresses this along with the other issues people are having.

Yngvi said:

As with several others, I pre-ordered but no 1GB download, just the patch. Maybe it's because I pre-ordered relatively late, only last Friday evening. (snip)

Click to expand...

I think that's probably the case: they pre-loaded the earliest preorders based on some list and you were not on it, unfortunately. But I suspect you will see BNW pre-loaded in the next few days. One way to confirm would be to quit Steam entirely and then re-load it and select Civ V to play. It may well tell you it is updating and that would be the DLC coming in.